KFC was definitely not a nationally known brand in 1963. It’s exposure among the What’s My Line audiences and panelists would be minimal or non-existent. Television viewers may have recognized the product name but not necessarily the Colonel himself. I understand if you were born in 1960 or later it would seem as if KFC had been around forever, but it was just emerging in the 60s.
KFC got a boost in 1964 when one of its restaurant – with its image of the Colonel – appeared in Goldfinger.
Of course, that was after 1963.
In subsequent years KFC and/or the Colonel appeared in other movies. Sanders himself showed up in Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth and The Blast-Off Girls (both 1967). Kentucky Fried Chicken was also ostentatiously on display in the Soupy Sales movie Birds Do It (1966)
That was a very successful marketing campaign. The company wasn’t owned by Sanders anymore but the owners recognized his potential as a symbol. Nationwide marketing campaigns for a restaurant were new also, in the early 60s McDonalds was largely using local advertising. In 1963 Willard Scott became the first Ronald McDonald in what I think were only local DC area commercials. Even into the 70s KFC was contracted with the chain Gino’s which carried the fried chicken in their stores, KFC wasn’t a widely known reference yet either, internally at Gino’s it was referred to as KTYF at that time. Even born in the mid 50s the boom in nationwide marketing that began in the 60s left me with the impression certain products had existed and were well known long before hand. This has to be much worse for millennials and more recent generations who would see PCs and cellphones as existing forever, along with marketing campaigns that would have been impossible without them.
Actually, the very first franchised KFC were at Pete Harmon’s restaurants in Salt Lake City. I’ve eaten at the “World’s First KFC” in Salt Lake, as well as other Harmon’;s restaurants. Very weird experience – you might have waiters, and you can get things like carrots with your chicken.
When I first encountered KFC, it was through Gino Marchetti’s string of fast food restaurants, which served burgers as well as chicken. It was years before I learned that there were free-standing KFCs not associated with Ginos. That KFC in Goldfinger is clearly a “free-standing” KFC. It’s not a Ginos or a Hasrmon’s
And I’m on the opposite end, having my first KFC that I can remember around the turn of the 80s. Until at the very earliest the late 90s and probably more like the mid 2000s, every KFC I knew about was standalone, until the trend for multi-branded restaurants really took off and you started to have KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut combinations and the like.
I can’t really tell when I first saw a free-standing KFC. I knew they were advertised when we still lived in MD but I don’t think I ever had any there. When we moved to PA in '69 the Gino’s deal was in place and that’s where I would first get some KFC. I worked for Gino’s HQ for a while in '76, their stores weren’t franchised, all centrally owned and controlled from King of Prussia PA. It was clear they weren’t going to be around long. I’m not sure how KFC got divorced from them, but they didn’t have any Gino’s or KFC stores at all before long. The owners of Gino’s were Gino and some of his teammates and old frat buddies. They built up the business Gino started and built a chain from it. Gino was also the owner of high end restaurant in nearby Wayne PA, generally just know by the name San Francisco, apparently it also was called Gino Marchetti’s San Francisco at some point. Gino was quite a local character, I knew his son who was around my age, best to leave those stories untold. Although no longer officially having any authority at the Gino’s company he felt free to come in and talk to anyone there. Young guys like us would take a football stance and Gino would tuck his arms and run through us like we were an offensive line. There was also a crisis one day when the ‘Hamburger’ was missing, a big fiberglass hamburger model on a trailer kept out behind the building. Turns out Gino had come by and towed it away for a party somewhere.
Bear in mind that Gino’s was a regional chain; it was, as I understand it, only a presence in the mid-Atlantic area.
I grew up in the Midwest in the 1960s and 1970s; I’d not ever heard of Gino’s as a kid, but we had plenty of stand-alone Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.
Yeah, they had dreams of bigger things. They were actually betting on Rustler Steakhouse restaurants to take them over the top. I don’t recall how many restaurants they opened through the 70s but their model of ownership and central control was clearly a problem. In the chain restaurant business franchise fees were the means of success for parent companies. Interestingly, at least to me, Gino’s and it’s assets were bought out by Marriott, and Marriott had grown out of the Hot Shoppes restaurant business. Hot Shoppes was our local source for fried chicken take out when I was growing up in Maryland. Howard Johnson’s also had an ‘All you can eat’ fried chicken deal but it wasn’t great fried chicken, at least not at our local one.
Pete Harmon first opened his Harmon’s restraurant with a KFC franchise in 1952, having met SAnders at a food convention (Sanders had a restaurant in Corbin KY in the 1930s). I don’t know when Gino’s took on KFC as part of a franchise, but it was sometime before 1970.
Both Ginos and Harmons were local franchises. As the image from Goldfinger I posted shows, there were freestanding Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises by 1964.
Weird thing is, that Kentucky Fried Chicken was in Miami, FL. even though the filmmakers were using the sign to signal to the audience that the location was in Kentucky. Only some brief exteriors of Ft. Knox were actually filmed in Kentucky.
I’m on the West Coast, so I’d never heard of Gino’s and only saw freestanding KFC stores since I began seeing them (mid 60s?). But I preferred Dinah’s fried chicken … and their pancakes! Dinah’s was also in The Big Lebowski (where the nihilists had their pigs in a blanket) and a Ziggy the Pinhead cartoon.
Yes, my first (and only) enounter with Kentucky Fried Chicken in the early 1960s was at Gino’s restaurants in New Jersey. Gino’s did use Colonel Sander’s likeness in at least some of its ads and storefronts in the 60s, but not to a great extent, as I recall (they were mostly pushing burgers). Since Gino’s had expanded up to New England, this may have been the only venue for the NYC WML panel to have been familiar with KFC, but not necessarily with Sander’s image. And, fast food joints probably weren’t places the high-brow panelists frequented often anyway.
