Friday Favorites: Personified Food Mascots: EVIL!

Since I am still using the old Blogger templates, it may be hard at times for new users to swim through all the entries I have made over the years, especially since the label system only presents the last 20 entries under any particular heading, and I use a small group of them, so I tend to accumulate a lot of entries under each label.

With over 1000 entries under my belt and a bunch of new readers, I felt that perhaps it would be fitting to go back and repackage some of the entries I enjoyed sharing with you, my audience, in the distant past. Plus posting some older content once in a while will help me avoid burning out (and it lets me get other things for the blog done as well).

So for this first trip in the wayback machine, I thought I would start with an entry I made on June 18th, 2006. That was back in the days when I actually blogged on Sundays. It is a classic rant on my part.

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If there is one marketing mistake that I feel major food manufacturers make, it is personifying their products. Now I am not talking about the use of funny cartoon pitchmen that are related to but not the product themselves like Toucan Sam, the Trix Rabbit or Chester Cheetah.

No, I am talking about figures like the Kool Aid Man, Mr. Peanut, the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Charlie the Tuna. You know, characters who are consumable in and of themselves.

I don't want to think about the fact that if I have Kool Aid from a pitcher, I am draining the Kool Aid Man of his lifeblood like a vampire, and bravo for the art director who came up with the idea that he should be filled with a red fluid. He couldn't have been blue, orange or purple could he? Granted, blood is slightly easier to scrub out of a white shirt than Kool Aid is.

And what about the California Raisins? Who wants to devour a singing Motown band composed of purple wrinkled little troubadours? How did California and Motown get mixed up together anyway? Happily, this was a very short-lived phenomenon. Rumor has it that the Doughboy's stripper sister, Cinnamon "Cindy" Buns, did the lot of them and gave birth to some Cinnamon Raisin buns, but that's another story.

And I can just imagine Mr. Peanut, upon finding out that his family has been skinned and eaten by the human race, going on a rampage against us all... perhaps making a fine cooking oil and butter from our crushed bodies.



Of course, I can see depression hitting Charlie the Tuna hard. He has been rejected so many times that he just decides to give up on life, after all, dolphins were better than he was as a food item to a lot of companies. He also did a lot of things he wasn't proud of in the salmon spawning grounds, and you can't forget that, even with prodigious amounts of alcohol, can you? So he starts hanging out near the end of the pipe coming out of a Michelin factory, trying to poison himself to death, but all it ends up doing to him is turning him into some kind of bloated supermutant fish that will baffle the fishermen that pull him up after a hulk-like bender down by Venice Beach. Ironically, he does look a little like a roasted chicken so Jessica Simpson has the last laugh.



See, this is the problem with having an active mind... you end up making backstories for EVERYTHING, and I personally can't eat anything that has a backstory.

Tags: advertising, mascots, mr. peanut, doughboy, california raisins, kool aid, man, pillsbury, charlie the tuna, trix rabbit, toucan sam, cereal killers, chicken of the sea, motown, flipper, venice beach, backstory