“Here it comes,” she’s about the enjoy the “gum that goes squirt,” so says the old-school commercial for Freshen-Up gum.
Food products come and go, often with good reason. What seems like a good idea might leave diners gagging in retrospect a decade down the road.
Some products die because they’re a bad idea. But some, perhaps, were killed by really questionable advertising campaigns.
5. Swiss Miss Pudding Bars, 1982
It’s hard to compete with Jell-O, a company known for making pudding. It’s even harder to do so when that company has Bill Cosby hawking its frozen-pudding-on-a-stick product. Why even bother? Well, if you’re a cocoa company with a few marionettes at your mercy, why the hell not?
4. Chiffon Margarine, mid-1970s
Not just one ad, but a series that ran throughout the 1970s that we should perhaps have heeded: Quit with the fake butter or suffer the consequences. Not only are we dealing with the horrors of hydrogenated oil 35 years later, but we also have to see that drunk chick from Will and Grace dancing with a tub of fake butter. Mother Nature would not approve.
3. McDLT, mid-1980s
Ah, the salad days — that time before an actor scores a role on a hit show — say, Seinfeld — and has to sing for his supper. Possibly while dancing, perhaps wearing a hairpiece, and praising a doomed McDonald’s creation that not only slapped a cold wad of American cheese on a burger, but created twice as much Styrofoam waste as a pre-assembled burger. The McDLT still exists, as the Big n’ Tasty, except it’s all smooshed together. Which is neither hot nor cool.
