Real LIVE Wacky Packages

1974 art for ScreamSicle - From the book Wacky Packages New New New published in 2010 by Abrams  

I grew up buying Wacky Packages trading card gum stickers and I putting them all over my notebooks and dresser. ( I wish I didn't) but I still love them to this day. There have been hundreds of them made over the years and there has even been a resurgence of interest in them with the Topps company putting out collections and books and new stickers!

So, I almost couldn't believe it when I saw Nestle's daringly humorous move to temporarily change their best selling candy bar packaging for a novelty halloween theme. These are real live Wacky Packages!

I must say that the Kit Kat design here is rather lame. The Kat is pretty cool but none of it says Halloween like the other three do. Below are some of the other candy bar related wacky package stickers Topps put out. But like I said there are hundreds of these little designed paintings of all sorts of products. In another post I'll put up some more of my favorites.

 1974

 1974

 1979

 1979

2006

Flavor Codes

One of my favorite all time graphic designs has got to be the Old Dutch chip bag and box packaging trim you see here. Just the trim - it's simple, bold and effective, and very festive. Old Dutch chips were the potato chip brand in my youth and today they still carry on with the best potato chip on the market. There are only three ingredients in their regular potato chip: potatoes, oil, salt. And this is the bag we are seeing here on this wall on Pacific Avenue here in Winnipeg. I don't know how long or who painted this graphic but I only noticed it this past winter. I went back last week for another photo but there has been some new activity on the wall.

Can you guess what Old Dutch product this top blue 'code" is from? How about the many other potato chip flavors Old Dutch offers. Here are BBQ, Onion & Garlic, Sour Crean & Onion and All Dressed.

Thumb In My Brain

     I don't even know what is going on here! This thing is so silly. I was into making artist trading cards at the time and this is an offshoot of some of the other cards I was making, though those were not cards either. So this was some years ago and I made about ten of them.

     Under neath the fingerprint layer is red satin that you can just barely see through the slit. I guess the idea of having just cut yourself and licking up the blood. For another product, I can just imagine having a soft candy finger with red liquid candy inside. The candy package comes with a pin or a little blade (could be plastic) that you would poke or slice into the candy finger and suck out the blood. I guess this is not too far removed from my next item we have here today... ZOMBIE POPS.  These do not exist three dimensionally.... only in your mind. Squishy black cherry eyeball with cherry licorice muscle. Mmmmm  

        

Kamels

     I love caramels so much that I started to make my own. But of course this was only an excuse to make a candy wrapper for them. At first I was going to call them Nakamels.  I devised a flat long wrapper design to house a single 2 x 4 x 3/16th of an inch piece of caramel. I wrapped a few this way, but then I started to think more upscale and cryptic, ancient and Egyptian. I had already had the Kamels lettering on this first design for no particular reason except that I always come up with options while designing something and even with this first design I obviously did not decide which name to use or I just wanted to misspell caramel so that I could use the letter K from my Nak name.

     So with the name Kamels came a whole rethinking of the package. They would be individual squares of caramel which is equivelent to 2 regular pieces that you would get with Reisens or Wherthiers. I weighed a number of these squares and on average they happened to weigh about 13 grams each - a nice cryptic number. 

     Of course with the word Kamel you get the association of a camel (I'm imagining some commercials already) and also the association of the middle east or Egypt, hence the pyramid. Now this is interesting, in Egyptian metaphysics, KA is the spirit. If you look at the ingredients on my wrapper, you will see that the last ingredient is........ 

But then I often  will get the reaction, "Ewww......what is Ka?". 

    

     It's a lot of work hand cutting the caramel, the wax paper, and tin foil to size and wrapping all the pieces. Oh but the joy, the joy of giving these away to friends is immense. And they are awsome caramels or should I say Kamels™

This is a wrapper that would house 4 individual squares.