• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, April 4, 2024

I love when brands venture into creating pop cultural content about offbeat artifacts, and “The Last Barf Bag,” an eccentric mini-documentary from the makers of Dramamine, sure qualifies.

Normally, the “nausea space” is not something I’d want to explore. But the doc has its charms.

Created by FCB Chicago, and directed by the film collective Sunny Sixteen, the li’l film reveals that both the air-sickness bag and its nemesis, the nausea-diminishing Dramamine tablet, were invented in 1949, so each is celebrating its 75^th anniversary.

They are oldsters, both. But while the innovative flat bag – still welcomed in the seat pockets of most airline flights – is becoming obsolete, Dramamine use is surging.

The filmmakers are not shy about showing the Tarrytown-based marketing folks on camera, revealing that since 2010 (when Prestige Healthcare acquired the brand and dramatically raised ad budgets) Dramamine has boosted its market share in the motion sickness category from 30% to 60%. During the same period, however, the use of air sickness bags has gone down, down, down.

Did Dramamine kill the barf bag? Not exactly, because its slow death is also a result of smoother flights. During the 1940s and 1950s, commercial air travel was often rough, bumpy, and smelled of gas. Even for flyers who didn’t need to fill it, the bag’s existence was a comfort.

Therefore, a complicated combination of pride, guilt, and humor went into the making of this vomit-bag-based chronicle.

To atone for being part of the problem but also wanting to be part of the solution, bag-slayer Dramamine decided to elevate the bag, offering it the respect it deserves before it fades away.

It’s a funny and gutsy move.

But only two minutes into the 13.5 minute video, we hear from regular folks who are wise in the ways of throwing up and are willing to fake-spew on camera and list the variety of colorful terms that describe it. One dude walking in a park holds a bag but explains “I use the ground.” A woman blames her latest unpleasant emission on the “Jalapeno Linguini.” 

I thought about pausing but powered on.

I’m glad I did. A group of dedicated barf bag collectors from around the U.S. forms the heart of the film. Yes, they exist and are as weird as you’d expect. One guy from Maine drives a car with the vanity plate “Barf Bag”. Another earnest fellow calls himself a “nausavatologist.”

These quirky collectors have varying senses of humor about their passion, but they’re all quite meticulous about cataloguing the bags under proper conditions, under glassine pages in giant photo albums, as serious collectors of ephemera would.

But the art of the bag – the design and clever graphics, such as a reindeer spewing ice cubes – really got to me, and I wish we could have gotten a better look at them.

At the very end of the film, as a coda, we find out in a crawl that the noted nausavatologist and his wife have decided to move into a retirement community and won’t have room for his collection. A marketing person from Dramamine tells him on a Zoom call that the company would like to acquire it as part of an ongoing exhibition.

And I celebrated. Dramamine will hold pop-up exhibitions of their historic and growing barf bag collection, but also will be paying tribute by reimagining new uses for them. A wonderful website, https://www.thelastbarfbag.com/shop, shows the products they’ve developed and sell – like the popcorn bag, a glove, a chef’s hat, etc. 

It’s what I’d call an inspired, re-purpose-driven project. Kudos to the crew for going there.