Classic Wrestling Magazine Ads: You Don’t Need A Gun!
Looking back, the ads featured in the Stanley Weston wrestling publications of the ’70s and ’80s (affectionately known by some fans as the “Apter Mags” in honor of managing editor Bill Apter) were often just as sensationally entertaining as the fictionalized accounts treating the business as sport. Case in point, this ad featuring the Kiyoga Steel Cobra,™ billed as providing an “impenetrable steel shield” against “muggers, rapists and maniacs.” I love the expression of the empowered dude raising his fist into the air in the lower left-hand corner, clearly after he knocked a would-be mugger senseless. (Ironically, he looks a little like the Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer.) Then there’s the businessman cracking the jaw of a biker, while the classy broad belts an apparent rapist-and you don’t even need a license to carry it!
Personally, I ordered one of these and used it to beat the shit out of a schoolyard bully-the ultimate foreign object for a kid, with the possible exception of an Aladdin®-made metal lunchbox.
Behold the power of the Kiyoga!
You should have ordered the book on Witchcraft. You could have put a spell on the guy.