The Energy Mascot that Electrified America

With all the attention paid to electric vehicles and heat pumps, the 2020s might seem like the decade of home electrification — but nothing might ever rival the boom of the original Roaring Twenties. By 1929, 70% of all American homes had access to electricity, double the figure from the beginning of the decade – bringing home electrification from minority to majority.

Home electrification was so big back then, it even had a mascot: Reddy Kilowatt. Invented by a marketer at the Alabama Power Company in 1926, this cheery spokescharacter with a lightning-bolt body and a lightbulb nose was licensed to hundreds of utility companies throughout the greater part of the 20th century to promote electricity – and more specifically investor–owned utilities. Reddy was even used as a tool to link government-owned utilities to socialism or communism in years following World War II.

I first came across Reddy Kilowatt last year when a climate tech peer emailed me an image of him, probably from the 1950s, powering everything from a hot water heater to a record player with the headline “Your all Electric Home.”

National Museum of American History Archives Center

For weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about that headline because I kept hearing people in the decarbonization movement say similar things (does Electrify Everything ring a bell?). Itching to learn more of the history of Reddy, I reached out to an expert.

Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson is a professor at Seattle University who teaches and writes about animation. Her paper, Live Electrically with Reddy Kilowatt, Your Electrical Servant, explores the history of this “phenomenally successful and ubiquitous spokescharacter.”

I chatted with Dr. Moana Thompson over a video call from her office where a framed illustration of Reddy Kilowatt hung behind her. I went into the call thinking about positioning this article, “Is America ready for another Reddy?,” but by the end I learned he may be best left in the 1900s. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

Mike Munsell

Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you ended up researching Reddy Kilowatt?

Dr. Kirsten Moana Thompson:

I'm a professor and chair of the film and media department at Seattle University, and Reddy Kilowatt was part of my research into animation that has been used in sponsored media — that is media used for non-traditional, non-entertainment purposes to do something else, like sell something, instruct you, persuade you. It forms a chapter in what will be a new book coming out in the next couple of years on animation and advertising. I think Reddy Kilowatt is a great example of how popular it was in the post-war period to use animated spokescharacters to sell products or ideas.

Munsell:

I’m curious: Are animated mascots less prevalent today than back in the post-war period?

Thompson:

My research doesn’t focus on the contemporary era, so I couldn't give you a precise example. But certainly, as late as the ‘70s, animation characters still were extensively used to promote products, not just cereal, and toys, but things like bubble bath and candy and, well into the ‘70s, alcohol as well.

There are lots of reasons for that, because certain types of animation were fairly cheap to produce, were appealing, often comedic, and attention grabbing. They were a great means to sell a product — also great to use for abstract or more complex processes, like, how do you make oil or petrol or gas? How do you convey a concept like capitalism? Animation, as opposed to live action, was often a more successful way to convey or target topics of that nature.

We have to anthropomorphize the things that are too abstract, too conceptual, or too inhuman to make them translatable into something that we can comprehend and relate to. Hence the Geico lizard or the Aflac duck.

Munsell

And that makes sense then for Reddy Kilowatt to advertise electricity back when it was new, right?

Thompson

Yes, it really emerged around the time electrification was in two thirds of American households — by 1930. And electrical utility companies needed to find an appealing way to sell their product and to encourage consumer consumption of things like appliances, which themselves were emerging — things like dishwashers and washing machines and hair dryers and so on. But also rural electrification, and electrification for business purposes and factories, and on farms.

[Reddy Kilowatt] emerged targeting a fairly affluent consumer, by, for example, turning electricity into a servant – an abstract servant that was personalized and anthropomorphized.

But it was also a way of rather cleverly justifying rate increases as well, which occurred a little later, by making Reddy Kilowatt literally a figure that earns wages and was regarded as an employee by many electrical utility companies. So it's a clever way to say to people, hey, everybody deserves a wage and Reddy Kilowatt deserves a wage and prices are going up, so we're going to put his wages up. And that's a fair thing.

Munsell:

The Smithsonian has a huge collection of Reddy Kilowatt material. Did you get to go check that out?

Thompson:

Yes, I did. The archives are extensive. And so you can read all about how [Reddy Kilowatt creator] Ashton Collins promoted the product, and what the kinds of speeches that he gave to many other business companies and electrical utility companies in the 30s and 40s.

But he's part of a wider movement. There are other leading figures like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz, who were animation studio heads. Walter Lantz, of course, ran what he would pick the Walter Lantz studios that produced Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda, and a number of other popular cartoons of the 40s. And Walt Disney, of course, we're all familiar with. But they all believed that the kinds of skills that animation studios were doing in the 1940s — by making cartoons to train troops to operate machinery or rifles, and by making propaganda to translate the values of the fight for democracy against fascism — they believed that those skills could be applied to the commercial market in the post-war period. And that animation was a key element of visual culture that could translate to a sometimes illiterate population or partially illiterate population.

So Ashton Collins is not alone there. He's part of a broader movement in the film industry and in the animation industry, to understand the unique power of animation to communicate and to sell and persuade.

Munsell

Did you find anything in your research particularly surprising?

Thompson

In addition to extensive print materials in the Smithsonian, you see dozens and dozens of objects that featured Reddy Kilowatt. His image is on everything from stickers to comic books to toys, and other giveaways for kids to little marionettes, and robots, which were used in trade shows and trade fairs. [Author’s note: eBay has an extensive Reddy Kilowatt collection]

It was used in the 1939 World's Fair, for example, to communicate and to encourage the public to interact with Reddy Kilowatt as if it was a real figure. I was quite taken with this – it's really an early form of animatronics. They were using an avatar, a spokescharacter, who was fairly ubiquitous in the American home, on people's electricity bills, and combining it with a large three dimensional object with a record player attached and somebody who operated the speaking, to interact with kids at fairs and to communicate basic ideas. So that was really exciting in a way because it shows how ahead of its time Ashton Collins was at understanding interactivity.

Mike Munsell

I was thinking about copyright and trademark law and the public domain. Reddy Kilowatt was, in his original form, created in 1926. We're coming up on that 100 year mark. Is there a chance he enters the public domain?

Dr. Moana Thompson

I'm not sure about that. Because you can renew copyright. Which of course Disney did repeatedly before it finally had to succumb to the end of copyright. And Reddy is also a trademark as opposed to a copyrighted image. So he has not just appeared in what is public access now, some of his films and TV commercials, but he's also a trademark figure that has a continuing commercial currency. And Ashton Collins was absolutely rigorous at paying attention to trademark law. He sued other companies that had similar characters, like Willie Wired Head.

I suspect that Xcel Energy [who now owns the rights to Reddy Kilowatt] is going to be very strict in policing its trademarks. Because if this product has value as a commodity of nostalgia for a certain generation, or multiple generations, or even if it has a new function in Xcel’s future corporate identity, he's going to have value.

Munsell

I guess your research sort of doesn't get quite into the present day, but for my understanding Reddy Kilowatt is not really used much today. It was used by a utility in Barbados and an Ecuadorian soccer club more recently, but from your understanding do you know why he stopped being used?

Thompson

Well, I'm not sure that he stopped being used. I have seen the return of Reddy Kilowatt as a consumer figure and as a licensed product that appears on T-shirts and stickers. Amazon has been selling quite a lot of Reddy Kilowatt products. So it's possible that Xcel Energy that owns the trademark sees the value of the product for a new market, which is the nostalgic market, where you can sell a cartoon character itself.

Munsell: I do think that with the emergence of heat pumps, and induction stoves, there is a push toward home electrification and moving away from fossil fuels in your home. I wonder if that’s an opportunity for a reemergence of Reddy?

Thompson

Yeah, it could be an opportunity for them to repurpose the trademark.

Munsell

Is there anything else you wanted to add about your research into Reddy?

Thompson

I thought it was interesting, the blend that Reddy Kilowatt had of both the impersonal and the personal. On the one hand, we've mostly been talking about it as this cute cartoony character of appeal and personality. But on the other hand, he represents an abstract concept, which is almost robotic. He was literally a robot as part of his marketing. This concept of the kilowatt as one and a half horsepower was part of this wider discursive emergence in the ‘20s that electricity was both a servant, as an anthropomorphized figure, and an abstraction that is there at the flick of a switch.

And in their marketing, they used imagery that of course would never be used today. The association of kilowatt as both a “coolie” – which was the specific language used – and a slave.

So this kind of racist imagery is interesting because it gets to the roots of this idea of the dehumanized, depersonalized aspects of Reddy Kilowatt – that electricity represented by using this imagery, and they had little pictures of kilowatt, which were described as a slave or a “coolie” to explain that, basically, this was free labor and unlimited labor. So obviously addressed to an implicitly white consumer. [The idea that] racial imagery of course affected all kinds of aspects of American advertising is well known to scholars in this field and often played on imagery of blackness or whiteness, in the case of soap advertising, for example, but Reddy Kilowatt in particular is this machinic identity.

And who knows, maybe that'll come back again in the future, because machines are so much more part of our lives now, as compared to 1926 or the mid century with computers and artificial intelligence.