Bazooka gum was cheap and long lasting. In the past, I thought it tasted delicious. In addition to the gum, a somewhat bizarre comic was included. I read there were thousands of different ones. Was it ever explained why Bazooka Joe had an eyepatch, like that dude in the soap opera I never watched?
But my question is about other items using the same principle as the “free comic”. Sure, cereals, fast food happy meals and caramel popcorn sometimes had prizes, but not thousands of variations of the same thing. Is there anything really comparable?
It’s been a while. Part of my point is no one I know bought the gum for the comic, though everyone read the comic. Baseball card purchasers buy it more for the card, though that oddly hard and tasteless gum was appreciated. I did not realize the card was once the sideshow.
There must be money to be made making a cocktail that tastes like Fruit Stripe (hard to.find in Canada after 1980 or so). But that delicious flavour lasted all of two minutes? WTF.
I doubt there were thousands at any given time, though. When I was working at a summer job in the math department, I bought a tub of 200+ Double Bubble gums and there were only ~10 different “Pud and his Pals” comics in the sample (all numbers vaguely remembered). We did a chi-squared test to see if they were uniformly distributed (and they probably were).
When I was a kid, I remember being excited by the figurines that came with boxes of Red Rose tea.
As a child, I thought it was weird that one of the characters wore a turtleneck sweater with the collar over his mouth. By my teens, I was mostly over it, and then I saw Devo’s Whip It video. Too weird.
