13 Brands That Ruled Yesteryear, Remember Brylcreem's 'little dab'? From hair pomade to sugary cereal, here are some products that earlier generations absolutely adored.
Legends of the past
There was a time when Budweiser wasn't the "King Of Beers." As the Brewers Association craft beer industry group points out, around the time Budweiser was introduced in the United States by Anheuser-Busch in 1876, there were more than 2,000 breweries across the country. Brands such as Schlitz, Falstaff, Pabst and Ballantine stood on even ground with their beechwood-aged rival.
Industry consolidation and Anheuser-Busch's growth put an end to all of that. By 1988, Bud accounted for one out of every four beers sold in the U.S. at the time.
Dominance is rarely permanent, as some fading brands know all too well. The marketplace is littered with products and institutions that were once at the top of their industries and No. 1 in America's hearts. Relegated to the dusty shelf of nostalgia, the following brands serve as examples of how time can knock even the mightiest mainstays off their thrones.
Big Boy
Best known for its cowlick-haired, overalls-wearing statue of a boy holding a double-decker cheeseburger on a plate -- the same statue that Dr. Evil used as a spacecraft during the "Austin Powers" film series -- the chain known first as Bob's Big Boy, shortened later to Big Boy, has a complicated tale considering its humble beginnings.
Started as the Bob's Pantry Drive-In in Glendale, Calif., the chain took its name from the Big Boy burger sandwich on its mascot's plate.
The character evolved into its current incarnation in 1956 and was popular enough to warrant its own comic book by the time Big Boy began spreading across the U.S. While one of the first restaurants to franchise locations, Big Boy had a tough time standardizing its franchisees' menus and even their franchise fees, with some paying as little as $1 a year for the rights.
The sheer size of the chain drew interest from Marriott (MAR), which bought the company in 1967, but the continued fracturing of the Big Boy brand into chains such as Eat 'N' Park and Shoney's in the late '70s and early '80s was taking its toll. While there were more than 1,000 Big Boy restaurants at the chain's peak in 1979, increased pressure from more standardized fast-food chains such as McDonald's (MCD), Burger King (BKW) and Wendy's (WEN) helped turn America away from the drive-in and toward the drive-thru. As the Big Mac pummeled the Big Boy, Marriott sold off the brand to a large group of franchise operators in 1987 and the whole works went bankrupt in 2000.
Today, there are fewer than 250 Big Boy locations remaining, but the quirks that tore the chain asunder in the first place remain. While all locations exist under one parent company, they're subdivided into Bob's Big Boy and Frisch's Big Boy, with different branding, websites, menus and even Big Boy mascots. You know who doesn't have time to sort all of that out? Americans who have more clear-cut options.
Pall Mall
For Americans who've ever wondered why the cigarettes smoked abroad seem so small compared to their favorites back home, thank Pall Mall.
Created by English manufacturers Butler & Butler in 1899, it took its moniker from a popular London street of the same name and was sold as a pack of upper-class smokes. When American Tobacco took over the brand in 1907, it was determined that such frou-frou European sensibilities wouldn't fly in the states. Instead, the company used Pall Mall as its testing ground for "king-size" cigarettes, which increased their length to the 85 millimeters that are now standard for U.S. cigarettes.
By 1960, it was the No. 1 cigarette brand in America. That reign would only last for six years, as Winston took over the top spot and began the trend toward more masculine cigarette marketing. That left the relatively effete Pall Mall adrift among a cloud of competitors.
By 1994, the brand had fallen so far that it was packaged with former heavy hitter and "Mad Men" favorite Lucky Strike and sold to Brown & Williamson Tobacco. That was only four years before the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement that would gut the cigarette industry and leave its brands flailing.
As a result, Brown & Williamson merged with R.J. Reynolds in 2004. Instead of drowning in Reynolds' huge portfolio, though, Pall Mall re-emerged as a lower-priced alternative to other premium cigarettes and rode the recession from a 2% share of the cigarette market in 2006 to a nearly 8% share by 2010. It is now Reynolds' most popular brand, and third behind Philip Morris' (PM) Marlboro and Lorillard's (LO) Newport brands.
Tab soda
If you watch "Back To The Future" today, there are a couple circa-1985 gags that have held up about as well as Marty McFly's vest. The most jarring is Michael J. Fox going into a 1955 soda fountain and ordering a Tab.
That's a tough reference for even the most nostalgic '80s babies today, especially considering that Tab was designed specifically to be inoffensive and gastronomically transient. When Coca-Cola (KO) first introduced it as a competitor to Royal Crown Co.'s Diet Rite in 1963, it had an IBM computer pluck its name from a 250,000-word list of four-letter words with one vowel (no, we're guessing that one wasn't included), and later shortened Tabb to Tab.
It was well-received, but it replaced sugar with cyclamate, which was found to cause bladder cancer and decreased fertility rates. When the Food and Drug Administration banned cyclamate in 1969, Coca-Cola replaced it with saccharin -- commonly known as the key ingredient in the sweetener Sweet'N Low. While the FDA mulled a ban on that, Coca-Cola expanded Tab's lineup to include lemon-lime, root beer and orange flavors.
Tired of playing games with ingredients and looking for something more strongly associated with its key brand, Coca-Cola launched Diet Coke in 1982 and replaced saccharin with aspartame-based NutraSweet in 1983. While Tab hung on throughout the '80s, Diet Coke's NutraSweet had a less harsh taste than Tab's saccharin.
Today, Tab gets little distribution outside the United States and Coca-Cola produces only 3 million cases or so of it annually. With the 30th anniversary of "Back To The Future" only two years away, Tab has become just as much as an anachronism today as Texaco men, The Honeymooners and "Earth Angel" were in 1985.
Alpha-Bits
There was a time when sugar wasn't the enemy of children and their breakfasts, but a vital portion of it. Kellogg's Honey Smacks first entered American bowls as Sugar Smacks, while Post's Golden Crisp originally paired with Saturday morning cartoons as Sugar Crisp -- complete with a Sugar Bear mascot.
Father of seven Thomas M. Quigley didn't think it would be so bad to use some of that sugar "frosting" on letters of the alphabet when he pitched the idea to his bosses at Post Cereals. Alpha-Bits launched in 1958 and later included Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 among their pitchmen. There was even a version of the sugary corn letters introduced in 1990 that incorporated marshmallow vowels.
But the nutritional tide was turning, and parents began to frown on sugary cereals specifically targeted toward children. Alpha-Bits got the worst of their wrath, and the sweet corn alphabet was yanked from shelves in 2006. It took two years for the cereal to reappear, this time with characters from the educational PBS cartoon "Super Why!" as its mascots. Post has since toned down the sweet talk and has highlighted some of the nutritional benefits of Alpha-Bits, but their hiatus coupled with nonstop cereal scrutiny spells bad things for Alpha-Bits' floating text.
Prell
Americans not only liked to clean their hair with Nickelodeon-grade green slime, but they also enjoyed searing their eyeballs with a shampoo that could have doubled as a crowd-control device.
That was the Prell experience in a nutshell in the 1970s. You got a glass bottle of green slime that looked as if it was stolen from the "Ghostbusters" prop shed, you put it on your hair and then you either rinsed it out as quickly as possible or basically Maced yourself.
This was a time when brands such as Prell, Head & Shoulders and Denorex were prized not for sweet scents or the soft hair they left behind, but for the tingling, burning sensation of their chemical formulas that led Americans to believe that they were incinerating dirt and contaminants.
We don't need to tell you that this doesn't play well in an Herbal Essences world, where a shampoo not only needs to make you feel as if you've just cannonballed into a tropical tea bath, but perhaps as if you were seduced by it as well. By 1999, Procter & Gamble (PG) decided a half century of its bathroom chemical warfare was enough and sold off Prell to Prestige Brands International. When that group grew weary of Prell, it foisted it off on Ultimark Products 10 years later.
Prell is a shell of its former brand at best and a bleary-eyed, burning memory for older consumers at worst.
Max Factor
It's been more than 30 years since Kim Carnes released the song "Bette Davis Eyes" and 24 years since Bette Davis herself died. How important, exactly, was the fact that she wore a certain brand of makeup?
That was the question facing Procter & Gamble (PG) in 2009, when it was deciding what to do with the Max Factor brand once worn by Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland. The line spawned cake makeup and was the toast of Hollywood in the early 20th century, but was discontinued in the U.S. by P&G in 2009.
Though Max Factor products looked great on Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow, they weren't getting much room in the makeup cases of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Queen Latifah or Drew Barrymore -- who push P&G's competing Cover Girl cosmetics.
That rival brand was perhaps the biggest reason Max Factor foundered after P&G purchased it from Revlon in 1991. It allowed Max Factor's core constituency to age and shrink while its competition's spokeswomen could be mistaken for the grandchildren of its most famous fans. The Max Factor brand still lives on, but like Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and other stars who wore it, it has become a faded Hollywood memory. It is the Norma Desmond of the cosmetics industry's "Sunset Boulevard" and the only way it's getting a close-up from Cecile B. DeMille again is when it joins him.
Studebaker
Take a long, hard look at Tesla Motors (TSLA) and just consider for a moment how impressive it has to be to survive in the current auto climate. If you're wondering why so many independent automakers have come or gone before it, let Studebaker provide your answer.
Founded in 1852 as a family blacksmith house and carriage company, Studebaker slowly became the largest carriage maker in the world -- even making the beer-carrying vehicles pulled by Budweiser Clydesdales to this day. In 1897, however, the firm turned its attention to automobiles and began rolling out Studebaker Electric cars from 1902 to 1911. By partnering with other vehicle companies, it began making gasoline-powered cars and buses in 1904. By 1911, the Studebaker Corporation was born.
While the company made innovations that are auto industry standards to this day -- including the first automobile proving grounds in South Bend, Ind., in 1926 -- its biggest achievement may have been surviving the Great Depression and riding military contracts to the end of World War II. Postwar cars such as the Studebaker Starlight introduced in 1947 offered great promise, but only masked far tougher times ahead.
Feeling price pressure from both Ford (F) and General Motors (GM), Studebaker eventually merged with fellow independent automaker Packard in the early 1950s in an attempt to survive. Instead, it began bleeding money, sold off its Packard plants to Chrysler and ceded space on its showroom floors to Mercedes-Benz when it became the first American company to import the German automobiles.
Pressure from the Big Three forced the company to close its South Bend plant in 1963 and, eventually, cease operations altogether in 1966. While one of its spinoff companies eventually became AM General -- best known for producing the Humvee -- even the commercial version of that vehicle has gone the way of the Studebaker.
Turkish Taffy
While some Turkish restaurants still sell the sweet, rose-flavored confection known as Turkish Delight, you have to go pretty far back into the archives to find Turkish Taffy.
Invented by Victor Bonomo, whose father had emigrated from Turkey and founded the Bonomo Company in Coney Island in 1897, the not-at-all Turkish nougaty treat consisted of a batter of corn syrup. It was a big hit for Woolworth's stores, which used to lay it on the candy counter in large sheets and break it up for customers with a hammer upon request. It was later sold in bars that customers could relish breaking themselves.
Remarkably, it was still soft when chewed and was such a favorite among America's youth that it was one of the first candies advertised on television after NBC signed it on as a sponsor in 1949. The next 40 years or so were not kind, however, as it became an old-folks' treat on par with ribbon candy or Werther's Original.
Tootsie Roll bought it in 1980 and thought so little of it that it discontinued the brand nine years later. Keep in mind, this is the Tootsie Roll that has been making the exact same chocolate chews since the late 1800s and has kept Charms Blow Pops alive since 1988. While Turkish Taffy eventually resurfaced in 2010, it did so as a niche product on a candy nostalgia site. That's a long way from NBC.
F.W. Woolworth
Every time you step into a Foot Locker (FL), you're stepping into all that remains of the great Woolworth brand of five-cent stores that were once ubiquitous in this country.
Sure, the Woolworth Building still stands in Lower Manhattan, but what was the largest department store chain in the world in 1979 is nonexistent today. Though the sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., during the Civil Rights Movement in 1960 led to a Woolworth's counter making its way to the Smithsonian and the Woolworth site becoming a civil rights museum, the 30 years that followed would erase Woolworth from the American retail economy.
When five-and-dime competitors couldn't knock Woolworth's out, general goods stores including Kmart, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT) began chipping away at it. By the time Woolworth closed its last stores in 1997, Wal-Mart was large enough to swoop in and take some of its bigger outlets off its hands.
While unrelated Woolworth's outlets exist in other countries, the Foot Locker spinoff is all that remains of a store than once anchored just about every other downtown and mall in America. The stores' closest cousins -- economy-driven dollar store chains such as Dollar General (DG), Family Dollar (FDO) and Dollar Tree (DLTR) -- may have the low-priced goods, but they lack the soaring skyscraper headquarters, the red-and-gold facades and anywhere to get lunch. See that slushie machine and heat-lamp pizza at your local Kmart or Target? That's your lunch counter.
Necco Wafers
The little flavored chalk circles that were first produced by the New England Confectionery Co. during the Civil War may be a bit dated, but it's way too late to make wholesale changes to them now.
First made in 1847 by English immigrant Oliver Chase and his lozenge cutter, the Necco Wafer headed south in the pockets of Union soldiers during the Civil War and first appeared on candy counters under that name in 1910. They're crisp, they're powdery and they're a bit bland, but they were produced by the Union under federal decree and garnered a strong following among veterans.
Though the company still makes Clark bars, Sweethearts and Mary Jane peanut chews, Necco Wafers are the only candy that still carries the company name and still has enough loyalists to appear in Halloween bags each year.
That's a problem when some newbie in the company wants to ditch artificial flavors and completely change the makeup of the product, as Necco did in 2009. We don't mean that they repackaged some new flavors as Necco Smoothies or Necco Chocolates; we mean that they softened up original Necco Wafers with glycerine, switched to "all-natural" flavors, dropped the lime flavor completely and left everything tasting like the candy at the counter of one of those toy stores that only sells Scandanavian wooden blocks and obscure games that look as if they were smuggled off a European freighter in the mid-'80s. For the record, the Revere, Mass., company wasn't even this particular about its product when it was based in the notoriously left-leaning People's Republic of Cambridge.
Necco die-hards, who've earned the right to be surly after spending years eating the equivalent of flavored classroom chalk, deluged the company with hate mail accusing it of ruining Necco Wafers.
Despite the marketing department's assertions to the contrary, fans believe cinnamon Necco Wafers are supposed to taste like Red Hots, lemon wafers aren't supposed to taste like lemon merengue pie and the chocolate flavor should taste absolutely nothing like cocoa. But because Necco execs, in typical Massachusetts fashion, would rather be right than helpful, the company stood by the new formula for two years as Necco Wafer sales plummeted 35%.
Necco finally went back to the original formula in 2011 and a good harrumph was had by all. Necco Wafers may not be as popular as they were when this nation was engaged in its great Civil War, but their fans aren't about to let them perish from the earth.
The $100,000 bar
This would be the equivalent of selling "Wheel of Fortune," "Jeopardy" or even "Wipeout" bars today.
Nestle (NSRGY) introduced what was then known as the $100,000 bar in 1966 to cash in on the success of game shows including "The $64,000 Question," "Twenty One" and "The Big Surprise," the latter of which had prizes ranging from $100 to $100,000. No, it wasn't named after the three-episode ABC game show series "100 Grand" -- the change to the slang "100 Grand" didn't occur until the mid-1980s.
This was also around the time that love of the chocolate, caramel and crisp rice bar reached its peak. While it still has its fans, it now seemingly exists mostly as prank fodder for radio DJs, with Sirius XM's (SIRI) "Opie & Anthony Show" using it as prize bait for an unsuspecting caller during its 1990s run in Boston. For the record, kids, when someone offers you 100 grand unsolicited, always assume they mean this candy bar.
RC Cola
The first company to offer soda in a can and to offer a diet or caffeine-free soda at all wasn't Coca-Cola (KO) or PepsiCo (PEP), but a Georgia soda pop giant known as Royal Crown.
Though the company traces its roots back to 1905, Royal Crown didn't actually produce a cola until 1934. We'll spare you the stories of RC-and-Moonpie Southern lunches and skip to the good parts where RC puts soda in a can in 1954 while Pepsi and Coke are still attaching bottle openers to vending machines.
RC dropped Diet Rite on the world in 1958 -- a full five years before Coca-Cola could pull itself together and put out saccharin-laden Tab. While it basically took a backseat to the cola wars in the 1980s, it was still beating the fizz out of Coke and Pepsi when it came to innovation.
In 1980, a full five years before Michael J. Fox name checks Pepsi Free in "Back To The Future," RC released RC 100 as the nation's first caffeine-free cola. Though its relevance was waning by 1995, it still had the good sense to see that Americans weren't all that into the new high-fructose corn syrup formulas being used by Coke and Pepsi and introduced RC Draft Cola -- a "premium" product made with the cane sugar all the cola companies were using until the New Coke fiasco of 1985. It would take Pepsi more than 20 years to offer a similar product -- Pepsi Throwback -- while Coca-Cola exiles all its cane-sugar colas to Mexico.
Unfortunately, you can be first to all of these innovations and still come in dead last. By 2000, Royal Crown was on life support and had found itself under the Snapple banner. Snapple was picked up by Cadbury Schweppes later that year and the whole works eventually became the Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS), which RC calls home today. While the soft drink industry owes it a great deal, RC Cola isn't even strong enough to be its company's flagship soda anymore.
Brylcreem
Unless you've been to your local FBI office or the Republican National Convention lately, chances are you haven't seen or, more importantly, smelled Brylcreem in a while.
The hair product of choice for men who desperately want to be a bad guy in a new "Matrix film," Brylcreem got its dubious start in 1928, when it came out of County Chemicals at the Chemico Works in Birmingham, England. Purportedly a combination of water, mineral oil and beeswax, this pomade really hit stride in the 1950s, when its "A little dab'll do ya" TV jingle hit and just about every male member of "Leave It To Beaver's" Cleaver family bulletproofed his hair with this dreck.
So how did it go from being on nearly every noteworthy head in America to a barbershop pariah shunned to the corner by Crew, Murray's, Redken and just about every other pomade this side of Dapper Dan? Richard Nixon could bear some of the blame, as a war- and scandal-weary nation saw his slicked-back coif as a reminder of bombs in Cambodia and lockpicking political operatives. But shouldn't the shimmering mane of Ronald Reagan have undone some of the damage?
While it may have made the heaping use of hair product somewhat palatable again, it certainly didn't do much to dispel the notion that the people wearing it were buttoned-up, traditionalist squares.
Even as the definition of "cool" has changed throughout the generations, the Brylcreem once associated with rebels without a cause and wild-one bikers is now the official grooming product of The Man. Buy a can, and you may as well interview for a position as university administrator or head of a particularly wonkish think tank. You're The Establishment, and that Brylcreem is keeping your hairdo nice and established.
Legends of the past
There was a time when Budweiser wasn't the "King Of Beers." As the Brewers Association craft beer industry group points out, around the time Budweiser was introduced in the United States by Anheuser-Busch in 1876, there were more than 2,000 breweries across the country. Brands such as Schlitz, Falstaff, Pabst and Ballantine stood on even ground with their beechwood-aged rival.
Industry consolidation and Anheuser-Busch's growth put an end to all of that. By 1988, Bud accounted for one out of every four beers sold in the U.S. at the time.
Dominance is rarely permanent, as some fading brands know all too well. The marketplace is littered with products and institutions that were once at the top of their industries and No. 1 in America's hearts. Relegated to the dusty shelf of nostalgia, the following brands serve as examples of how time can knock even the mightiest mainstays off their thrones.
Big Boy
Best known for its cowlick-haired, overalls-wearing statue of a boy holding a double-decker cheeseburger on a plate -- the same statue that Dr. Evil used as a spacecraft during the "Austin Powers" film series -- the chain known first as Bob's Big Boy, shortened later to Big Boy, has a complicated tale considering its humble beginnings.
Started as the Bob's Pantry Drive-In in Glendale, Calif., the chain took its name from the Big Boy burger sandwich on its mascot's plate.
The character evolved into its current incarnation in 1956 and was popular enough to warrant its own comic book by the time Big Boy began spreading across the U.S. While one of the first restaurants to franchise locations, Big Boy had a tough time standardizing its franchisees' menus and even their franchise fees, with some paying as little as $1 a year for the rights.
The sheer size of the chain drew interest from Marriott (MAR), which bought the company in 1967, but the continued fracturing of the Big Boy brand into chains such as Eat 'N' Park and Shoney's in the late '70s and early '80s was taking its toll. While there were more than 1,000 Big Boy restaurants at the chain's peak in 1979, increased pressure from more standardized fast-food chains such as McDonald's (MCD), Burger King (BKW) and Wendy's (WEN) helped turn America away from the drive-in and toward the drive-thru. As the Big Mac pummeled the Big Boy, Marriott sold off the brand to a large group of franchise operators in 1987 and the whole works went bankrupt in 2000.
Today, there are fewer than 250 Big Boy locations remaining, but the quirks that tore the chain asunder in the first place remain. While all locations exist under one parent company, they're subdivided into Bob's Big Boy and Frisch's Big Boy, with different branding, websites, menus and even Big Boy mascots. You know who doesn't have time to sort all of that out? Americans who have more clear-cut options.
Pall Mall
For Americans who've ever wondered why the cigarettes smoked abroad seem so small compared to their favorites back home, thank Pall Mall.
Created by English manufacturers Butler & Butler in 1899, it took its moniker from a popular London street of the same name and was sold as a pack of upper-class smokes. When American Tobacco took over the brand in 1907, it was determined that such frou-frou European sensibilities wouldn't fly in the states. Instead, the company used Pall Mall as its testing ground for "king-size" cigarettes, which increased their length to the 85 millimeters that are now standard for U.S. cigarettes.
By 1960, it was the No. 1 cigarette brand in America. That reign would only last for six years, as Winston took over the top spot and began the trend toward more masculine cigarette marketing. That left the relatively effete Pall Mall adrift among a cloud of competitors.
By 1994, the brand had fallen so far that it was packaged with former heavy hitter and "Mad Men" favorite Lucky Strike and sold to Brown & Williamson Tobacco. That was only four years before the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement that would gut the cigarette industry and leave its brands flailing.
As a result, Brown & Williamson merged with R.J. Reynolds in 2004. Instead of drowning in Reynolds' huge portfolio, though, Pall Mall re-emerged as a lower-priced alternative to other premium cigarettes and rode the recession from a 2% share of the cigarette market in 2006 to a nearly 8% share by 2010. It is now Reynolds' most popular brand, and third behind Philip Morris' (PM) Marlboro and Lorillard's (LO) Newport brands.
Tab soda
If you watch "Back To The Future" today, there are a couple circa-1985 gags that have held up about as well as Marty McFly's vest. The most jarring is Michael J. Fox going into a 1955 soda fountain and ordering a Tab.
That's a tough reference for even the most nostalgic '80s babies today, especially considering that Tab was designed specifically to be inoffensive and gastronomically transient. When Coca-Cola (KO) first introduced it as a competitor to Royal Crown Co.'s Diet Rite in 1963, it had an IBM computer pluck its name from a 250,000-word list of four-letter words with one vowel (no, we're guessing that one wasn't included), and later shortened Tabb to Tab.
It was well-received, but it replaced sugar with cyclamate, which was found to cause bladder cancer and decreased fertility rates. When the Food and Drug Administration banned cyclamate in 1969, Coca-Cola replaced it with saccharin -- commonly known as the key ingredient in the sweetener Sweet'N Low. While the FDA mulled a ban on that, Coca-Cola expanded Tab's lineup to include lemon-lime, root beer and orange flavors.
Tired of playing games with ingredients and looking for something more strongly associated with its key brand, Coca-Cola launched Diet Coke in 1982 and replaced saccharin with aspartame-based NutraSweet in 1983. While Tab hung on throughout the '80s, Diet Coke's NutraSweet had a less harsh taste than Tab's saccharin.
Today, Tab gets little distribution outside the United States and Coca-Cola produces only 3 million cases or so of it annually. With the 30th anniversary of "Back To The Future" only two years away, Tab has become just as much as an anachronism today as Texaco men, The Honeymooners and "Earth Angel" were in 1985.
Alpha-Bits
There was a time when sugar wasn't the enemy of children and their breakfasts, but a vital portion of it. Kellogg's Honey Smacks first entered American bowls as Sugar Smacks, while Post's Golden Crisp originally paired with Saturday morning cartoons as Sugar Crisp -- complete with a Sugar Bear mascot.
Father of seven Thomas M. Quigley didn't think it would be so bad to use some of that sugar "frosting" on letters of the alphabet when he pitched the idea to his bosses at Post Cereals. Alpha-Bits launched in 1958 and later included Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 among their pitchmen. There was even a version of the sugary corn letters introduced in 1990 that incorporated marshmallow vowels.
But the nutritional tide was turning, and parents began to frown on sugary cereals specifically targeted toward children. Alpha-Bits got the worst of their wrath, and the sweet corn alphabet was yanked from shelves in 2006. It took two years for the cereal to reappear, this time with characters from the educational PBS cartoon "Super Why!" as its mascots. Post has since toned down the sweet talk and has highlighted some of the nutritional benefits of Alpha-Bits, but their hiatus coupled with nonstop cereal scrutiny spells bad things for Alpha-Bits' floating text.
Prell
Americans not only liked to clean their hair with Nickelodeon-grade green slime, but they also enjoyed searing their eyeballs with a shampoo that could have doubled as a crowd-control device.
That was the Prell experience in a nutshell in the 1970s. You got a glass bottle of green slime that looked as if it was stolen from the "Ghostbusters" prop shed, you put it on your hair and then you either rinsed it out as quickly as possible or basically Maced yourself.
This was a time when brands such as Prell, Head & Shoulders and Denorex were prized not for sweet scents or the soft hair they left behind, but for the tingling, burning sensation of their chemical formulas that led Americans to believe that they were incinerating dirt and contaminants.
We don't need to tell you that this doesn't play well in an Herbal Essences world, where a shampoo not only needs to make you feel as if you've just cannonballed into a tropical tea bath, but perhaps as if you were seduced by it as well. By 1999, Procter & Gamble (PG) decided a half century of its bathroom chemical warfare was enough and sold off Prell to Prestige Brands International. When that group grew weary of Prell, it foisted it off on Ultimark Products 10 years later.
Prell is a shell of its former brand at best and a bleary-eyed, burning memory for older consumers at worst.
Max Factor
It's been more than 30 years since Kim Carnes released the song "Bette Davis Eyes" and 24 years since Bette Davis herself died. How important, exactly, was the fact that she wore a certain brand of makeup?
That was the question facing Procter & Gamble (PG) in 2009, when it was deciding what to do with the Max Factor brand once worn by Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland. The line spawned cake makeup and was the toast of Hollywood in the early 20th century, but was discontinued in the U.S. by P&G in 2009.
Though Max Factor products looked great on Rudolph Valentino and Clara Bow, they weren't getting much room in the makeup cases of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Queen Latifah or Drew Barrymore -- who push P&G's competing Cover Girl cosmetics.
That rival brand was perhaps the biggest reason Max Factor foundered after P&G purchased it from Revlon in 1991. It allowed Max Factor's core constituency to age and shrink while its competition's spokeswomen could be mistaken for the grandchildren of its most famous fans. The Max Factor brand still lives on, but like Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and other stars who wore it, it has become a faded Hollywood memory. It is the Norma Desmond of the cosmetics industry's "Sunset Boulevard" and the only way it's getting a close-up from Cecile B. DeMille again is when it joins him.
Studebaker
Take a long, hard look at Tesla Motors (TSLA) and just consider for a moment how impressive it has to be to survive in the current auto climate. If you're wondering why so many independent automakers have come or gone before it, let Studebaker provide your answer.
Founded in 1852 as a family blacksmith house and carriage company, Studebaker slowly became the largest carriage maker in the world -- even making the beer-carrying vehicles pulled by Budweiser Clydesdales to this day. In 1897, however, the firm turned its attention to automobiles and began rolling out Studebaker Electric cars from 1902 to 1911. By partnering with other vehicle companies, it began making gasoline-powered cars and buses in 1904. By 1911, the Studebaker Corporation was born.
While the company made innovations that are auto industry standards to this day -- including the first automobile proving grounds in South Bend, Ind., in 1926 -- its biggest achievement may have been surviving the Great Depression and riding military contracts to the end of World War II. Postwar cars such as the Studebaker Starlight introduced in 1947 offered great promise, but only masked far tougher times ahead.
Feeling price pressure from both Ford (F) and General Motors (GM), Studebaker eventually merged with fellow independent automaker Packard in the early 1950s in an attempt to survive. Instead, it began bleeding money, sold off its Packard plants to Chrysler and ceded space on its showroom floors to Mercedes-Benz when it became the first American company to import the German automobiles.
Pressure from the Big Three forced the company to close its South Bend plant in 1963 and, eventually, cease operations altogether in 1966. While one of its spinoff companies eventually became AM General -- best known for producing the Humvee -- even the commercial version of that vehicle has gone the way of the Studebaker.
Turkish Taffy
While some Turkish restaurants still sell the sweet, rose-flavored confection known as Turkish Delight, you have to go pretty far back into the archives to find Turkish Taffy.
Invented by Victor Bonomo, whose father had emigrated from Turkey and founded the Bonomo Company in Coney Island in 1897, the not-at-all Turkish nougaty treat consisted of a batter of corn syrup. It was a big hit for Woolworth's stores, which used to lay it on the candy counter in large sheets and break it up for customers with a hammer upon request. It was later sold in bars that customers could relish breaking themselves.
Remarkably, it was still soft when chewed and was such a favorite among America's youth that it was one of the first candies advertised on television after NBC signed it on as a sponsor in 1949. The next 40 years or so were not kind, however, as it became an old-folks' treat on par with ribbon candy or Werther's Original.
Tootsie Roll bought it in 1980 and thought so little of it that it discontinued the brand nine years later. Keep in mind, this is the Tootsie Roll that has been making the exact same chocolate chews since the late 1800s and has kept Charms Blow Pops alive since 1988. While Turkish Taffy eventually resurfaced in 2010, it did so as a niche product on a candy nostalgia site. That's a long way from NBC.
F.W. Woolworth
Every time you step into a Foot Locker (FL), you're stepping into all that remains of the great Woolworth brand of five-cent stores that were once ubiquitous in this country.
Sure, the Woolworth Building still stands in Lower Manhattan, but what was the largest department store chain in the world in 1979 is nonexistent today. Though the sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., during the Civil Rights Movement in 1960 led to a Woolworth's counter making its way to the Smithsonian and the Woolworth site becoming a civil rights museum, the 30 years that followed would erase Woolworth from the American retail economy.
When five-and-dime competitors couldn't knock Woolworth's out, general goods stores including Kmart, Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT) began chipping away at it. By the time Woolworth closed its last stores in 1997, Wal-Mart was large enough to swoop in and take some of its bigger outlets off its hands.
While unrelated Woolworth's outlets exist in other countries, the Foot Locker spinoff is all that remains of a store than once anchored just about every other downtown and mall in America. The stores' closest cousins -- economy-driven dollar store chains such as Dollar General (DG), Family Dollar (FDO) and Dollar Tree (DLTR) -- may have the low-priced goods, but they lack the soaring skyscraper headquarters, the red-and-gold facades and anywhere to get lunch. See that slushie machine and heat-lamp pizza at your local Kmart or Target? That's your lunch counter.
Necco Wafers
The little flavored chalk circles that were first produced by the New England Confectionery Co. during the Civil War may be a bit dated, but it's way too late to make wholesale changes to them now.
First made in 1847 by English immigrant Oliver Chase and his lozenge cutter, the Necco Wafer headed south in the pockets of Union soldiers during the Civil War and first appeared on candy counters under that name in 1910. They're crisp, they're powdery and they're a bit bland, but they were produced by the Union under federal decree and garnered a strong following among veterans.
Though the company still makes Clark bars, Sweethearts and Mary Jane peanut chews, Necco Wafers are the only candy that still carries the company name and still has enough loyalists to appear in Halloween bags each year.
That's a problem when some newbie in the company wants to ditch artificial flavors and completely change the makeup of the product, as Necco did in 2009. We don't mean that they repackaged some new flavors as Necco Smoothies or Necco Chocolates; we mean that they softened up original Necco Wafers with glycerine, switched to "all-natural" flavors, dropped the lime flavor completely and left everything tasting like the candy at the counter of one of those toy stores that only sells Scandanavian wooden blocks and obscure games that look as if they were smuggled off a European freighter in the mid-'80s. For the record, the Revere, Mass., company wasn't even this particular about its product when it was based in the notoriously left-leaning People's Republic of Cambridge.
Necco die-hards, who've earned the right to be surly after spending years eating the equivalent of flavored classroom chalk, deluged the company with hate mail accusing it of ruining Necco Wafers.
Despite the marketing department's assertions to the contrary, fans believe cinnamon Necco Wafers are supposed to taste like Red Hots, lemon wafers aren't supposed to taste like lemon merengue pie and the chocolate flavor should taste absolutely nothing like cocoa. But because Necco execs, in typical Massachusetts fashion, would rather be right than helpful, the company stood by the new formula for two years as Necco Wafer sales plummeted 35%.
Necco finally went back to the original formula in 2011 and a good harrumph was had by all. Necco Wafers may not be as popular as they were when this nation was engaged in its great Civil War, but their fans aren't about to let them perish from the earth.
The $100,000 bar
This would be the equivalent of selling "Wheel of Fortune," "Jeopardy" or even "Wipeout" bars today.
Nestle (NSRGY) introduced what was then known as the $100,000 bar in 1966 to cash in on the success of game shows including "The $64,000 Question," "Twenty One" and "The Big Surprise," the latter of which had prizes ranging from $100 to $100,000. No, it wasn't named after the three-episode ABC game show series "100 Grand" -- the change to the slang "100 Grand" didn't occur until the mid-1980s.
This was also around the time that love of the chocolate, caramel and crisp rice bar reached its peak. While it still has its fans, it now seemingly exists mostly as prank fodder for radio DJs, with Sirius XM's (SIRI) "Opie & Anthony Show" using it as prize bait for an unsuspecting caller during its 1990s run in Boston. For the record, kids, when someone offers you 100 grand unsolicited, always assume they mean this candy bar.
RC Cola
The first company to offer soda in a can and to offer a diet or caffeine-free soda at all wasn't Coca-Cola (KO) or PepsiCo (PEP), but a Georgia soda pop giant known as Royal Crown.
Though the company traces its roots back to 1905, Royal Crown didn't actually produce a cola until 1934. We'll spare you the stories of RC-and-Moonpie Southern lunches and skip to the good parts where RC puts soda in a can in 1954 while Pepsi and Coke are still attaching bottle openers to vending machines.
RC dropped Diet Rite on the world in 1958 -- a full five years before Coca-Cola could pull itself together and put out saccharin-laden Tab. While it basically took a backseat to the cola wars in the 1980s, it was still beating the fizz out of Coke and Pepsi when it came to innovation.
In 1980, a full five years before Michael J. Fox name checks Pepsi Free in "Back To The Future," RC released RC 100 as the nation's first caffeine-free cola. Though its relevance was waning by 1995, it still had the good sense to see that Americans weren't all that into the new high-fructose corn syrup formulas being used by Coke and Pepsi and introduced RC Draft Cola -- a "premium" product made with the cane sugar all the cola companies were using until the New Coke fiasco of 1985. It would take Pepsi more than 20 years to offer a similar product -- Pepsi Throwback -- while Coca-Cola exiles all its cane-sugar colas to Mexico.
Unfortunately, you can be first to all of these innovations and still come in dead last. By 2000, Royal Crown was on life support and had found itself under the Snapple banner. Snapple was picked up by Cadbury Schweppes later that year and the whole works eventually became the Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS), which RC calls home today. While the soft drink industry owes it a great deal, RC Cola isn't even strong enough to be its company's flagship soda anymore.
Brylcreem
Unless you've been to your local FBI office or the Republican National Convention lately, chances are you haven't seen or, more importantly, smelled Brylcreem in a while.
The hair product of choice for men who desperately want to be a bad guy in a new "Matrix film," Brylcreem got its dubious start in 1928, when it came out of County Chemicals at the Chemico Works in Birmingham, England. Purportedly a combination of water, mineral oil and beeswax, this pomade really hit stride in the 1950s, when its "A little dab'll do ya" TV jingle hit and just about every male member of "Leave It To Beaver's" Cleaver family bulletproofed his hair with this dreck.
So how did it go from being on nearly every noteworthy head in America to a barbershop pariah shunned to the corner by Crew, Murray's, Redken and just about every other pomade this side of Dapper Dan? Richard Nixon could bear some of the blame, as a war- and scandal-weary nation saw his slicked-back coif as a reminder of bombs in Cambodia and lockpicking political operatives. But shouldn't the shimmering mane of Ronald Reagan have undone some of the damage?
While it may have made the heaping use of hair product somewhat palatable again, it certainly didn't do much to dispel the notion that the people wearing it were buttoned-up, traditionalist squares.
Even as the definition of "cool" has changed throughout the generations, the Brylcreem once associated with rebels without a cause and wild-one bikers is now the official grooming product of The Man. Buy a can, and you may as well interview for a position as university administrator or head of a particularly wonkish think tank. You're The Establishment, and that Brylcreem is keeping your hairdo nice and established.
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