Friday, August 22, 2014

Arby's Ad for Cartoon Character Glasses – August 28, 1975

Remember those cartoon character glasses that were available at select local fast food restaurants as part of a Pepsi promotion in the 1970s?

Of course you do. You might even have tried to assemble a complete set of the glasses (dated 1973) featuring the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes gang.

But it was almost impossible to accomplish. Often the store would not have the advertised glass of the week, and instead of Daffy Duck, you might end up disappointedly with Beaky Buzzard.

And even if you did manage to get a pretty good collection going, it was very likely that it would never survive the dishwasher.

Anyway, the Arby's ad above ran in the Journal on August 28, 1975. I wonder how many people were excited to get the Cool Cat glass?

I didn't go to Arby's to get my glasses. Hardees on Oberlin Avenue had the same glasses, so that's where I went. I even remember riding bikes there with a girl I liked so she could get the (ugh) Tweetie Pie glass, since the obnoxious canary was her favorite character.

We had several sets of glasses going in the Brady household, much to my mother's annoyance, I'm sure. They certainly cluttered up the bulging kitchen cabinets for a while, until the dishwasher started inevitably thinning the inventory. Then the rest of them that survived went off with us to college. (I have no idea whatever happened to mine.)

I always liked those original 1973 glasses, though, because they featured (for the most part) the definitive designs of the characters used on posters and in advertising in the 1940s and 50s.

Here's a complete set of the 1973 glasses (below), courtesy of Etsy.

A 1976 series of glasses featuring the characters interacting with each other just weren't as well drawn, and we didn't feel as bad when those broke.

Today, several generations of kids have grown up who never watched The Bugs Bunny Show on Saturday mornings – which is too bad. But for those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s and enjoyed those cartoons, the Pepsi glasses were a lot of fun to collect.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never liked Tweety either.....

Unknown said...

I went to Arby's in Elyria to get those glasses, had about half of them. I always check them out at flea markets.

Rick Kurish said...

I never had any of the Arby's glasses, but in the 1960s and 70s I managed to collect a few free glasses through gas station fillups. I had several Cleveland Brown glasses, and a few glasses commemorating space missions.

Incredibly, the last one I had was one that commemorated the Apollo 12 mission "Return to the Moon", from about 1970, I had until I managed to finally break it about a year or so ago. I actually felt bad about breaking it!

Anonymous said...

We have hundreds of all kinds of cartoon glasses back to 73 we are working on getting them all logged to sell AsAP

Anonymous said...

I grew up in the 90s and I collected these with my grandfather and have every one in the set and still use them today I'm my 30s

Anonymous said...

Which gas station in 1973 was the first to give away the Looney Tune glasses?

Dan Brady said...

I couldn't find anything online as to a gas station chain that were part of the promotion; it seemed to be a fast food thing if Pepsi was the cola being served (such as Arby's or Hardee's).