In 1912 it didn’t cost $200 million trillion in licensing fees to Major League Baseball to print cards.
A big part of it is the chocking hazard. I remember reading an interview with a Cracker Jack executive in charge of toys. They had a plastic model of a kid’s esophagus on nthe desk, and anything that could get stuck in it was banned. That excluded a lot of the toys I got in Cracker Jack as a kid.
They weren’t great, but they weren’t awful, either. They had snap-arat-and-assemble plastic toys kinda lie the Playmobil stuff. A tiny pair of cardboard “spy” glasses with mirrors so you could se behind you. Random plastic toys. And the temporary tattoos.
Those were good. His face was highly recognizable from his many roles as a character actor, but he ended up being known as the ‘CrackerJack guy’.
“Buy me some peanuts and Crunch-n-Munch,
I don’t care if you even pack lunch…” ?
Agreed! Looking at the wiki page, those aren’t allowed in the us, though.
I’m 51, and haven’t had a box of Cracker Jacks since I was a little kid, in the late Sixties. As I recall, the “prize” was always something cheap like a small plastic whistle or a few water-on “tattoos.”
Pretty much what your kid got!
Cracker Jacks haven’t changed, but WE have. What SEEMED like cool prizes when were were 6 look pretty chintzy to us as adults
Born in 1976. I seem to remember the prizes being mostly temporary tatoos. I don’t think they had sunk to joke-on-a-slip-of-paper level yet, but they were close.
Born in 1950, loved CrackerJacks as a kid. Haven’t bought them very often since about age ten. IMO, the “prizes” were definitely more substantial back then, but the bar is set pretty low. Even to an idiot 8 year old they were underwhelming.
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I remember the magnifying glass and the top. Also a little maze and some plastic animals. I seem to remember one of those magnet put the beard on the guys face things but not sure if that was a prize to something else. We played with it for five minutes and it was either broken or shoved under the sofa cushions.
Santa used to give us a goodie bag at school every year which would always include a box of Cracker Jack. I remember a lot of temporary tattoos in the 80’s, but once I got a “weather predictor” which had a shape (I think it was a cloud) filled in with what looked like blue ink. There was a legend telling you that when the cloud turns pink, it’s going to rain (or something like that.) Mom set it on the kitchen windowsill for a long time, but I don’t ever remember the cloud changing color at all. What a ripoff!
Well, years later, I came across these things at work called humidity indicators. The blue dot turns pink at a certain relative humidity level. That’s all the Cracker Jack thing was. However, in Montana, especially in the winter, there was never enough humidity in the air to make it work.
I remember liking the arch-shaped whistles shown here, but not the ocarina-shaped ones.
In the olden days, everyone had to be told where to blow into a whistle, so in non-English-speaking locales, they were worn around the neck as amulets.
Me, I’ve always wondered why you’re buying both peanuts and Cracker Jack, when the latter has peanuts already in it.
In any event, though Crunch 'n Munch is a superior product, baseball fans won’t stand for it replacing Cracker Jack at ball games.
Sure. That’s where I got my driver’s license.
mmm
These are the Cracker Jack prizes, I remember.
I had a bag of Cracker Jacks just a few weeks ago. (Yes, it came in a bag–a pretty big bag, too.) A far cry from the stuff I used to get 45-50 years ago. Almost no peanuts. The “prize” was a picture of two mountaineers that you’re supposed to slip onto a pencil so it looks like they’re climbing the pencil. What a jolly wheeze.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Does anybody remember if the prizes from the 60s came inside a package like today’s paper envelope? (I’m not talking about the box itself, but the prize package inside.) I’m assuming not, but I can’t remember myself, perhaps because I was much too young. I’m writing a story during that takes place in 1963 and I’m still trying to figure out that tiny detail. Thanks to anybody who might have input!