Quick! When you think of cereal, who says, “Theeey’re great!” Who’s the suave yet finicky cat peddling Nine Lives? The patch-eyed comic punk selling gum? The creepy yet charitable fast food clown? If you answered Tony the Tiger, Morris the Cat, Bazooka Joe, and Ronald McDonald, you’ll love the Mr. Product books, by product design aficionado Warren Dotz (author of Dog Food for Thought and Cat Food for Thought, also reviewed on Wink).
Associating products with characters started off in the 1800s with simple easily-recognized trademarks (for instance, Quaker Oats, whose original trademark in 1877 was “a lean and austere Quaker holding a scroll that displayed the word “Pure”). But these simple trademarks soon evolved into product characters with full-on personalities, many of whom starred in their own comic books and T.V. commercials.
Meet Mr. Product Volume 1 and Mr. Product Volume 2 by advertising art historian Warren Dotz are packed with advertising’s most recognizable product mascots, spanning around 60 years between the two books (Volume 1 covers 1920s-1970s while Volume 2 focuses on 1960-1985). Each book starts off with a nice bit of “spokes-characters” history, followed by page after page of colorful, whimsical, deliciously designed ads that have lured us suckers, er, consumers to buy their products for decades. It's interesting that both volumes were released on the same day – each with the same amount of pages – and I'm not sure why, as they could both have been seamlessly packaged within the same covers. But they do make a cute pair.
