Remember Wacky Packages?

[geardaddy]

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/before_there_were_garbage_pail_kids_there_were_wacky_packages

Art Spiegelman’s career has produced a wide-ranging body of work. There are punk favorites Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, his comics for Playboy, his New Yorker covers, and (of course) his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, a complex and stylized account of his father’s reflections on the Holocaust. Spiegelman has worked in the “highest” and “lowest” of artistic milieus, and while Garbage Pail Kids are probably considered the nadir of his vulgarity, his lesser-known Wacky Packages series are their obvious predecessor.

Drawn primarily by Spiegelman and then painted in full by pulp master Norman Saunders, these parodies of household brands were sold in packs of five with a stick of gum. Although packaged as trading cards, they were actually stickers you could pop out, presumably for easy defacement of public property. The work was juvenile and snide, but this stuff was the Clickhole of the late 1960’s, and although reboots and new series of Wacky Packages were launched in later years (with art by the likes of Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman and Bill Griffith) it’s the early ones from Spiegelman and Saunders that really skewered brands in a fresh, irreverent way.

While Wonder Bread actually ended up including the cards as giveaways to get kids to ask their moms to buy their product, other companies got pretty peeved and tried to sue. As a result, each series only ran for a little while, so the stickers quickly developed a cult following, and are now seriously collected by fans. In fact, in 2013, the Topps company tried to sell the original art for the “Band-Ache” sticker for $1 million!

More at link. We used collect and trade these in grade school!

http://www.wackypackages.org/stickers/cloth/frames_index_smaller_images.html

[shenmue]

1. Me too

[Throd]

2. I still have some in a box deep in the basement.

[Frank Cannon]

3. My bedroom door was covered with them.

I loved those things. I had no idea that Art "Maus" Spiegelman was behind them, but it makes sense. The artwork was always very detailed and well done.

I wouldn't think a company could sue them, because they were all obvious parodies. But maybe this happened before the Jerry Falwell v Hustler hubbub.

[OriginalGeek]

4. I wish I still had all mine

That was the best part of day-care during the summer. Once a week they would take us older kids next door to the convenience store and let us shop for candy and stuff. I got Zotz and wacky packages. You could get a lot of stuff for 50 cents back then.

this was my favorite:

[geardaddy]

5. Zotz!

I loved those. Did you have Bubs Daddy too? I would put a whole grape one in my mouth.

[OriginalGeek]

6. that one I never heard of

but if they had grape ones, Id'a loved 'em!

Another one I loved when I didn't get Zots was Boston Baked Beans. Basically, sugar coated peanuts:


but they were more expensive than Zots so I didn't get them as often lol. Apparently, whatever thriftiness I was learning in Day Care didn't make it to adulthood.

[geardaddy]

7. Bubs Daddy was basically a 12-inch rope of bubble gum.

They had all kinds of flavors.

I LOVE Boston baked beans to this day!

[cyberswede]

12. Man, we'd try to chew the whole bubsdaddy at once

[geardaddy]

13. Me too!

[cwydro]

10. I remember those.

And candy cigarettes, and those little wax bottles full of colored sugar water lol!

[Art_from_Ark]

8. I'm not sure if it was Topps, but

I remember sometime around 1969 or 1970, buying packages of wacky automobile stickers, like "Banzai Bomb" and "Chevy Eater".

[OriginalGeek]

9. Odd-Rods?

Ithink I remember them too

[Art_from_Ark]

15. I looked up Odd-Rods

and I found a picture of "Bonzai Bomb", which dates from 1969. For some reason, it was "the card to get" back then, as was "Ford's Breakfast of Chevys", which I remembered as "Chevy Eater".

[mucifer]

11. kids in my neighborhood used to trade them

My brother is 4 years older than me. He always got me to give him my good wacky packs because I didn't understand which ones were the cool ones and which ones were the duds.

[marzipanni]

14. Talking about candy from when we were kids - this website

"Candy Kiss"!

A trip down the candy memory lane...
http://www.oldtimecandy.com/candy-by-decade