Just a quickie. I’m trying to come up with a character to introduce all my food related posts. Nothing to complicated, maybe in the vain of Timer from those 80’s Saturday morning PSA’s Time for Timer (you know that big blob of cheese with a hat and cane that “Hankered for a hunka, a slab, a slice, a chuncka, hankered for a hunka cheese”.) He also showed kids across America how to make a wagon wheel out of cheese and crackers (’cause our brains were obviously too cartoon addled to know how to put a piece of cheese on a cracker) and how to freeze juice in an ice-cube tray with plastic wrap and tooth picks to make Popsicles. Well anyway, I want to have something in that vain for my food reviews and stuff.

Well I was trying to think of odd foodstuffs that I was enamored with as a child that might make good mascots and I thought I’d mention a few since I was thinking about ’em.

First, the preferred cracker in my household growing up were (and still are) Cheez-Its. My mom and I would snack on ’em while watching movies in the wee hours of the morning and both of us coveted the much more tasty burnt Cheez-Its. You were usually guaranteed to get a few per box back in the days when anomalies still happened on the production floor. Nowadays every single Cheez-It is identical and perfectly cooked which sort of takes some of the fun out of ’em.

Next, and about the same rarity, were the fabled double pretzel sticks. You know those two pretzel sticks that were fused together and usually a lot crunchier, sometimes rocklike in density. Finding a double stick always sent me into happy convulsions and I’d be reluctant to eat it for fear of never finding another.

Last we have the rarest of the bunch, the solid clump of Cool Ranch Dorittos flavoring. Every once in a blue moon there would be this ginormous clump of Cool Ranch flavoring at the bottom of the bag that was about an inch in diameter. It was slightly moist and packed a flavor that was so intense that it had the possibility of sending one into a sodium-induced coma. I’ve only seen one of these buggers twice in my lifetime, one was of the fabled Cool Ranch variety and the other was a concentrated ball of Hot flavoring from the Golden Flakes Hot Chips variety.

Though I’m leaning toward the clump of flavoring as the mascot since it resembles Timer (as he is a weirdly shaped clump of cheese I assume) I’m thinking that it might be hard to convey that idea in simple cartoon animated style. I might just go with the double pretzel because of it being a lot more common and easy to draw. I’m also toying around with using a frozen burrito or that foil flavoring packet found in ramen noodles, though both of those were staples in my teen years and not so much nostalgia for the 80’s.