Charles Bronson In Mandom

As mentioned before, things have been a little chaotic for the staff at Showa OK! over the past couple of months, so please excuse our lack of updates to the site. We hope you've been following our posts on Twitter and Facebook and enjoying the content we've been sharing there. However, as we prepare for our move east, we'd like to provide you with a little something in the meantime to whet your surely insatiable appetite for all things Shōwa.

A few months ago we covered director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi's spectacularly odd film House (ハウス, Hausu), which, at the time, was touring theaters across the country. It has since been announced that the film will be released in October by The Criterion Collection on both Blu-Ray and DVD. In our post we had mentioned that Ōbayashi had honed his skills producing television commercials in the 70s, perhaps the most memorable of which was a campaign for men's care line Mandom featuring fearless action star Charles Bronson.

First aired in 1970, the ads showed Bronson performing a host of "manly" tasks, set to the music of Jerry Wallace's single of the same year, "The Lovers Of The World", which was released only in Japan — apparently as a commercial tie-in — under the title "Otoko No Sekai" (男の世界).

Below is a collection of those curious commercials, originally found via the website C.H.U.D. and graciously posted to YouTube by user rinrinsky. So sit back, kick off your boots, douse yourself in cologne and enjoy the rustic world of Mandom.