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Cereal Mascots!
HERE’S one that even the breakfast cereal websites won’t touch.
I hereby offer, for your looking-at pleasure, a box of Fruit Rings:
Available at your local Dollar Tree, this sweetened multi-grain cereal with the taste of fruit looks good enough to eat!
As for its mascot, a friendlier, funnier fellow we’ve never seen. The perfect spokescreature for venerable Fruit Rings, you’ll agree. But wait…!
Let’s move down the aisle eighteen inches or so…
And, brother, you’re not going to believe this!
Yes! You’re saying exactly what I said! “Do the Fruit Rings people know that Cocoa Rounds stole their mascot?”
Ah ha, but how do we know that it’s not Fruit Rings who stole him from Cocoa Rounds?
Clearly, we needed to get to the bottom of this. So I had someone look into it and it turns out that both cereals are made – deep in South America’s cereal bowl, Argentina – by the same manufacturer! So there’s no copyright infringement at all! Call off your lawyers, Fruit Rings and Cocoa Rounds – you’re on the same team!
So why the good goddamn couldn’t they have made the Cocoa Rounds guy brown or something? That’s what you or I would have done and we’d have been right to do it.
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Lettuce!
I WANTED to leave you with one for the weekend that would make you think.
I was at the 99¢ Only Store again today. As my late wife used to say, “You can’t keep him out of there!”
Christ almighty, how that used to piss me off when she’d say that. And to people we didn’t even know! The bank teller! She didn’t need to know my business. Or the ass who put the tinting on my car windows for $60 cash. (And then the next day I go through a red light, get pulled over, and the cop makes me peel the film off the front windshield right then and there or else pay a $300 fine. And three weeks later the rest of it started wrinkling and bubbling and coming off anyway. Sixty bucks shot to hell!)
But somehow she works into the conversation to Mr. Window Tinter, “You can’t keep this one out of the 99¢ Only store!” (He did the job in the parking lot when we were shopping inside.) Thank God he didn’t speak English so he didn’t understand. But if I ever find him I’m going to take sixty dollars out of his hide and he’ll understand that. I think he had a baseball cap and dark hair.
The point is, at the 99¢ Only store, they sell produce now, and today they were offering this:
And as you know, I’m a pretty introspective person – always thinking.
It occurred to me that this is a particularly odd brand name. And it makes you think.
Earthbound Farm.
To some, it would imply that most farms are just floating around unanchored to our planet, hovering just over the surface maybe, but this one is distinctive because it is in fact an earthbound farm; that is, it’s bound to the earth.
And others might interpret it this way: This company sells produce that they grow elsewhere in the galaxy, but it’s all being shipped here. Therefore in transit, it’s earthbound.
It makes you think, though, and every once in a while, that’s important.
You know what’s also important? Getting your feet checked regularly for Morton’s neuroma. My God, what I wouldn’t do to hear her say, just one more time, to some complete goddamn stranger, “The 99¢ Only store? Oh, you can’t keep him out of there!”
But she’s gone.
Well, that’s what comes of wearing cheap Chinese Crocs knockoffs.
Holy crap, say that five times fast. -
Creme-Filled Oatmeal Cookies!
I‘VE got a real knee-slapper guaranteed to get you in good with the cute broad behind the counter at the package store where you pick up your forties on the way home from work every night.
Here’s a box of Mrs. Freshley’s Oatmeal Cremes. Sure, you know the ones – those individually wrapped creme-filled cookies. Our kids live on these things, and I bet yours do, too. They’re cheap and they let you buy them with your EBT card. It’s a food you can feel good about.
But how can they sell a box of eight for a buck at the local Dollar Barn?
A patented Ted Parsnips close-up holds the answer!
Ha! Priceless!
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10 Foods from the 99¢ Only Store That Are Way Ahead of the Curve on That Whole “Retro Package Design” Thing
EVERYTHING old is new again, and you know that if you’ve bought Cap’n Crunch, Doritos, or Hostess Cupcakes lately. They’re among an increasing number of products decked out in “vintage” packaging aimed to appeal to nostalgic consumers. Here, let the Wall Street Journal explain it to you. (Just read the article or click through the slideshow. For the love of God, man, don’t watch the video! It’s four excruciating minutes of three people who apparently have never been on camera before talking over each other!)
Quaker, Frito Lay, and Hostess, however, are merely jumping on a bandwagon driven by braver companies: Let’s take a trip down the aisles of our local 99¢ Only store as we celebrate some of the greatest vintage-looking packages still available today from manufacturers who were so forward-thinking that they never changed their packages from whenever they first debuted.
Or at least it looks that way.
Many (but not all) are from small, private-label companies that probably contracted a graphic designer long ago to develop their packaging. They’ve seen no reason to update it, and frankly, you and me, we’re glad they haven’t.
This is not “10 Packages Desperately In Need of a Makeover,” – no no no! Indeed, we love the way these products look, and we hope that, despite the infinite power and influence this website wields over all manner of society and industry, none of the companies making these foods decides to update their product’s packaging. Indeed: They look fine as they are. By the way, they’re all great products, all made in the good ol’ USA, and each and every one from companies worth supporting!
And one last note: This is just the tip of the iceberg, brother. I got another two batches to hit you with in the next week or so, and believe me when I say that the package design just gets more charmingly anachronistic as we go along!
On with the show!
This Sacramento Tomato Juice looks like it’s from… the late 1970s.
Proof of Its Modernity: Website address on label.
Where You’d Expect to See It: At your grandparents’ house in the Bloody Marys they’ll sip while watching “Crockett’s Victory Garden.”
Buy It Because: “Sacramento Juices offer exceptional nutritional value and extraordinary taste. Enjoy Sacramento, and you’ll be serving healthy juices your whole family will love.” –from their website.
• With its largely gold label with touches of green and a little silhouette cameo of a horse and buggy, this is a particularly handsome design. -
A Treat for the Mouth!
BIG fan of peanut butter, hmm?
Sure, of course you are – we all are! Check this out:
Yes, it may look like an ordinary jar of peanut butter, but look at that label closely! Much like you, it’s whipped!
It’s also got 1/3 less sugar, but don’t let that scare you off! Notice it doesn’t say what it has 1/3 less sugar than!
Oh, wait, actually it does. In smaller print.
Anyhow, a pal turned me onto this stuff and now I’m hooked. You can get it at the 99¢ Only store! And of course that begs the question, “Did this stuff not sell in regular stores and the Peter Pan Peanut Butter people are just dumping it at the dollar store before it expires to recoup some of the costs from what was presumably an enormous new-product roll-out (industry jargon), or was it made specifically for your dollar store retailers?”
I suppose I could look into this, but c’mon, neither of us really care. How much more interesting do you expect this damn thing to be? It’s a post on a blog, for goodness sake! Let’s not kid ourselves here!
The point is that the stuff is light and fluffy, and incidentally, that’s where the “1/3 less sugar” notation comes from. Essentially, a standard jar of peanut butter this size, unwhipped, would contain 1/3 more condensed peanut butter…and the sugar that comes with it.
So you’re paying for a smaller amount of peanut butter that might otherwise come in a jar this size…if it wasn’t whipped up all frothy and light. So is 99¢ a fair price for a 9.3 ounce jar of peanut butter?
Let me answer that for you…by sticking a spoon in it…
…and then offering you a taste:
Go ahead, don’t be shy. I haven’t had an outbreak in weeks.
Now, I ask you, isn’t that something? This is peanut butter you can eat right out of the jar! And according to my pal, it has erotic applications as well! Well, actually she said you could frost a cake with it and I just presumed that was some sort of euphemism.
But if she wasn’t talking dirty, if I were to take what she said literally, then yes, you could absolutely frost a cake with this stuff. It’s just that light and fluffy.
And remember those 1970s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercials with the “You got my chocolate in your peanut butter!” and the “You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!”…? Well, finally, thirty-five years later, the fatal flaw of those commercials has been erased. The improbability has been significantly lessened. The suspension of disbelief formally required to embrace the ads’ message is no longer necessary: It now makes perfect sense to walk around eating peanut butter right out of the jar, and I mean walking around town, not around the kitchen in your underwear at three in the morning.
See that you do.
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A Necktie!
HERE’S proof that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, or even in a book that one of those so-called “animation historians” write!
According to (ooh la la!) “Wikipedia,” the only time Speedy Gonzales and the Road Runner ever appeared together was in the admittedly classic and justifiably beloved cartoon from the golden age of Warner Bros. theatrical shorts, 1965’s “The Great Chase.”
Ha I say! HA!
Well, then, all you Jeremy Becks and John Cainraisers, explain this!
Do I need to go in for a close-up?
Oh, yes, please, let’s get a close-up so there’s no mistaking here!
So there’s no “Well, I couldn’t see it so you must have been lying again!”
It’s all there, blue and green, clear as crystal!
We’ve got, left to right, someone with a thyroid condition, three similar-looking fellows of unknown origin, and, yes, a morose Road Runner and a cheerful Speedy Gonzales. Together! Together in the same goddamn project!
Pay up!
Also, there’s someone (a ninja?) strung up in a tree…
A wide swath of Charles Schulz-type humiliating laughter – the kind that has bedeviled poor Sally when she’s said something stupid in front of the class…
And that guy from Asterix.
And where can you see this? Oh, not on whatever slightly repackaged collection of the same 600 or so cartoons Warner Bros. is offering on DVD this month, oh no! Don’t hold your breath waiting for W-B to release this ultra-rare team-up!
Much like Disney only allowing “Song of the South” for sale to the home video market in Japan where apparently there aren’t any black people, Warner Bros. doesn’t have the cojones to release this tie here, so good luck getting it unless you live in Italy or China (depending on whether you want to believe the embroidered label or the paper tag).
However, you can probably score a bootleg copy at Comic-Con this year (if Warner Bros.’ legal department doesn’t catch wind of this first).
Or do what I did, which is pick one up at the 99¢ Only Store next to the loose underpants.
Ted Parsnips
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