Fat Betty’s Bugles on Mad Men? Only the Tip of the Amazing 60s Junk Food Iceberg!

Ah, poor fat Betty Francis, sitting alone in twilit Gothic gloom munching on Bugles during last night’s Mad Men. Such period-specific pathos! For as you may or may not know, Bugles were the hip new snack food of 1966, an attempt to gather the decade’s turbulent energies and channel them into a fried corn-based product with now-generation marketing—in the mid-60s, even food was no longer “uptight.”

I am the exact same age as Bobby Draper (and yes, my father was dead when I turned 40), so I believe I am uniquely qualified to write about the amazing junk food of the 1960s. It was an era when processed foods were no longer content merely to replicate actual foods but instead aspired to have senses of humor or embody youthfulness—tasty and symbolic in equal measure.

Perhaps we will see these other fine products used as counterpoints to Betty’s soul-dead despair in upcoming episodes of Mad Men :

Whistles and Daisys. Bugles were introduced in by General Mills in 1966 as one-third of a corn-based snack triumvirate with pop-art-inspired geometric shapes. “All three seem to be aimed at the teenage market,” the New York Times noted. Bugles, happily, are still with us, but Whistles, which were cheese-flavored tubes, sort of like rigatoni, and the more mysterious Daisys, which had a flavor like “popovers,” “a bland corn mixture,” or “a new taste,” depending on which account you believe, disappeared somewhere around the time the Prince Valiant haircuts did. Daisys have receded in my own memory, too, if I ever knew them at all, but I can still summon the toothsome, cheddary crunch of a Whistle. But it was clear even then, to my 7-year-old palate, that Bugles were the winner, as history has proved. (In a rare historical mistake, last night’s Mad Men depicted Betty eating Bugles in the summer of 1966, but according to period news accounts, Bugles, Whistles, and Daisys had been test-marketed in six cities in the winter of 1965-66, but weren’t available nationwide, including in the New York area, until the fall of 1966. Possible explanation: Henry Francis’s political work took him to Syracuse or Buffalo, two of the test market cities, and he brought a box back?)

Banana Wackies. Another winner from General Mills, introduced in 1965, this was a cereal with banana-flavored marshmallow bits (or “marbits,” which I believe is the cereal industry’s preferred term). As far as I know, this was only the second cereal ever made with marshmallows, following Lucky Charms, which my parents would never buy—they drew a nutritional line that excluded cereals with marshmallows but included Frosted Pop Tarts—but for some reason they bought us a single box of Banana Wackies. Irony? Risky lifestyle experimentation? Not my parents; this is one of those mysteries that will never be solved, as is also the case with Banana Wackies. I remember not knowing if I liked this cereal or not—it was gross, but was it gross in a good way?—and that ambivalence has stayed with me; perhaps this was my first experience with the kind of deliberate obscurity I now find so compelling on Mad Men itself. This fabulous commercial, which suggests the first trace of psychedelia creeping into children’s advertising, reminds us that that the oat-based grain bits in Banana Wackies were known as “gloops” and “glots.” (And I’d like to see some copywriter try to get that by Don.)