TIL about "Patch Hop" dances, when young women in the '40s and '50s would claim a boy for a school dance by sewing their patch onto their clothes
TIL about "Patch Hop" dances, when young women in the '40s and '50s would claim a boy for a school dance by sewing their patch onto their clothes
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Sadie Hawkins Days/Dances were a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Hawkins_Day
Another time comic strip lingo entered the mainstream. The US Army repeatedly claimed that jeeps were so named because they were 'General Purpose' vehicles. The troops all knew the real reason was that they were named for Popeye's teleporting pet, Eugene the Jeep.
They still do Sadie Hawkins, too! At least they did in 2007.... I'm old now, nvm lol.
That's actually why this strip stuck out to me, it reminded me of an archaic Sadie Hawkins where the gal doesn't just ask the guy she.... forcefully sews a clothing patch on him?? Lmao
A quick search failed to find any actual 'patch dances.' I think it's more likely that the Archie writers were afraid of copywrite problems and came up with their own variation.
otoh, maybe I could have looked harder
I'd be pretty surprised if the Archie writers did that. I've been reading every Archie comic from the first printing, and they are pretty grounded in reality. Real musician names, real films, real actors, real fashion designers, etc. The panel this comic is from is only the 3rd time they've written a story dedicated to the "hop patch" dances between 1940 and 1950 (and that's including all 4 comics series and the 3 yearly publications being released at the time featuring Archie). That's a pretty long window with multiple artists and writers, who would have to remember the same parody of sadie hawkins. I'm more inclined to lean towards "wikipedia doesn't know everything" than the Archie writers invented it. I do have a 90 year old grandpa still surviving, maybe I'll reach out.
Edit: another example of the internet being ignorant, there is no record on the internet (that I can find) of the specific style of public washing machines that were depicted in the 1940s version of a coin-op laundromat within the comics. So either the Archie artists went to the trouble of inventing a never before seen style of a brand new technology in the era, or the internet simply has blind spots in our history.
Or the artist just drew something out of their imagination.
I can't find anything that isn't a reference to Archie, either. I'd be interested to know if this truly is an internet blind spot or not. Perhaps it was an extremely local thing that one of the writers had growing up?
Pretty sure it's an Archie thing. I remember Sadie Hawkins dances when I was a kid, and never heard of the patch thing.