Three of my old lunchboxes survived Hurricane Katrina: Evel Knievel, Six Million Dollar Man and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I still have them. They are far from mint condition though. A little rusty around the edges, but in generally good condition.
Before those, I had the Disney character Schoolbus that was metal, but shaped like the traditional construction worker lunchbox, but painted to look like a school bus with Disney characters looking out the window. When I was in 2nd grade, I put that lunchbox down at the table and then sat down. Evil Regan made me get up because she had “saved” the seat for someone else. I got up and picked up my lunchbox without securing the top (where the thermos was stowed) the thermos fell out and when I opened it, there were shards of glass sticking every which way in my chocolate milk. Oh well…
I had a rectangular tin lunchbox with a Naval submarine theme. Matching thermos bottle, of course. I’m pretty sure it was from Aladdin, because who else was making lunchboxes in 1963?
Be nice if Aladdin would post images of all the old lunchboxes they marketed back in the day…
I had a “Men Into Space” lunchbox covered with Willy Ley designs of what a REAL spaceship should look like. Ever since I have been disappointed by what NASA produced. Where is the art? Where is the COOL? The freakin’ Space Shuttle is the freakin’ fuselage of a freakin’ DC-3 with freakin’ stub wings and freakin’ covered with freakin’ tiles like a freakin’ floor. A FLOOR! Sickening. Not a war criminal, either. NASA backed the wrong German.
This summer when we were in Washington, DC, we visited the National Air and Space Museum. At the entrance to an exhibit about aviation in WWI and its place in popular culture, they had a display of Snoopy-as-Flying-Ace artifacts. I pointed and excitedly told the young flodnaks: “Look there! I HAD THAT LUNCHBOX!”
And the best part was that two total strangers behind us chimed in: “ME TOO!”
I had a black domed lunchbox. It looked like this, except the thermos wasn’t as cool looking as the one in the picture. I was just thrilled that I wasn’t using leftover paper bags of varying sizes any more.
Being the worlds most forgetful child (I once walked home from school, putting my bag down to retie my shoelaces then walked the rest of the way home without my bag), I was relegated to a lifetime of plastic bags instead of lunchboxes.
I had one of the old-school construction type lunchboxes. I think it was made of aluminum. Later I got an insulated high-tech one (either Coleman or Rubbermaid, can’t remember.)
I had a Peanuts lunch box, if not this one then one very similar. I would have to see the back and sides but mine had several Peanuts comics there that I would remember.
This would have been purchased in the late 1960s or 1970 at the latest. I remember the glass inside the Thermos broke eventually so I had to use a different one after that.
It must have been among the last of the metal lunch boxes to be made. The thwang it made when hitting someone was gorgeous. Mine still has a perfect imprint of my brother’s head on the front.
I had a Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp lunchbox!! The box itself lasted for several years, but one year I dropped the thermos, they had glass insulation in those days
which shattered into a million shards, so I had to throw that away.
