As a candy collector, traveling out of the country is a great opportunity to find fun and foreign versions of candy packaging. Of course, if you’re not a regular globetrotter, it helps to have friends pitch in for the hunt.
A pal of mine recently put together a great care package of current offerings from the candy shelves of Australia. She had done so a few years earlier, so when I saw a fun new M&M’s package from down under, I asked if she could do so again.
One of the fun things about candy history, and about product packaging more broadly, is that it’s something that isn’t very well documented. For me, that means I get to become a bit of a pop-culture archeologist, hunting for things and revealing things that a lot of folks don’t remember, or never even knew existed. There isn’t too much primary research being done in the realm of pop culture, but with candy packaging and candy history, there is.
For years over on Flickr, I’ve been endeavoring to track down items and share high-quality images of things that you couldn’t see anywhere else, and I’m continuing to do that in a different, more-focused way here on this site.
Today is one of those special days where I get to reveal a piece of pop culture ephemera (and confectionery packaging history) to the world that most folks have never seen.
The Clark bar and Clark’s Zagnut have been around for decades. During the late 1970’s, the D.L. Clark company rolled out a few bars in wonderfully-designed wrappers, along with an ad campaign to support them.
Since first seeing images of these wrappers, I’d been hunting for them, and it turns out they were not easy to find. Because of that, I assume they did not last as long as the Clark company had hoped. In spite of this, they remain a cool piece of Clark’s confectionery past, and today I’ll share the wrappers that came out of this creative burst.
When Wacky Packages Old School first launched back in 2010, I was pretty excited about it. A new series parodying the products of the 1970’s that the original Wacky Packages series never covered – how could I not love it? I was not disappointed.
That first series gave me one of my favorite Old School Wacky Packages stickers thus far, the one which parodies the first style of Fleer’s Razzles packaging – Spazzles.
I’ve been a bit out of commission since late last week due to an accidental eye injury, and I’m slowly getting caught up on the many things I wasn’t able to do while patched-up with only one good eye. I’m still a bit blurry in the injured eye, but I’m healing. In other words, I’m back and ready to talk candy.
In order to give myself a leg-up on getting up to speed here on the site, I decided to pull something especially fun from my archives that sort of speaks for itself. The item I chose also happens to speak quite a lot about me personally.
I played AD&D (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, for you civilians) a LOT back in the 1980’s. I guess you could call me an “old-school” RPG player, as I was a 1st Edition AD&D guy… I eventually learned and played 2nd edition, but I never really warmed to AD&D 3rd Edition rules. Yeah, I’ve got some nerd-cred. I could go on, but rather than bore the non-role-players reading, I’ll get to the subject of today’s short post: Dungeons and Dragons Candy! Yes, it really existed:
Amurol - Dungeons and Dragons - fantasy candy figures - candy box - early 1983
Howdy, all. Sorry that the site has been without update the last two days. I’ve had an injury, and today is the first time I’ve been able to keep my eyes on a computer screen for more than a few seconds without a lot of pain.
You see, late Wednesday night, my dog decided that jumping upon my face was a good idea… and her claw proceeded to scratch my cornea – dead center, as a matter of fact. After several hours at the ophthalmologist the next morning, I left fully eye-patched up.
Admittedly, not the coolest eye-patch available.
From there, I endured a good 36 hours of waves of pain and discomfort, mixed with bouts of pain-killer-induced sleep and euphoria.
And, of course, I was thinking about CollectingCandy.com, and what I might write about, with regard to my absence. While I’m still dealing with a bit of occasional pain, and my injured eye has yet to regain full focus back, I did want to get something posted to the site today. So, I thought I’d give you a few pieces of Pirate-themed, or more specifically, eye-patch wearing candy.
Today’s edition of Wacky Wednesdays will showcase a sticker from Wacky Packages original 1970’s run. Specifically, the Mounds parody, Pounds, from 1973’s Wacky Packages series 5.
One of the more unusual pieces of vintage confectionery packaging to come out of the L.M. Kallok Collection (a wonderful collection I’ve talked about here before, and that I recently acquired) was something I’d never encountered or even heard of: A powdered candy offering out of Mexico called Bip Bip, featuring Warner Brothers’ Road Runner as its mascot.
A product from General Mills of Mexico and sold in the 1970’s, Bip Bip appears to have been a Lik-M-Aid type of powdered sugar candy, which came in four different sour flavors: Pineapple, Orange, Strawberry and Lemon.
GORP Plus - black-and-white image from 1978 trade magazine.
GORP might sound like the name of some invertebrate globular alien Star Trek character, or an odd comic book sound-effect, but it’s not – at least that’s not all that it is. Gorp was a confectionery brand name – an acronym for “Good Ol’ Raisins & Peanuts”.
This is one of those 70’s treats I don’t really recall, possibly because it contained raisins, and while I’m sure raisins are truly “nature’s candy”, they were never really mine. I first came across GORP in a 1970’s candy industry trade magazine, while doing candy-related research at the New York Public Library (yes, I do candy-research at the library, don’t beat me up). I snapped a photo of the image in question, and that very photo is today’s title shot.
Though it was only a black-and-white image, I immediately became enamored with the packaging and the odd name. It was just weird enough and just 70’s enough that I couldn’t help myself. As I have with many of my candy first-sightings, I made a note and added GORP to my want-list of vintage candy packaging I would one day hope to find. Lucky for me, I recently did.
Big League Plug pre-release promotional flyer image.
Today’s piece is a short tale of finding a collectible “Holy Grail” and how much fun it can be to track down something you thought you might never see.
I initially learned about the Big League Plug chocolate candy bar while doing research for my Big League Chew Retrospective piece.
The bar was first mentioned to me by Rob Nelson, the creator of Big League Chew, when I asked if there had ever been any confectionery spin-offs of his brand. He explained that, “There was a chocolate bar they tried, called Big League Plug…”
