क्रेच्कर जैक!

Cracker Jacks grew up with popcorn in America, almost. Popcorn was first noticed in 1827 and became popular around 1835-40. Cracker Jack joined the pop culture scene in 1908. Jack Norworth wrote the song, "Take me out to the ball Game" which advertised Cracker Jack(C.J.) at, well, ball games, of course! In 1912 the C.J. company introduced their famous prizes into packages and in 1918, Sailor Jack was also introduced to the scene with his dog Bingo. When World War II came around the Cracker Jack company had to stop importing their once intricate whistles and trinkets from the enemy(Germany and Japan). This brought men like C. Carey Cloud, a prize designer at the C.J. company, into the picture. Unfortunately, Cloud's story is a tragic one, he designed a line of plastic figures representing different jobs of the time and he made the mistake of designing a plastic sea captain that consumers mistook for Joseph Stalin. Or at least Stalin-esque. Poor Cloud, a designer of 102 different toys in 28 years was let go as the company tried to pull themselves out of their sticky rut. And now you know why there are only crappy scraps of paper at the bottom of your C.J. bags.

Fun fact: During the second World War Cracker Jack's prizes focused on propaganda. One prize was even a picture of a hanging Hitler. Imagine finding that in your bag of tasty popcorn at a ball game with dad!

For those of us who have never heard of Cracker Jack, it's toffee covered popcorn with some nuts. Oh, and it comes with a prize. Well, "prizes." If you want to see some of the earlier real prizes check out this site. Those aren't all of the prizes, just some examples, of course.


For those of you who are confused about my title, apparently my Blogger headings only come in Alien language now. Grin and bear it, my friends, grin and bear it.