• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, December 1, 2010

When I was a lad, my family took a car trip to visit distant relatives. One stop was my mother's cousin in St. Louis. When my brother and I hunkered down to sleep on the pullout couch in the paneled basement, I spied a pair of very long legs on a magazine in plain view on an end table. That was my introduction to Playboy. I was in heaven, but I knew there'd come a time when I'd be heading straight to hell.

Times have changed. What once seemed so naughty is now languishing somewhere between quaint and passé -- the victim of lad mags like Maxim on one end and the raunchier Hustler on the other while the Internet offers its own style of "adult entertainment," according to Time's Christopher Shay.

Time itself, in the Golden Age of the Pun, once wrote that having a membership key to a Playboy club was "the closet thing to a Phi Beta Kappa from Yale." (Closet, if you missed it. Like I said, times have changed.) But the cachet of Playboy Clubs, with their fuzzy-cottontailed hostesses, has obviously faded in the U.S. There's only one, and it's in Las Vegas. Overseas, particularly Asia, is a different story.

Playboy CEO Scott Flanders recently opened a 12,000-square-foot Playboy Club in Macao, where a 30,000-square-foot Playboy Mansion that pays homage to founder High Hefner's legendary digs is due to be erected in 2012. Even more ambitious may be Flanders' plans to position Playboy to upwardly mobile women as an "aspirational fashion brand." He says women purchase 80% of its licensed products, and it has signed a deal with a Shanghai-based company to open 2,000 branded stores in mainland China.

This brings to mind the auction next week of other venerable brand names such as Victrola, Braniff International, Bowery Savings and -- dare I type it? -- Lucky Whip. Where might you take those faded brands if you got your hands on them for pennies on the Eisenhower-era dollar?

Or think of some other dusty brands from your youth that you could reposition into new glory. Kaypro "portable" computers. Buster Browne shoes. Good & Plenty candy. Tareyton ("I'd Rather Fight Than Switch") cigarettes.

Here's one. Remember Vitalis hair tonic, the men's locks-slickening product popular before the Beatles made mop-tops de rigueur? Is that not the perfect name for an erectile dysfunction product for aging do-woppers (who may, or may not, have owned a Playboy Club key)? It even has a magical secret ingredient: V7.

What brands would you reposition if you had a chance, and how?