"food mascot" news and stories

Speedy Alka-Seltzer is one of our more durable male advertising mascots, though you wouldn't know it to listen to him. The high-pitched voice heard in over 200 TV advertisements between 1954 and 1964 (courtesy radio actor Dick Beals) could have belonged to a Madison Avenue castrato, sent to school an overindulgent nation on the error of its ways.

For Alka-Seltzer is not food, of course, but its antidote. In this Sixties spot, Speedy promotes the product as good for political headaches and Mardis Gras hangovers. The original model (brainchild of ad man Chuck Tenant and graphic artist Bob Watkins) was retired for decades, but made a triumphant comeback last year. In a series of Web videos, Speedy accompanied the Conchords-like singing duo Rhett & Link as they crossed the country in a tricked out AMC Gremlin dubbed the Speedmobile, playing chicken (and burger and falafel) with heartburn and stomachaches.

Speedy wasn't alone in the world of mascots. Though it's become harder to find Thomas Lipton on a box of Lipton tea these days, his spirit lives, Tom Joad-like, in every bag. Sometimes called the father of modern advertising, the Scots-Irish entrepreneur was celebrated for stunts such as parading hogs through Glasgow wearing signs that read, "I'm going to Lipton's! Best shop in town for Irish bacon!" (I guess you had to be there.) Lipton went from one teashop to over 300 in twenty years and was famed in the U.K. for his healthy, abstemious lifestyle. For that and underselling the competition.

Lipton went on to buy (and revive) blighted British tea plantations in Ceylon and pioneered the "flow-thru" tea bag that helped Americans overcome their fear of the stuff. His use of the word "brisk" (tea-taster code for leaves that weren't stale) was revived most recently in the canned ice tea commercials featuring Claymation puppets modeled after Bruces Willis and Lee, among other cultural icons, who exclaimed of the beverage, "That's brisk, baby!"

In ancient times, food was marketed primarily by "hunger." But in the modern era, it's not enough that we eat our food, we must also emotionally bond with it. This partly explains the enduring appeal of food mascots, those bright, colorful, affable characters who beckon us to consume.

In many cases, we choose a product simply because we have a bizarre attachment to the cartoon that represents it. There is no shame in trusting, say, a paranoid Leprechaun with a powerful marshmallow lust more than one's own family. These 10 icons are the awesomest in the pantheon of cheap food branding.