Nope, it’s not a villain from Batman — it’s a brand of ice pops!
Yep, for only $2.99 with the purchase of a pack of Freeze Pops, you could get this pool float! I give them credit in their choice of promotional product — since the inflated sections of the float actually look like Freeze Pops, it’s a great promo!
Well, this ad isn’t nearly as entertaining as Captain America & Nick Fury or The Penguin extolling the excellence of Hostess products, but that doesn’t make the snacks any less tasty!
Since I know pretty much nothing about sports, I wasn’t familiar with these, but apparently they were a pretty big deal back in the day! Some avid collectors would check back at the store whenever Hostess snacks were restocked, and go through all the boxes to find the ones they needed – good thing the cards were printed on the outside of the boxes, so you could see what you were getting!
You know, all my life, right up until I started preparing this post, I’ve thought of this snack as “Cracker Jacks,” not the singular “Cracker Jack” – I’ve been wrong for all these years and never had any idea!
Most of us remember Cracker Jack for its “Toy Surprise” – when I was a kid, it was usually some kind of small plastic trinket. I haven’t had Cracker Jack in many, many years, but the last few times I did, I remember being particularly disappointed in the quality of the “toys” – usually just stickers. Well, as it turns out, that’s not so bad! Apparently in 2017 they replaced the toy with a QR code that allows you to download a game – lame! I feel like that takes away all of the specialness that Cracker Jack used to have.
Well, I guess gum counts as candy too, so this works well for a post-Halloween post! Here we have the addition of pink lemonade to the Bubble Yum lineup! I remember liking that flavor – how about you? I was curious as to whether or not they were still making this flavor, so I looked up the current Bubble Yum site, and apparently the only kind they still make is original flavor sugarless – how disappointing!
Well, since this is another anagram game, I was hoping to have some fun like I did with Fig Newtons, but unfortunately none of these words can be rearranged into something else (at least, not with using all the letters) – sorry to disappoint you!
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It’s almost Halloween, and you know what that means: airplanes! No, wait – candy! This is the only candy-related ad I have in stock at the moment, so I guess it’ll have to do. Here we have a styrofoam sailplane soaring above three excited white-haired children (or are they elderly midgets?). You can get this dandy plane just by sending in a Whoppers wrapper… and $3.99. That’s worth about $14.00 in today’s money, so that wasn’t exactly a steal, but I guess if you wanted to get a plane like this anyway, maybe this deal made it a little cheaper(?).
I was a little surprised to see that Whoppers were made by Leaf rather than Hershey back in 1979… but then when I looked it up on Wikipedia, I was even more surprised to see that Whoppers have only been made by Hershey since 1996! Wow, I guess I don’t pay nearly enough attention to candy! I’ll have to fix that from now on…
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M&M’s are a classic candy that has been around for generations. The colors shown here are the ones I remember growing up: orange, yellow green, light brown, and dark brown. I remember red being added (and upon looking it up, that was in 1987), but apparently red had already been used from 1960-1976, until people started to believe that red dyes caused cancer. I still think of the blue ones as the “new” M&M’s, and still think they look out of place, but apparently they’ve been around since 1995!
Fun fact: Did you know that Steven Spielberg originally wanted to use M&M’s in the movie E.T., but Mars turned him down? So instead he approached Hershey, which was more than happy to have Reese’s Pieces featured in the film!
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KitKats have always been one of my favorite candy bars, so I’m excited to finally be posting an ad for them! And in a historical note: This ad features a kid taking a selfie – long before selfies were a thing!
This one is done in the style of a Mad Magazine fold-in – but who wants to fold up and crease their classic comic books?! Well, thanks to the magic of photo editing software, I’m able to show you the finished result without having to harm my book:
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You guys are in for a real treat this week, because I’ve got Hostess Fruit Pies for you! Back when I did my very first post, I had no idea that Hostess had actually done a huge series of comic-style ads featuring popular comic characters.
So, maybe I’m overthinking this, but why would the Penguin use cuckoo clocks to steal money rather than just regular birds? Seems to me that he’s just adding extra complication with the clocks.
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Unscramble the letters? But the first one is already a perfectly cromulent word: GIF! Could this possibly be the first-ever use in print of that term??
Just for fun, I looked up anagrams for the rest of them. It turns out that “apple” can be rearranged to “pepla,” which is the plural of “peplum,” which is essentially a type of toga, so… toga-flavored Newtons! I couldn’t find any good anagrams for “cherry,” but for blueberry, take your pick: beery blur, blurry bee, burly beer, lube berry, or rubber lye (or several other options, but the ones listed seemed like the best)! Hmm… given those options, I think I’d have to go with lube berry…
I’ve always thought that choosing fig as their go-to flavor was kind of an odd move. I did a little research, and I found a little info on its origin (apparently eating fruit and biscuits were considered good for health, and this was a convenient solution that included both), I couldn’t find any info on why figs specifically were chosen over other flavors that may have been more popular/appealing. Maybe figs were just “in” back in the 1890s?
I was actually surprised at just how little information seems to be out there on such an iconic snack – even from the brand’s own website! We all know that fig is the original flavor, and according to an ad I posted earlier, apple had already been introduced by 1985. This ad introduces cherry and blueberry, so we know those were new for 1985/’86. Apparently the current fruit lineup is: fig, blueberry, strawberry, and mixed berry. So I’m not sure at what point apple and cherry disappeared, or when strawberry and mixed berry were introduced (and I’m sure no one besides me really cares anyway!).
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This is one of my favorite types of ads from my childhood – one that includes some kind of game or activity rather than just telling you to buy something. Though I’m not really sure why this maze is set in outer space…
Fun (or not) behind-the-scenes CBA fact: I usually try to get my ads as straight as possible when scanning them, and then make minor corrections (if needed) with software before posting. Well, I had one hell of a time with this one, because LOOK AT THE BORDERS ON THIS THING! No matter how I did it, it still looked crooked… and then I realized that the borders of the ad itself were crooked (sigh).
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