Following decades of cultural austerity and industrial growth, as well as the atrocities and devastation of a World War, the 1920s were ripe for change. The younger generations wanted no more of their parents' prim and proper path. So, they threw off their ancestral layers of modesty and decency, raised their hemlines and hairlines, listened to jazz, drank, danced and whooped it up as if they knew exactly what lean days lay ahead.
And Hollywood led the way for change, bringing larger than life characters to screen: vamps, tramps, sheiks, dukes and dandies, allowing moviegoers an escape from their everyday lives, as well as a template for how to look and behave in this new, young, free and easy era.
All they had to was pay the price of admission, find a seat, and off they travelled to ages past, faraway lands and futuristic worlds, to mansions of the rich and the trenches of soldiers.
Famed and familiar storybooks suddenly came to life with swashbucklers and maidens, villains and queens; and extravagant follies once reserved for the main stages of big cities, soon flashed and glistened each week at the new cinema down main street; filling the screen with color and movement, song and dance, with pretty girls dressed in very little making human kaleidoscopes and handsome men in top hats and tails, swooning and crooning. Filling the senses of the young and the old with visions the likes of which most had only imagined before.
Audiences gleefully hopped on board the Hollywood train and headed off each week to exotic destinations with erotic characters, imagining themselves in the arms of their favorite movie star - be it Clara Bow, or Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Ronald Coleman, or the incomparable Rudolph Valentino.
And when it wasn't adventure and romance the film audience was seeking, Hollywood obliged. After all, who couldn't laugh at a good ol' pie in the face, or high speed, Keystone Cop chase?
What better little object to reflect this golden era in American Culture and filmmaking than My Little Whoopee Book?
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