Match Your Mood with Westinghouse

[StevePulaski]

Match Your Mood with Westinghouse (1968)

Rating: ★★★

For decades now, Westinghouse has been a trusted name in electrical appliances, ranging from lighting fixtures to washers and dryers, and Match Your Mood with Westinghouse, a peculiar oddity from the late sixties, works to emphasize their name, their level of quality, and perhaps even a subtle affirmation of generationally accepted gender roles for women.

The six-minute short showcases a wide variety of refrigerator panels/overlays, ranging from plain black, walnut, and cherry-oak styles, to more complex colors and patterns that further one's creative intentions. Westinghouse also boasts their versatility in allowing customers a variety of options to accessorize their parties with decadent patterns of all different colors and designs. The short features little dialog and is largely predicated upon showcasing the products, their names, and their easy uses through boisterous, eye-catching graphics and strangely addicting music from the 1970's.

It's reasonable to believe that the intentions of this innocuous little short are far larger than just simply trying to promote Westinghouse brand appliances; there's an element of feminists self-expression here without being too radical that seems to seep through the story's direct narrative. The idea of allowing women the element of self-expression through appliances, specifically one located where most women spent their time in the 1960's, works to affirm the notion of where the United States was at during this particular time. Of course, expecting radical depiction of gender roles in a sixties short that, above anything, is trying to sell a product, is an almost unheard of thing, but it is through these short films that we often see something larger, more telling about where we were, as a nation, during that time.

Match Your Mood with Westinghouse, at the end of it all, social-commentary aside and primarily as a sales tool, is more fun than it has any right to be: its loud colors, lively presentation, and fun music almost indicate the attributes of loudness we'd come to associate the next decade with.