Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Uncle O'Grimacey wishes you all a very Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Enjoy a Shamrock Shake today in honor of our furry green friend.

Stretch Monster Cereal?

I made this fantasy cereal box in honor of Stretch Monster Week over at Neato Coolville. Be sure to check out his blog and join in the fun!

Sea Host Restaurant

Several years ago, I was thrilled to uncover some push puppet toys of these fun little sea creature characters. They are dated 1969 and marked "Sea Host". After scouring the web for information on Sea Host, I turned up virtually nothing.


Here's the first push puppet. His name is Ossie Oyster. He seemed like a happy enough little fellow, so I kept him. Then the quest began to find out more about Ossie and this "Sea Host" entity.

Since information regarding Sea Host is very sparse, I'll throw out what I know and hope that others can share information and piece together the mystery.

Here's what I know -- Sea Host was a seafood restaurant chain, locally owned and nationally franchised. It was a subsidiary of Proteus Foods & Industries.

The only dated materials I've located are the push puppets which are dated 1969. Was Sea Host around before 1969? How long after 1969 did it remain in business? Are there any Sea Host restaurants still around? I'm plagued with more questions than answers.

I'll add the fact that I've never seen a Sea Host restaurant, never dined in one and have no fond memories of it at all.

Now, on to the fun stuff! Sea Host's crowning achievement was not their lobster bisque, but rather their legacy of fun but obscure spokes-creatures. In fact a group of six characters represented the restaurant chain, led by a fish named Sylvester C. Host.

• Sylvester C. Host -- a fish in a chef's hat and leader of the gang
• Ossie Oyster -- a tiny oyster who wore a beret
• Mr. Big The Shrimp -- an older shrimp with a large mustache
• Turtle The Turtle -- a turtle with the least imaginative name
• Smiley The Crab -- a blue crab who wore glasses
• Clem The Clam -- a happy clam who wore a rain hat

A full set of six push puppets was created, and here they are.





The Smiley The Crab push puppet is quite spectacular, though I'm partial to Clem The Clam as my favorite Sea Host character.

The next and last find was this give-away comic book which is undated but probably from the late 1960s.


As the comic story goes, Ossie asks Sylvester to help find Clem who they think has been "clam-napped". It turns out to be a ruse to bring Sylvester to his surprise birthday party.


I'll have to wrap up the Sea Host story with that. I've not found any other memorabilia or information about the chain. I do know that Sea Host, Inc. was located at 477 Madison Avenue in New York City.

Blog Readers -- Let me know what you think about these characters and please contribute any information you have about the restaurant or other collectibles. Which of the six sea creatures do you like the best?

Gotta run! A few more pictures are on my Flickr site here.

The Crunchberry Beast

[ Well, I'm back in the blogging business after a break, though I have been posting pictures on my Flickr site. Grab a plate of waffles and enjoy! ]


What better way to start the new year than a little post about that beloved, polka-dotted, cereal muncher known as The Crunchberry Beast.

The Crunchberry Beast represented Quaker Oats Crunch Berries cereal from approximately 1968-1985 as part of the Cap'n Crunch cereal family. His appropriately simple name reflected his all-consuming passion -- the eating of the Crunchberries.

Our unusual friend had yellow skin with big red spots, a long snout, buckteeth, corkscrew tail and a tuft of bright red hair.

By all accounts and recollections, "C.B." -- as he was often called by Cap'n Crunch -- was a rather energetic and hyperactive little guy, getting mostly enthused when there was some scrumptious cereal to be had.

He seemed to have a lot to say, but generally used very few words. His typical utterance was something like "boop boop boop boop boop!", spoken in a cereal-crazed frenzy.

As the story goes, C.B. was living a peaceful life on Crunchberry Island. One day Cap'n Crunch and friends arrived, discovered the Crunchberry Trees, and later C.B. himself. C.B. quickly joined the crew and set sail for further cereal adventures on the S.S. Guppy.









While Crunch Berries cereal was first on the market around 1967, the original cereal boxes featured only the Cap'n and a Crunchberry Tree, but no Beast. (Actually he wasn't even in the first Crunch Berries TV commercial.)

Starting in the early 1970s, C.B. took his rightful place on the box alongside the Cap'n.

Here's a box from the late '70s.

The Crunchberry Beast was another fantastic character from the minds of Jay Ward and Bill Scott. Jay Ward created the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon, among others, and such memorable advertising characters as Cap'n Crunch, Quisp, Quake and of course Wallace the Waffle Whiffer. Bill Scott provided the voices for many characters including Bullwinkle and our pal the Crunchberry Beast.

Here's a list of some cereal premiums featuring the Crunchberry Beast:

• "Beast Inside" iron-on patch
• "I'm Lost" bumper sticker
• "State of Confusion" pennant sticker
• unicycle glass sticker
• padlock and key
• farm animals stamp album
• Book of Fun & Games
• Crunch Money dollar
• cardboard dominoes game
  
• 4 different posters
• storyscope watch and story disks
• glow-in-the-dark puzzle
• a few smaller stickers
• movie viewer strip
  

Unfortunately, C.B. did not make the cut for some of the cooler plastic premiums like the balloon racers, surfers or spaceships. Those would have been great. I think his only individual appearance in plastic was this super-cool padlock and key set.


I'll interject here to say that Crunch Berries cereal was quite delicious during my prime cereal-eating years of the late '70s! One of my all-time favorites, it was the standard Cap'n Crunch taste with just the right amount of strawberry-flavored bites mixed in. Quaker added some different colored berries in the post-Beast years, and I can't say that I really approved of the change.

Here's a commercial featuring the Crunchberry Beast foiling Jean LaFoote's plot. (This is embedded from YouTube, and should be playable here if you have Flash installed in your browser.)



Here are some pictures of premiums I've acquired over the years.









Well the Crunchberry Beast was retired around 1985, along with most other Cap'n Crunch characters, besides the Cap'n himself. Bill Scott passed away in 1985 and Jay Ward's contract with Quaker Oats was over, after a long and tremendous run.

The Crunchberry Beast was such an effective advertising character, at least for this author. I put away a lot of his cereal, and remember him fondly over 20 years later. And every now and then I get that sugar-charged excitement in finding a new collectible that I hadn't seen before, like the dominoes set I recently discovered!

C.B. lives on, of course, in the many vintage collectibles and classic commercials that have survived. I imagine he's off in animation land munching some crunchy cereal right about now, and telling tales about his many adventures on the S.S. Guppy.

Burger King's Magician? (circa 1973)

It's really fun finding things, thinking they might be "something" and trying to identify them and perhaps recapture some lost memories.

This yellow plastic motorcycle toy had been around the house since childhood. It has a gyro wheel and should have a zip cord to make it go. The character seemed vaguely familiar, enough so to make me think it was not just a generic toy. I had been wondering for several years who it was.

There's a crown on the side of the bike and a bearded man at the wheel with a long nose and double pointed hat. His long beard runs down the side of his arm to his back, like it's blowing in the wind as he rides.

I have another similar cycle of Simon the kangaroo from Quangaroos Cereal, made in the early 1970s. Possibly related, I thought mine might be King Vitaman, another Quaker cereal character back then. Here's the Quangaroo.


Well the design, size and material are similar, so I assumed at least that these were made by the same company and that mine was likely from the early 1970s, too. At the time, that was the best I could do.

The proverbial fog started to lift on September 1, when I saw this amazing vintage fast food prize on Neato Coolville's blog. Todd turned up one of the coolest items I had never seen. This is the old cartoon King from Burger King, and he's riding his Royal Motorcycle! Needless to say, I need to get myself one of those!


[The cartoon King represented Burger King from about 1972-1976. More about him on a future blog post. ]

I started to see the similarities with mine -- same crown on the side, same wheel spokes and same headlight. So I was thrilled to assume that mine was also from Burger King, but a different character. A character who I did not remember. Mine was clearly not the King.

From that point, the quest continued. Sadly, very little information was available about the cartoon King, and certainly nothing about any secondary characters in that BK ad campaign.

Finally, I found this vintage Burger King commercial with the cartoon King, circa 1973, on YouTube! (Click to play the commercial within this page.)

In the commercial, we see a man with a long beard, long nose and double pointed fast food employee hat. He's working the counter at Burger King. The King himself identifies the man as "my former Magician"!

I feel pretty certain now that my motorcycle is indeed the Magician from Burger King, an obscure secondary character, who may be a little less obscure now.

Thanks to Todd at Neato Coolville and whoever found and posted that glorious commercial to YouTube, finally I think the mystery is solved!

Please post comments to let me know if you think I've got this right, and if you know any more information about this Magician or perhaps other motorcycles given away in this Burger King promotion.

Hopefully more vintage Burger King commercials and toys will surface to reveal more.

Problems posting comments?

Since switching to the Beta Blogger template -- which, by the way, I really really like -- I've discovered that there are problems posting comments.

If you have a Blogger account but have not upgraded to the Beta, you may not be able to post comments to a Beta blog like mine. The opposite also appears to be true, as I've not been able to post comments to some non-Beta blogs with my Beta account. Hopefully Google/Blogger will get this all worked out.

*** Update 09/23/06 -- The beta bug is fixed. Everyone should be able to post comments now. ***

Pizza Hut Pete

The man with the floating hat is none other than Pizza Hut Pete. As far as I can tell, he started making pies for the pizza giant around 1965 and virtually disappeared in the mid-1980s.

[While he was named Pete, I've also seen him referred to on Pizza Hut paper items simply as "Pizza Man".]

The bag puppet shown here was probably given away in the early 1970s. I love how he is simultaneously giving kids the "thumbs up" and the "OK" sign to assure us that all is well at his pizza joint.

Pete's design caught my attention at an early age; most notably his floating hat, which usually hovered just above his head, and of course the fact that he had two eyes on the same side of his nose. Yes, Pete was always a beacon for classy pizza and good times.

I fondly remember having family meals out at the Pizza Hut in the 1970s and working the activities on the back of the kids' placemats. Here is one such placemat in which Pete shows the steps to make the perfect pie.




Here is the second edition of the Pete bag puppet from the late 1970s. Pete has a more refined or cleaned-up look here.

I've tried to compile a list of Pizza Hut Pete premiums and collectibles that I've seen over the years. Here's what I've come up with so far:

• Bag puppets (2 different)
• Coleco toy oven
• Pizza Hut kids playhouse
• Pete plastic bank
• Stickers (at least 4 different)
• Matchbooks (at least 4 different designs)
• Server set (toy dishes)
• Key ring
• Playing cards
• Glasses & mugs
• Pinback buttons (2 different)
• Uniform patch
• Pete enameled pin (newer/retro)
• Pete plush doll
• Paper placemats (various, with activities on back)
• Postcards (Pete featured on store sign or roof)
• Swizzle stick
• Store "Closed" sign
• Pocket menu

Here are a few of the above-mentioned items.



Pete seems to be another advertising icon that is being lost to history, though he'll make an occasional appearance in an eBay auction. Pizza Hut doesn't seem to acknowledge him anymore, and there's not really anything written about him on the web... until now!

But Pete does live on, certainly in the memories of many kids of the '70s who, like me, remember gathering the family around a pepperoni pie, doodling on placemat activities and pondering the laws of gravity and that funny little pizza man under the hat.

New Template

I'm testing out the new beta templates and design features here on Blogger. So far so good. The beta allows for much more horizontal space than before -- something that always bugged me.

I love the collapsible archive index over on the right side.

I'll be posting some more fun stuff again very soon.

Oh, and here's my new waffle symbol [:::]

Big Yella from Corn Pops

Yee-haa! The man with the big yellow hat is "Big Yella", the cool cowboy from Kelloggs Sugar Corn Pops cereal.

For a relatively brief stint, Big Yella rustled up some tasty Sugar Corn Pops for kids of all ages. He was featured on the boxes and premiums from 1977 to 1980. Before Big Yella, there was a "live", unanimated cowboy character. After Big Yella in 1980 we were treated to Poppy the Porcupine for a few years.

The box pictured here is from late in 1977 and features the True West trading card premiums.

I have not been able to locate copies of any TV commercials with Big Yella, though I do remember them from the time. If anyone knows of some, please let me know!

Big Yella was created by the Leo Burnett advertising agency, who created many memorable commercial characters back then. I was fortunate enough to acquire an original piece of artwork of Big Yella. This drawing was done by Bill Mackley for "Jean" -- and I believe that both of them worked at Leo Burnett. This is one of several that I acquired -- the others being different characters created by that agency, all done for Jean. I can only guess that Jean was leaving the company and Bill gave these as a parting gift.




















Cereal premiums featuring Big Yella are out there, and relatively in short supply it seems. Here's an incomplete list of prizes that I have or have seen:

• "Bull Dozer Bike" Sticker
• Notebook Tab Divider Stickers
• Beach Ball
• School Subjects Paper Bookmarks (at least 8 different)
• Drinking Glass
• Heat Transfer Glitter Iron-On
• School Bus Pencil Box (with other Kellogg's characters)
• Big Puzzles (at least 3 different, with other Kellogg's characters)
• "I like everything Big & Yella" Poster
• Music Poster (with Dig'em the frog)
• Rub-Ons (at least 3 different, with other Kellogg's characters; Canadian)
• Window Cling-On "Sticker" (2 different)
  
• Yo-Yo
• Light Switch Sticker
  
• "Best Looking Of The Lot" Sticker
• Bike Reflector (Stick Up For Breakfast promotion)
  
• Tube Socks
• T-Shirt (mail-away offer)
  
• Bendy Figure

In my opinion, one of the best cereal prizes ever is this wonderful bendy figure of Big Yella.





Probably the oddest Big Yella prize has to be this pair of tube socks, which must have been a mail-away item.
Big Yella rode off into the sunset in 1980 and hasn't been heard from since. Happy Trails, Big Yella! We miss you.

Save Fruit Pie The Magician!

Fruit Pie The Magician has been removed from the Hostess Fruit Pie wrappers. This is really a shame.

Fruit Pie The Magician was created in 1973 by artist Don Duga to represent Hostess Fruit Pies. Hostess snack cakes had some great characters back in the '70s like Twinkie The Kid, King Ding Dong, Captain Cup Cake, Chief Big Wheels and more. Together, those characters made some memorable commercials.

Here's one of the last salvaged Fruit Pie wrappers with the Magician himself on it.


Check out the website to Save Fruit Pie The Magician. Maybe we can complain enough to get Hostess to bring him back.

As of 2006, the new Fruit Pie wrappers have a new design, and have just lost their magic.

Here's a t-shirt iron-on from 1981.




















More talk about Hostess characters coming in the future...