Friends, I will admit that I perhaps think about things like cereal and snack food mascots a little more than the average person – for example I have three collector’s boxes of the General Mills Monster cereals on display in my curio cabinet. In the case of Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and of course Boo Berry – I love their overall design and obvious connections to the classic Universal Monster films I cherish so much. While those trio – since sadly Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy are missing in action these days – are still my favorite there are a handful of other food related mascots that I fondly recall. I was always a fan of Lucky the Leprechaun, the Quik Bunny, Kool-Aid Man, Ernest the Keebler Elf, as well as Twinkie the Kid and Fruit Pie the Magician to name a few. In particular I was always a fond of Fruit Pie the Magician as nearly every morning when I was very young, my Father would take me down to the local gas station before he headed to work so I could buy a Hostess fruit pie for breakfast. Something about that smiling character with his top hat, cape and magic wand conjuring up tasty fruit pie snacks made me smile. Reading online it appears that the character was introduced as the Hostess fruit pie mascot back in 1973 – with the Western attire wearing Twinkie the Kid beating him to the punch two years earlier.
Now there were other Hostess mascots introduced around the same time as Twinkie the Kid – those were Captain Cupcake who was the chosen mascot for Hostess Cupcakes and Chauncey Choco-dile for Chocodiles (chocolate covered Twinkies). In addition the mascot for Hostess Ho Hos was Happy Ho Ho the Archer as well as Chief Big Wheels for the orange or chocolate flavored cupcakes, and last but not least was Hostess Ding Dong’s royal King Ding Dong. As I understand it – all of the mascots in the animated commercials were voiced by none other than Alan Swift (The Howdy Doody Show, Underdog).
As a matter of fact – Twinkie the Kid, Captain Cupcake, Fruit Pie the Magician, and King Ding Dong have been give the Funko Pop! treatment in the last few years – so they’ve not completely faded from the pop culture consciousness. Did you know though the original designs though for the mascots were handled by Don Duga? The name might not sound familiar to you but I promise you’ve seen his work before – he was a co-founder of Polestar Studios along with Irra Verbisky and produced numerous animated segments for Sesame Street in addition to working with Rankin and Bass on the likes of The Last Unicorn and Frosty the Snowman.
Pop Culture Retrorama 