Every so often Dopers tend to ask “whatever happened to…?” questions regarding consumer products like Funny Face Drink mix or Screaming Yellow Zonkers. The answer of course, is, those products stopped making enough money for the producer, therefore they dropped them.
But…
Time goes on, and generations are replaced. If a product at one time made money, then interest waned, why don’t manufactures try again after so many years?
My example of Funny Face drink mix (like Kool Aid, only more fun). At one time it was a huge seller. Then sales dropped, and the product was discontinued. That was 30 years ago. No kid today ever heard of it. Why don’t the manufactures of that try again with this generation.
There are a lot of products that were discontinued years ago (and not replaced by similar products). Why don’t companies say, “hey, this worked before, then people bored of it, but that was 30 years ago. Let’s try it again!”
Wouldn’t that be easier (and cheaper) than trying to come up with brand new products? The current generation (and their kids) have never heard of Funny Face, Zonkers, Spoon Candy, 1-2-3 geletin, Crazy Car, Thick-n-Frosty,Sir Grape Fellow, Etc… Why not recycle these products?
You are basicly arguing why names become lame after a while.
Funny face drink mix never disapeared. No more than oxygen did.
I believe the same vile crap is being sold as “crystal lite” nowadays.
Screaming yellow zonkers? Ive seen that stupid brand name at stores within the year.
Fact is the same products have been introduced, over and over again. What you remember as an original is most likely another copy of what was probably a pathetic product to begin with.
I think the problem is that the other product came along, was better, and threw the original out of the marketplace. Now companies, if they want to revive the “original,” must compete against the behemoth. To the kids, this is an unknown product and they must now choose between it and the stuff they normally buy and love. To the parents, it’ll be, “oh, I remember that. I stopped buying it years ago because X was better.”
Maybe it’s not that difficult though. Maybe parents have nostalgia overrule their previous opinion. Throw some cartoon bears on the carton and stick a prize inside and you can sell kids anything.
Nope - Crystal Lite is made with Nutrasweet (and always has been), which definitely wasn’t around when they made Funny Face. Choo Choo Cherry and Goofy Grape are the only flavors I can remember, and I had Goofy Grape glass when I was a kid.
Weren’t “Screaming Yellow Zonkers” named based on something from the Beatles “Yellow Submarine” movie?
Sometimes things don’t come back because it’s impossible to recreate them. For instance, for many years, you could buy Leiderkrantz cheese. Eventually Borden stopped making it, and the recipe is now lost (and it can’t be recreated, since the original cheese took its character from a bacterium that lived in the cheese factory, and no one knows exactly what bacterium that was).
On general terms, it’s easier to create something new simply because there are no expectations. If you bring back something, people who remember the brand may buy it out of nostalgia, but if there were enough people like that, the brand wouldn’t have gone out of business in the first place. People who hated the old produce won’t buy the new, and people who have never heard of it, will buy depending on the advertising. Now, if you give it a new name, you can get all three groups (this was done when the renamed the Forever Yours candy bar “Milky Way Dark”).