Open your eyes: The ghoulishness of RCA
RCA has quite a web site. Which is surprising, really, all these years after it stopped being an actual company. I was expecting the internet equivalent of Buford’s Grocery, an old corner store I remember from childhood–they went out of business one day, but their sign (provided by the makers of 7UP) remained up for years afterward, rusting, and if you looked through the dusty plate-glass windows you could see boxes of Quaker Oats still rotting on the shelves.
The company that was once the Radio Corporation of America got swallowed up by General Electric long ago. But the RCA name lives on, and you can still find its funky ’70s-kitsch logo stamped onto a wide range of brand-new products made by other companies that bought the rights to the name. I’m always baffled by these zombie brands. If I walk into Best Buy and see the RCA logo on a TV, it feels pointless and a little bit ghoulish. On an MP3 player? Dissonance gives way to annoyance—they abuse nostalgia, as if trying to implant false memories.
The problem is that for me RCA is not just an obsolete company, but a company still mourned; and as much as I know it shouldn’t matter, I cannot quite shake it, any more than I can erase an RCA jingle that remains etched in my mind. A brand is a mind worm; perhaps that is why they can live on long after the corporate body has expired.
The web site is a tasteful Flash tableau featuring Nipper, the RCA mascot (and a second dog, either the parent or spawn of Nipper—I don’t see how we’re to know which). The twirly glass-wind-chime effect is peculiarly mesmerizing, almost ethereal, and the dogs look like apparitions.