Play Piano Or Die Alone!

Dean Ross Piano Studios had been printing their advance course booklets for a while in the 40s, but when the 50s crawled along they really amped up their game by using comics to brainwash youngsters into thinking that learning to play piano is the only thing that can save you from a life of social exile. These comic ads promoted their ever so special patented Automatic Chord Selector which was really just a cut-out piece of paper that acts as a finger guide for anyone wanting to tickle the ivories. For some reason, nearly every other middle-class home had a piano taking up an immense amount of space during the mid-20th Century, probably because there wasn't much on TV at the time, so pianos were the nexus of all get-togethers. Dean Ross devised a deceptive ploy in their ad's short comic about a girl named Mary fretting herself into near catatonic state just because her friend Betty is now an irresistible man-magnet only due to the meager skills she learned from Dean Ross. At lunch, Betty inducts Mary into ways of the Automatic Chord Selector religion, and next we see Mary is now playing the piano with two men and a woman wanting to be part of her new sex cult declaring out loud that she's not a wallflower anymore. There's also some clod at the bottom of the ad boasting that he has to beat the girls off with a stick since he can now play Heart And Soul. Dean Ross must've been one despicable pianist if he thought that dopes caving into peer pressure would be enough motivation for them to give into his psychological tactics.

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