Bosco Ad Featuring Donald Duck Glass – May 27, 1937

Back in 2014 (here), I wrote about how as kids we used to collect Pepsi cartoon character glasses at some of the fast food restaurants during the early 1970s. Locally, both Arby's and Hardee's offered Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warner Brothers cartoon menagerie on collectible glasses (that usually met their Waterloo in the Brady dishwasher).

Well, putting popular cartoon characters on glasses really wasn't anything new back then, judging by the above ad. It ran in the May 27, 1937 Lorain Journal and promoted a free Donald Duck drinking glass with the purchase of a jar of Bosco from your grocer.

Here's a photo (below) of one of those Bosco glasses emblazoned with the irascible sailor-suited waterfowl, courtesy of theglassjunkie.com.

(I recently discussed Donald Duck with the one of the customer service reps here at work. Her one-year-old son really likes Mickey Mouse. I told her that when he got a little older he would probably switch his allegiance to Donald Duck, who is much funnier and more interesting since he was much more of a jerk in his films.)

Anyway, the ad is also interesting since it promotes Bosco, the "milk amplifier," which I had no idea had been around so long. We had drank Bosco as kids in our house, and I associate a bear with the product for some long-forgotten reason. 

I don't remember this commercial featuring the Bosco Bear, but it's pretty cute anyway.

Although I remember drinking Bosco, we soon moved over to Nestlé Quick, which had (and still has) the rabbit on it. This is how I remember the product looking (below). I never understood that strawberry sitting on his head, though.

Courtesy of Gregg Koenig's flick river.com page