Then And Now: Zombie Gadget Brands

Here's a look at some of companies that enjoyed massive success but eventually faltered, only to be brought back from the dead as "Zombie Brands..."

Polaroid: Edwin Land's company got its start selling polarized sunglasses in 1948 before moving into the instant camera market. They competed head-to-head with Kodak for many years but eventually faltered after the dubious introduction of Polavision, an ill-fated instant movie system that cost the company millions. They failed to make the jump to digital and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001. The Polaroid name now appears on a variety of products including TVs and digital cameras. And yes, they still produce their classic instant cameras.

Bell & Howell: There was once a time when nearly every school in North America had an A/V room filled with B&H 16mm projectors. The company's 16mm Filmo movie camera was renowned for its rugged simplicity and their 8mm cameras were tremendously popular with amateurs. Alas, they didn't survive the transition to video and the company produced its last motion picture camera in the late 1970s. These days, the B&H name is licensed to companies producing digital cameras, noise reduction headphones and even floor lamps.

Commodore: Commodore computers seemed to be everywhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From modest beginnings with the KIM-1 board, they had a string of hits with the PET 2001, VIC-20, C-64 and the Amiga. Alas, they also had more than their fair share of flops. There have been several attempts to revive the Commodore brand in the years since its bankruptcy in 1994, most of them centering around the Amiga. The name was eventually sold in 2004 for a reported € 22-million and Commodore Gaming recently unveiled a line of expensive looking Commodore XX PCs and the bizarrely named "Gravel In Pocket."

AgfaPhoto: The oldest Zombie on the list, originally founded in 1867. The company was famous for the development of the Agfacolor film in the 1920s and the rollout of Agfacolor-Neu color reversal film in 1937 (intended to compete with Kodachrome). They filed for insolvency in early 2005 and the AgfaPhoto name is now licensed to companies such as Sagem, Plawa and the unfortunately named Lupus.

I can hardly wait to see which of today's high-flying brands will go on to become tomorrow's zombies.

Comments

[montysano]

I'm a film devotee who still shoots B&W and works in a darkroom. The death of Agfa was a real blow for us analog photographers. Their Agfapan B&W film was in general very good; their Agfapan APX25 (yeah, that's right, film speed of ISO 25!) was a fabulous film. Please, somebody, bring Agfapan back as a zombie!

[JayP]

MG/Rover...

[Wink]

montysano wrote:

"I'm a film devotee who still shoots B&W and works in a darkroom. The death of Agfa was a real blow for us analog photographers. Their Agfapan B&W film was in general very good; their Agfapan APX25 (yeah, that's right, film speed of ISO 25!)"

Ditto! I miss their B&W film, which while it was never as good as Kodak's, was "weird", which means you could get some really crappy results with it, and other times get really cool, different things that you weren't planning on at all but would make people go "how the heck did you do that?" And the APX25 - yes, I want an ISO 25 film speed, dammit. The colors were astounding. Again, people complained that Agfa's color film wasn't "accurate" but that's why I loved it - it was overly saturated and really brought out natural colors, esp. in sunlight. Artificial, but once you learn the film, you could get some great results from it. R.I.P. Afga! :(

[Tofuik]

Wow, I never knew that they revived the commodore name in another company. Kinda cool, kinda sad though...

I still have my 64's and 128's :)

[Derek]

I was wondering what went wrong at Bell & Howell. The new company with the name is selling "10 megapixel (interpolated)" cameras without revealing the true resolution or explaining what "interpolated" means.

[Klyph]

I too, enjoyed Agfa film. I was once told that the "walgreens" brand 35mm film sold in the early 1990's was Agfa motion picture short-ends.
I even remember shooting some 16mm tests of Agfa stock in the early 90's

and I LOVE the photo of "Hans und Frieda"
with their "kleinbild" camera.

[aredant]

B & H is sad example of how branding means less and less today - Once a high quality, trustworthy brand, the name has become a shameless whore of a brand used to schlepp
shoddy Chinese electronics over cheesy direct response TV ads. Things began to fall apart in the early 80's when rebranding seemed to take flight. In fact, I worked for Allied Radio in 1980 - years after they went out of business. The name was bought by Schaak Electronics to sell their clearance audio equipment.

[Jonas Qvale]

...And of course, AGFA is an abbreviation for the german paint manufacturing company A.G. Farben that produced Zyklon B nerve gas for the extermination chambers in the concentration camps during the war, and like many other companies (Krupps -> Krups) continued happily after the war. The entry above about the beetle, whose rough initial design sketch was drawn by Adolf Hitler, made me want to post that.

[Tina]

Wow!!!

[Ryan Cousineau]

Argh! Krups has nothing to do with Krupp! The latter continues to this day as part of ThyssenKrupp AG.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_078.html

The situation with I.G. Farben (NOT A.G. Farben) is slightly more complicated: AGFA was one of several companies conglomerated under that name after WWI (others included BASF, Hoechst and Bayer). Virtually all German chemical production came together under this single name, which was broken up after the WWII, at which point AGFA et al resumed operations as separate companies.

13 IG Farben execs were convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben_Trial

The biggest difficulty here is that every German company of any size was involved in the Nazi war effort, just as every British (and every American) company of any size was similarly producing products for the war effort. It's good to know history, but the above is a mess of urban legends and half-truths.

Ironically, only Krups (of the companies listed above) was likely small enough to not have been part of making munitions or whatnot: They built nothing but precision scales until 1956.

The Beetle's basic design parameters were dictated by Hitler, but in trying to fulfill them, Porsche adapted a design he already had (and substantially copied a Tatra design):

http://www.oldandsold.com/articles01/article711.shtml
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/8-20-2004-58195.asp

It appears that the shape was all Porsche. Well, mostly Tatra, by way of Porsche:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_T97

But I know: research is hard.

[sveta]

Pretty nice site, wants to see much more on it! :)

[a k bressen]

The camera industry is full of zombies; Contax (which recently died again), Alpa, Argus; Voigtlander is the oldest, founded in the 18th century and absorbed by Zeiss around the 1970s, the name today is licensed to a Japanese company named Cosina (for some very nifty products).

Cars and motorcycles also are a popular zombie arena, Bugatti being a prominent example.