Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s Zippy, on product satire:

A festival of mangled product names.

An inventory of names and slogans in this strip:

Slayer Aspirin: Bayer Aspirin, with the slogan “shot from guns”, borrowed from Quaker Puffed Rice and Puffed Wheat, here:

Skimpy Peanut Butter: Skippy Peanut Butter

Kentucky Fried Fingers: Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC as it is now known, with the slogan “Finger lickin’ good” (here transformed into the rhyming “Chicken lickin’ good”)

Head and Boulders Shampoo: Head and Shoulders

Hipton Tea: Lipton Tea, with hippy/hippie and Lipton portmanteaud

But wait, there’s more!

Wacky Packages are not an invention of Bill Griffith’s, but an actual set of trading cards from Topps (the chewing gum people). Note the strip’s title, “Topps in its class”. From the Wikipedia entry:

Wacky Packages are a series of trading cards and stickers featuring parodies of North American consumer products. The cards were produced by the Topps Company beginning in 1967, usually in a sticker format. The original series sold for two years, and the concept proved popular enough that it has been revived every few years since. They came to be known generically as Wacky Packs, Wacky Packies, Wackies and Wackys. According to trader legend, the product parodies once outsold Topps baseball cards.

Relying on the talents of such cartoonists and comics artists as Kim Deitch, George Evans, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, Norman Saunders, Art Spiegelman, Bhob Stewart [yes, that’s spelled right] and Tom Sutton, the cards spoofed well-known brands and packaging, such as “Crust” (instead of Crest) toothpaste, “Blisterine” (instead of Listerine) and “Neveready” batteries (for Eveready batteries).

Note that Bill Griffith was one of the contributors.

One more illustration, Gulp (i.e. Gulf) Oil:

Collections of Wacky Packages images have been published, and new items continue to be produced.

This entry was posted on November 24, 2011 at 7:42 am and is filed under Language in advertising, Language play, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.