… and pour melted chocolate over me, and I’ll be your Penguin: p … p … p … pick me up!
I’m a McVitie’s Penguin biscuit bar, and I’m all yours:
(#1)
Chris Ambidge was in a UK food import shop in Toronto this week (for Twiglets, piccalilli, Rose’s lime marmalade (AZ swoons here) and also p-p-p-picked up an eight-pack of Penguins — chocolate-covered biscuit bars, with a chocolate cream filling — something he’s loved since primary schooldays, and now they also remind him of me. Because penguins.
From Wikipedia:
Penguins are milk chocolate covered biscuit bars filled with chocolate cream …
(#2)
They were first produced in 1932 by William McDonald, a biscuit manufacturer in Glasgow, and became a McVitie’s brand when McDonald joined with McVitie’s and Price, MacFarlane Lang & Co and Crawford to form United Biscuits in 1948. Each wrapper has a joke or “funny fact” printed on it and imaginative, often humorous designs featuring penguins that often pastiche famous works of art.
During the 1980s the Penguin brand became known for their television advertising slogan “P…P…P…Pick up a Penguin!”
(#3) One of the pick-up ad(vert)s
… The Tim Tam produced by Arnott’s in Australia was based on the Penguin. Occasional media references include tongue-in-cheek debates over which is the superior biscuit.
… There are four variations of the biscuit: Chocolate, Orange, Mint, Toffee
Over the years the company has offered various spin-off Penguin merchandise, for example this ceramic Penguin biscuit jar:
(#4)
Then, in 1996 McVitie’s introduced a switch on the “P…P…P…Pick up a Penguin!” slogan: “P…P…P…Pick up a Person!:
(#5) A screen shot from the ad, showing a McVitie’s Person biscuit bar
The ad:
(#6)
December 20, 2022 at 10:03 pm |
Here in the UK, we had Penguin biscuits all the time as a kid. Every week get a pack shopping and open them into a tub in the fridge and eat throughout the week.
In 1999, one week when I opened the fridge I could see through the plastic tub one of the Penguin bars said “Person” instead. Didn’t think anything of it, I thought it was just like those recent Snickers bars that said Numpty etc on them.
Only a few days later to see on the TV a Penguin bar advert declaring to viewers that You could win xxxx if you find a Person bar in your pack!
To which my sister piped up “I had one!”
“Well where is it now?”
“In the bin!”
Only to find the bins had gone out the previous morning.
So that was that.
We never found a Person bar again.
To make it worse, that advert continued playing and we had to suffer every single time it came on. We could only look down in a never-speak-of-this-again kind of way.
Actually, you remember that Simpsons episode when Homer became an inventor like Thomas Edison and it ended with him sitting back in that chair with extra legs he made, silently fuming as others took the credit?
Yeah it was like that.