Delightfully Anachronistic Package Design: Tru-Blu Duplex Sandwich Cremes!

OKAY, now where were we?

Oh, that’s right – as I was saying yesterday, before the Government shut down the entire internet – when I happen across a product with delightfully anachronistic package design, why, I just feel as though I’m going to bust, I get so excited!

How come? you ask.

Let me explain:  In this fast-paced, ever-changing world, where everyone’s looking for the “next big thing,” for what’ll be “trending” tomorrow, for what’s “hot,” here I’ve discovered some sort of product that defies Big Advertising’s ironclad rules of marketing;  a product that seems to tell us through its quaint package design, “Hey, you – slow down.  Take it easy, there, chum.  There’s no need to rush about all willy-nilly.  Look at me, why, I’ve slowed to the point that time stands still. One might say for me, an unassuming package of food, time seems to have stopped years and years ago, when they designed the very package you see I’m sporting.”

Anyway, at the 99¢ Only Store last week, I found these cookies…

…and I think you’ll agree that purple makes absolutely no sense for a duplex sandwich cookie when one side is vanilla, like Betty White, and the other, dark like Martin Landau King Jr., and besandwiched between the two is plain white creme.  Now if it were some sort of raspberry creme, then we could understand, but it’s not. It’s plain white cream so it makes precisely zero sense for the package to be purple.

And by Godfrey, that’s why you and I, we love it.  That and, well, its overall package design, I guess, because it just looks old, right?

These cheap cookies are like something they’d have in that disgusting afterthought of a daycare “center” in the bowling alley where Mother stuck me when she was on the “Wednesday Ladies” bowling league in 1975 – that terrible place, likely an unused storage room, with no windows, pale green walls and moldy carpet that smelled of urine and bowling ball hole sweat, where I and a cluster of other forgotten children of other bowling moms were left in the care of that hideous old hag who sat there on a chair borrowed from the bar ignoring us while reading “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Small, sickly children such as myself were left to fend for ourselves against the other kids (and half of them were from Chickahominy, so you know what that means…!) and invariably whichever bunny puzzle I brought from home that day would end up with pieces missing (or torn in half) and the box intentionally crushed.

You have to remember, this was in the 1970s, back when bullying hadn’t yet been outlawed.  Jesus Christ, I still have nightmares about that place. Oh, look, great, I’ve peed myself again just thinking about it. Hold on, let me get the rag.

Okay, I’m back.

Anyway, those cookies I was talking about were pretty good. Hell, for 99¢, you could do a whole lot worse.

Smells like a bowling alley storage room in here.  Well, minus the ball hole sweat.

Posted by Ted on January 19, 2012, 3:09 AM.