Mr. Blandings and the Advertisers’ Dream: The Role of Marketing in the Adaptation Process

Abstract This essay examines the role that marketing played in shaping the audience’s reception and interpretation of Eric Hodgins’ Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (originally published in 1946 as a short story titled ‘Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle’) and its 1948 film adaptation. It argues that while the print versions—modeled after Hodgins’ own unfortunate experience with the housing market before the war—relied on the self-deprecating humour to appeal to urban audiences and ultimately promote caution and frugality, the film adaptation, released at the onset of the suburban sprawl, targeted white families newly entering the middle class and promoted equality through mass consumption mythos. Working in conjunction with its massive advertising campaign that involved the construction of seventy-three replicas of the Blandings’ dream house across the United States, the film adaptation blurred the enormous disparity between Blandings’ dream and the suburban reality of baby boomers by creating new sites of middle-class identification. By reading each adaptation of the original story against the period-specific ideological forces, I demonstrate how marketing, by structuring the audience’s interpretation, shapes the process and the product of adaptation.