Here is the scenario Jay Gilbert imagines in thousands of American households: At a dinner party, everyone is seated in silent expectation around the table. As the host lifts the lid on the main course, all can see plainly that they are having roast chicken.
One of the guests says, ”Mmmmm, I love roast chicken,” or, maybe,
”Dibs on a drumstick!”
Suddenly those very drumsticks start to wiggle in a manner that carries more than a faint whiff of a burlesque house.
They shimmy bawdily for seven seconds, and when they stop the guests break into gales of laughter, which, of course, only triggers the sound-activated motor inside the fowl again, provoking more laughter.
And so on, until, finally, the ice having been broken and the joke having worn itself thin, the real dinner is brought out and the rubber bird is returned to the kitchen, ready to amuse yet another set of invitees or, perhaps, be brought out again after the fourth bottle of white zinfandel.
You might think Jay Gilbert imagines such a scene because he yearns to be the next Allen Funt. But that`s not it. His inspiration for these visions is that he makes and markets the gag chickens and wouldn`t mind becoming the Frank Perdue of funny fowl, the Col. Sanders of simulated-hen sight gags.
”Hey, this is not for print,” announces Gilbert one day, as he poses for photographers on a table laden with chickens and with two in his lap,
”but these chickens flopping around are really very stimulating.”
Chickens are not all he does. His S.A.M. Electronics, in a not-at-all-comedic-looking one-story brick building at 2701 W. Belmont Ave., is in all likelihood the nation`s leading manufacturer of latex-rubber novelty items that wiggle in response to noise.
Interviewing Gilbert at his factory is a disconcerting thing, not only because he is a leading manufacturer of latex-rubber novelty items that wiggle in response to noise, but also because, if you talk, laugh or moan too loudly, something inanimate in the vicinity is going to start undulating for seven seconds at a time, whether an alligator, a cactus, a rose bush, a skull or a trophy-mounted fish.
This sort of disruption in the natural order of things is not something that Barbara Walters would have to deal with, but it is worth the effort, if only because one rarely gets an inside look at the method to the novelty business` madcapness.
It is, from the sound of it, a very fickle field. ”Eight or nine out of 10 things that we come up with and actually do or test flop in the
marketplace,” Gilbert says. ”We have to run a lot of losers before we find a winner.”
He is asked to name one of them. ”Let`s see. One of our biggest flops was the beating heart. You know, you really can`t tell the difference between a beating heart laying on a table and a piece of liver.
”And, you know, here this thing would be, sitting there throbbing, and, I tell you, an organ laying on a table would really turn a woman off. They`d say, `Oh, my god, yuk, get me out of here.`
”Not only,” he continues modestly, ”do I not know what will sell, but I don`t know a winner when I see it.”
He points to a small, voice-activated wiggling alligator on the table, an item that Vic Provenzano, a California man whose company makes the rubber
”skins” for Gilbert, urged him to try marketing.
”Now, I think this thing is stupid, and I keep fighting it,” Gilbert says. ”I said, `People are not gonna go for it. It`s not cute. It`s two feet long. What do you do with it?` I`m saying, `I`m not gonna put advertising money into this thing. It`s for a 4-year-old kid, and it`s ugly.` For the year and a half it`s been out, it`s been back ordered. People are fighting for it. Everybody loves this item except me, and it sells like dynamite. A lesson I learned is that I cannot impose my likes or dislikes into the marketplace.
”Somebody in my position is inclined to get a little bit of an ego, and I think that ego can put you in an ivory tower. You get an ego, you think you`re smarter than anybody else. But if you let people yell at you and give you flak-in other words, my own staff will trash about 50 percent of my ideas before I even start prototyping them.”
The Carson caper
James Berg, a 22-year-old who works at S.A.M. putting the small, spindle- driven motors into the ”skins,” says staff members recently dissuaded Gilbert from trying to salvage a wiggling, voice-activated rose bush, which had flopped, by combining it with the company`s first successful twitching product, a wiggling (but not voice-activated) hand, which came out in 1984.
”He was trying to take the hand and put it in one of those roses, and we don`t know why,” Berg says. ”We shot him down.”
Gilbert, however, is a firm believer in the ”if at first you don`t succeed” principle. A glow-in-the-dark wiggling skull, first marketed as
”Mr. Friendly,” has since been rethought and will be reintroduced in the future, looking meaner, as ”Capone`s Bones.”
Even the chicken is not in its initial incarnation. When Gilbert sent it out to ”The Tonight Show,” a program that has given his products airtime in the past, either Johnny Carson himself or staff members there tinkered with the original concept.
”We sent him a quivering chicken,” Gilbert says. ”I thought it was funny to have the chicken be real nervous when you would go to cut it up. The chicken would sort of just quiver in a very nervous way.
”Well, apparently he didn`t think it was very funny and so he or his staff rigged up a chicken that, when it heard you talking, would wave both legs around romantically in a convulsive way.
”OK, and that was strictly a Johnny Carson design. So the day after the show-I hadn`t seen it-somebody calls us up and says they want the `sex chicken.` `You damn pervert, what are you talking about?` ”
When Gilbert figured out what had happened, though, that Carson had repeatedly whispered ”I love you” to it in front of millions and it had flailed about as if in ecstasy, he was more than happy to change his mind. Thus was born the product advertised in the June Playboy as ”Spring Chicken- Fully Roasted and Still Alive!-A high energy ice breaker for `In-Law`
parties, meetings, seminars, displays, etc.,” but since renamed the ”Alive Chicken.”
But is it art?
Most of his business, he says, is mail order, though he is coming out soon with a catalog that will feature his products and others in a similar vein, such as an ashtray that coughs and sasses a smoker. He has found that magazines such as Playboy, The New Yorker and Smithsonian are his most effective advertising outlet, because they reach the affluent male audience that buys his stuff and gets it as gifts.
Asked why women don`t seem to respond, he says, ”I think men like to be unique, interesting, controversial, and they like new, unique, creative things that are artistic and that they can live with. For a woman, something that comes alive or squirms when it`s supposed to be dead or cooked is not very appealing. Women don`t like to be scared with something out of the ordinary.
”Let me digress for a moment: An observation I`ve made over the years-it`s not pertinent to what we were talking about, but if you watch TV or plays or movies or something like that, one of the component things that you always have in a theme or in a story is the screaming, frightened woman.
”I watched something last night on TV-`Stranger Among Us,` or whatever-and the whole thing was two hours of a frightened woman. Maybe women don`t like to be frightened or scared easy. And they don`t take humor in robot things coming alive.”
On the other hand, maybe they are simply not opening themselves to another possible interpretation, one that Gilbert himself subscribes to. In his mind, these are not mere novelties, but something higher.
”I consider them art. It`s all in the eyes of the beholder, but I think this work is really artistic. This is what I call `three-dimensional electronic art.` And I think it has as much eye appeal as it does any other kind of appeal. Well, OK, maybe one would not call it art. I would. I do call it living electronic art.”
Renaissance men
He gives much credit to Provenzano, his product co-developer and a man who also crafts snakes that are sold at Walt Disney theme parks.
”Provenzano is an artisan,” Gilbert says. ”He and his dad are artistic. They are artists and they make molds. It goes back, I guess, I don`t know, they might have strains of, being Italian, they might have strains of Michelangelo in them or something like that. But they are very artistic, and when we come up with a concept and present it to Vic Provenzano what he and his dad, who`s passed away, would do was take this concept and start making plaster moldings of it.
”In other words, they would sculptor it. And instead of the sculpture ending up in stone or cast iron, it would end up in a vinyl rubberized form.
”And most of these things are individually cast by hand in the same way that you would make statues or cast iron as you did in Italy three or four hundred years ago.”
Gilbert got into the-as he calls it sometimes-”pet robot” field about seven years ago, as the recession was hitting hard in the Midwest and he was looking for something to supplement his ongoing business making industrial signs-ones that say things like ”Danger,” ”Caution,” ”Warning,” ”Men,” ”Women.”
”I hooked up with Provenzano, and we started talking about doing a complete human robot. So we started to develop certain moving body parts, and the only thing that really looked any good was the hand.
”In other words, we just spun the hand off and we said, `Look, this is the only thing working. Let`s show it at a trade show.`
”And it sort of took off, and we`ve sold about three-quarters of a million of these things in the last seven years. Then we kept going in the body parts, but they kept not working, so we came up with the fish, which is our biggest success.”
He tells the story of the ”It`s Alive” fish, yet another example of how a slight twist in the concept can turn chicken feathers into chicken salad.
”We had flops with the eyes and the heart and a couple of other things in there, a foot, and so we started looking at things that would flap around. We came up with a fish. That didn`t work because it just lay there and sort of flopped around, wasn`t particularly attractive or funny.
”OK, and then I came up with the idea-I saw one in somebody`s office once-I said, `Well, gee, what if we put it on a board?` And we put it on the board and it exploded.
”It isn`t really selling the steak,” says Gilbert, ”as much as it is selling the sizzle.”
But even though the marketing may change, the underlying principle remains the same: ”We don`t want to make anything where somebody says, `Well, where would I put it?`
”We want this for everyday living, and our things have to go on a desk or a wall or have someplace where you can put it and look at it every day-where you can have a piece of art.”
