'I Went From a Ninety Seven Pound Weakling...'

If you are my age, then you will, inevitably, have encountered an ad similar to the one above while browsing magazines and comics.  This one - from a 1965 'Meccano Magazine' - is fairly restrained.  By the seventies I seem to recall variants featuring tales of skinny geeky guys getting sand kicked in their faces on the beach by musclebound thugs.  After reading Charles Atlas' book, of course, this never happened to them again.  (The clear implication being that it is now them who are doing the sand kicking, an attitude which, I can't help but suspect, has informed society's seemingly ever escalating levels of violence).  These, apparently, stemmed from Atlas' claims that he had originally taken up body building after getting sand kicked in his face by a bully.  Of course, by the time I was reading those ads, Atlas himself was dead, (or Angelo Sicilano, to give him his birth name), having passed away, at the age of eighty, in 1972.  

I've often wondered how many young British comic readers actually sent off for that booklet.  I never did, despite the prospect of being able to kick sand in the faces of school bullies seeming very tempting to my young self.  But others did, some, like Dave Prowse, with considerable success, so clearly it wasn't all hype.  Even back then, though, I knew that I was too lazy to ever get into body building - all that weight lifting, stretching and the like just seemed too energetic, not to mention time consuming for me.  I'm just a natural born slob.  As it turned out, so were a lot of other people, judging by number of people who, by the eighties and nineties, had turned to steroids rather than weights to get those muscles.  I guess that it was around this time that these ads started to appear less frequently - not only were people looking for easier shortcuts to getting that physique, but for those still interested in traditional approaches, there were new heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger.   Still, my affection for those ads remain, they are an integral part of my misspent youth reading schlocky magazines and comics.