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Glorious Glass: A look back at some of my favorite collector’s glasses

Posted in advertising, comic books, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, reviews, Star Trek, Star Wars, Superman, The Flash with tags advertising, Burger King, comic books, glasses, McDonald's, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, reviews, Star Trek, Star Wars, Taco Bell on July 28, 2009 by Paxton

Fast food joints used to give out the best swag back in the day. At the top of this swag list was commemorative collector glasses. These were glasses made from ACTUAL glass (not f’n plastic) with kick ass graphics all over it usually given away as a premium with a purchase of food or drinks. Actually, collector glasses didn’t just come from fast food joints. The convenience store 7-11 as well as soda giants Coke and Pepsi both created collector’s glasses that were distributed in stores, gas stations, supermarkets and/or fast food joints. The heyday of collector glasses was in the ’70s and ’80s, but glasses were also released in the ’50s, ’60s and ’90s. Burger King recently revived the collector glass (real glass!!) tradition in May 2009 with their four glass set for the new Star Trek movie (Thanks, Michelle for finding those for me).

So without further ado, here are a bunch of my favorite collector glasses from the ’70s and ’80s. You can click any of the below images to see it bigger.

Burger King Star Wars/Empire/Jedi Glasses (1977, 1980, 1983) — The most famous of all commemorative glasses, the Star Wars Burger King collector glasses are what everyone thinks of when you mention “collector glasses”. A set of four were released for each movie. Surprisingly, it is not very hard to complete a set of all 12 as they made a crap-ton of them. Here’s a pic of the Star Wars set. Here’s a pic of the Empire Strikes Back set. Here’s a pic of the Return of the Jedi set.

Glasses for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom by 7-Up (1984) — This is probably one of the more obscure glass sets. Made by 7-Up to commemorate the second Indiana Jones movie, the glasses were only released to certain local fast food chains so getting a full set is extremely hard. I don’t care about a set, but I would love the Mola Ram glass (far right hand side) with him holding the still beating flaming heart. That is BAD ASS. A year earlier, in 1983, there was a set of three glasses created by Coca-Cola for Raiders of the Lost Ark but the set was never released. Check those glasses out here.

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Recent Fast Food ads that are hilariously AWESOME

Posted in advertising, Burger King, commercials, fast food, Jack in the Box, TV with tags advertising, Burger King, fast food, Hardee's, Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, TV commercials on July 16, 2009 by Paxton

Dude, I love fast food. I especially love fast food advertising. Fast food joints are right up there with beer/alcohol ads as being the most entertaining advertising in print or television. Here are some ads from the past few months that I have been LOVING.

Hardee’s French Dip Thickburger with French Maids – This has been a print campaign mostly for the Hardee’s French Dip Thickburger. It’s a third pound burger topped with roast beef and swiss with a cup of au jus for dipping. Sounds pretty awesome. I love that Hardees has the French maids as the mascots. That is clever and hilarious. See an intro video featuring the French maids here.

Hardee’s Biscuit Holes – I love the name of this product. Biscuit Holes. That is funny. However, Hardee’s currently has a campaign to rename them and the above video is the awesomely funny commercial that goes with it. I love seeing people trying to come up with something better than Biscuit Holes and everything they say is almost worse. See another biscuit holes commercial here (it’s just as funny).

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The Grocery Aisle of long forgotten breakfast cereals Pt II

Posted in advertising, Batman, breakfast cereal, movies, pop culture, Star Wars with tags advertising, Batman, breakfast cereal, commercials, movies, pop culture, Star Wars on April 3, 2009 by Paxton

Allrighty, here’s Part II of the discontinued cereals article. If you missed Part I, click here, my friends, otherwise, let’s walk back down Aisle 7c (Nostalgia) and take a look at some more forgotten cereals from our childhood.

Burgen, flurgen, murgen…BORK BORK BORK!! The cereal with the nonsense name. Swedish Chef was one of the more popular Muppets, so it’s not surprising he got his own cereal. This was released in the late ’80s and the commercials for it were produced by Jim Henson, right before he died. Here is one of the commercials.

What if you want a breakfast food that looks like other food? I mean, why eat donuts for breakfast when you can have cereal…shaped like donuts? Or waffles? Or ice cream? These cereals remind me of that Jim Belushi skit on SNL where he’s an Olympic athlete that eats “Little Chocolate Donuts” for breakfast. See that skit here. Here are cereals based on donuts, including a Dunkin Donuts branded cereal. I actually remember each of these.

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Kick ass alternative covers for books and movies

Posted in Back to the Future, books, Harry Potter, movies, ninjas, Penguin Classics, pop culture with tags advertising, books, movies on February 20, 2009 by Paxton

Last week I did a Weekly Geeks theme in which I discussed several alternate, foreign book covers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was cool doing the research for that and while looking around I came across several other alternate book covers that were so cool I had to share them here.

The covers we’ll look at today are different than the Harry Potter covers, though. The book covers I am going to show you today are entirely fan created by graphics artists. They create them because they are a fan of design and there are several initiatives on their blogs and in Flickr where they create these designs just to stay sharp and keep up on their designing skills. These book covers may not be real, but they rock. They look entirely professional, like some publisher actually created these and are selling them somewhere. Don’t go thinking they are available in some crazy limited edition in Uruguay, and I had to traipse my lazy, white ass through the Uruguayan jungles to find these little treasures. I didn’t, I barely want to traipse my ass to the fridge for another Girl Scout Cookie. I’m not going to Uruguay for a book. However, if these books were real, I would be very tempted to try.

So let’s start off with cover redesigns from the series I talked about last week; Harry Potter (click the images for larger versions).

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Weekly Geeks 2009-05 – Alternate book covers

Posted in books, Harry Potter, pop culture, Weekly Geeks with tags advertising, books, Harry Potter, Weekly Geeks on February 12, 2009 by Paxton

There’s a very cool blog site called Weekly Geeks. Every week it posts a theme that you can do on your own blog. I’ve somewhat passively watched this for a year or so and have debated about following along on this blog. I’ve enjoyed many of the themes they come up with and I especially enjoyed watching other bloggers execute the theme.

This week’s theme is called Judge a Book By It’s Cover. You pick one of your favorite books and talk about the different covers that have been released for that book. Here’s this week’s explanation:

This week it’s all about judging books by their covers! Pick a book–any book, really–and search out multiple book cover images for that book. They could span a decade or two (or more)…Or they could span several countries. Which cover is your favorite? Which one is your least favorite? Which one best ‘captures’ what the book is about?

the bookworm did a great job with Gone With the Wind on her blog. I thought it was a really fun idea so I’m going to try doing this myself. It’s pretty simple and easier to do than a full article, so I’m going to try it.

My pick is going to be my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I’m not going to show all the different covers, because we’d be here until I keeled over on the keyboard dead before we could finish it all, but there are some very interesting covers for this book. Here are a few of the coolest/most interesting.

This is obviously the American version of the Harry Potter 6 cover. I like all the green and the scene depicted shows Dumbledore and Harry gazing into the pensieve. A very ominous, but great looking cover.