Uninspired Anthropomorphic Mascots

A clown selling hamburgers? A lizard selling car insurance? A tiger selling sugar coated flakes of corn? How truly outrageous! Some advertisers were bold and went all in on a colorful stranger that came outta nowhere to push their products on an unsuspecting public in the hopes that we'd all "get it". Ooh a stork, that makes me want a pickle! Then, there was the less creative approach which was to assign a personality to the product itself (and by personality I mean sunglasses). This concept landed great results with the likes of Joe Camel, Mr. Peanut, and The California Raisins, but not every tangible object lends itself to arms and legs, and can sometimes come across as awkward, scary, or lazy. 

Here's a handful of merchandise, commodities, and creatures of the animal kingdom that will come to life before your very eyes, whether you want them to or not. 

- Paul

The Burger Thing

Burger King

Alongside McDonaldland, there was The Burger Kingdom, ruled by the King himself and featured The Wizard of Fries, Sir Shake-A-Lot, and this talking hamburger. But he wasn't a talking hamburger, he was a framed portrait of a hamburger that just happened to be a puppet that talked. What? Had he just been talking food like the McNugget Buddies I would've been all for it, maybe infatuated even, but instead I just feel hurt. 

The Bic Boy

Bic Ballpoint Pens

The schoolboy with the oversized tungsten carbide sphere for a head is more at home in some kinda industrial dystopia like The Wall or Metropolis, which gives him plenty of street cred in my eyes. But I can't imagine that aesthetic is the most positive sales pitch with which to learn your reading, writing, and arithmetic. Had the Bic Boy also come equipped with a razor blade and butane gas, embodying all Bic products into one colorful Swiss Army deal, he could get his own Saturday Morning cartoon!

Charlie The Tuna

StarKist

The beatnik fish from the 60s certainly adds a splash of color to the canned food aisle, but his motivations are entirely ludicrous. Charlie The Tuna only every wanted to be "chosen" by the StarKist Tuna Company -- that means homie wants to get mashed up and packed into a tin. I'm the last person to kink shame but damn. 

Tarzan Listerine

Listerine

In the early 90s Listerine employed surprisingly competent computer animation to depict the bottle doing things like fighting germs in a boxing ring or swinging on vines in the jungle to the tune of Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy". (For years I didn't know know it was a real song, just a commercial jingle.) My complaint is that, despite its bright mint green color (or sometimes pee yellow color) a Listerine bottle (particularly the label) is ugly - like a big Surgeon General's warning reconfigured into an eye chart. 

Herbie the Hot Pocket

Hot Pockets

He flies under the radar but you can still spot him somewhere on the box - though you really have to search, because Herbie the Hot Pocket is just that: a nearly-formless brown mass free of substance or personality (except, of course, for his sunglasses). Maybe his dullness is meant to be ironic, but Hot Pockets's parent company is Nestlé and last I checked they don't have a sense of humor. 

Mr. Red

The Cincinnati Reds

He's not the only mascot with a baseball for a head, but he's perhaps the first. To be fair, I don't particularly dislike anything about Mr. Red but when you hold him up against the other MLB mascots he begins to fade into the background; he's competing against birds, a dinosaur, an alien, and various bizarre monsters that look like they crawled out of the Sid and Marty Krofft workshop and onto the field. Suddenly "Baseball Man" seems kinda boring. 

Chicle Tabs

Chicle Tabs Chewing Gum

Chicle Tabs are like store brand Chiclets that you'd primarily find in vending machines where you could get a handful after dropping in a quarter. I'm sure my cynicism has something to do with when I grew up but I have a case of surfboards and shades fatigue; it's such a transparent effort to be hip that I can't help but roll my eyes. This is actually their older iteration, which comparatively was way better than how they look today...

The threatening gaze of a strung out addict

Various

Pictured here are the chilling contemporary depictions of Frosted Mini Wheats, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Apple Jacks. But this weak and obnoxious style goes beyond cereal, reaching as far as Jolly Ranchers, SpaghettiOs, and the modern portrayal of The Chicle Tabs. It's ugly, but the acceptance and persistence of this widespread trend of hackneyed artwork is uglier.