I bought a box of Cracker Jacks today for my son. When he got half way through the box he came across “The Prize”. It was a white piece of paper that read:
Jack’s Funny Facts:
When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.
And that was it. What the hell happened to Frito-Lay? Did they go broke? Did they start to offer Profit Sharing in the Cracker Jack prize division of Frito-Lay? How else do you justify going from already lame ass toys like the Compass With Stuck Needle, or Lick-On Tattoos to a small piece of paper with stupid facts printed on it?
Man, that is the suck ass prize of the century. Cracker Jacks suck with shit prizes like that. May as well get you some Fiddle Faddle and be done with it.
You know, I also wonder what the fuck is going on with cereal toys. They were much better when I was a kid. It seems like the only “free toy” that has actually gotten better over the years is the Happy Meal toy.
Once in a box of Cracker Jacks I got a plastic car that you had to put together like a puzzle box. That was a great prize, but that was about 35 years ago. Haven’t seen a decent one since.
I remember once getting a Fortune Telling Fish from Cracker Jacks. It told your fortune by the way it curled up in the palm of your hand. The fun of that at least lasted 30 minutes or so when I was a kid.
What? I remember being disappointed when they took it down a notch from squirt-ring calibre surprises to those crappy plastic novelty lips.
That’s even crappier than Bazooka Joe comics.
I bet Litigation, or the fear thereof, took the plastic rings and toys outta Crackerjack.
However, if you happen to still have some old CrackerJack toy from the long past, you might be able to make a few bucks off it. Check this out…
I seriously doubt that the people of the future will be collecting today’s CrackerJack crap.
Ok, silly me…I thought they would have done some kind of thermal imaging to show an increase in temperature due to increased blood flow.
Maybe is’t just me. If they had said they wanted to stick a camera down my throat (or into any opening in my body) I would instantly explained that they would either need to find a new way to determine the color of my stomach or learn to live with disappointment, cause it ain’t gonna happen.
A young man of my acquaintance (okay, my son) recently complained that McD’s used to have cool toys, like real Hot Wheels cars, or Beany Babies, or–he even liked the miniature Barbie, at the time (they were out of the Hot Wheels), although he didn’t much want to admit it. And nowadays they are giving things you can’t figure out, or things that you need to collect the whole set before they even work.
That reminds me of the clip-on fake moustaches they used to have. It was a plastic moustache with two things that you had to stick up your nose to hold it in place! I think that was the first step toward lameness with the prizes. Not because the prize was so horribly bad, but because for quite a while it was the only prize you could get - every box had that damn moustache.
My son is also eight. He turns nine on Sunday. I wish his mother could see him now.
[/hijack]
The kids may not realize how much better the toys are in Happy Meals, but I think that in general, throughout the life of the product the quality of the toys has gone up.
The ONLY Happy Meal toy I remember from my childhood was basically the goofy box it came it. You could bend it, and fold it, and follow these ridiculous directions to make a Star rek “board game”. Now that was Uber-Cheesey.
