Fisher Foods Ad With Donald Duck – 1950

Here’s another vintage ad from the Journal featuring a Walt Disney character. Only this time, it’s a full-page Fisher Foods ad from November 16, 1950 and the highlighted products are Donald Duck Brand grapefruit sections and citrus juices.

Fisher Bros. had several areas locations at the time, including 330 and 1820 Broadway, 1154 Ninth Street (later the home of Andy’s Hardware), 211 Park Avenue in Amherst, and 3018 Pearl.

Let’s take a closer look at the Donald Duck portion of the ad.

That’s a nice rendering of Donald Duck. It’s very similar to the art on this can (courtesy of eBay).

Here are a few other can designs. They’re rather cute.

However, I’ve never understood the idea behind assigning Donald Duck’s name to orange juice, grapefruit juice, grapefruit sections, etc. There’s no real connection between ducks and citrus foods. Maybe a brand of soft, white bread would have been more appropriate.

Nevertheless, being one of those people who like orange juice anytime, I’ve brought the irascible Disney duck’s brand products in my lunch for years. Thus I had plenty of time to study the label and each subsequent redesign.

This is the one I’m familiar with.

But when it switched to this design, I lost my appetite. It seems that the Disney corporation just had to pollute the label with their corporate brand.

Too bad the current designers forgot that Donald Duck’s popularity in the old days was specifically because he was a jerk – always angry, always quacking unintelligibly, always fighting with Chip ’N Dale or some bee or bug and getting the worst of it.

Obviously whoever designed this vintage signage understood this.

****

Hmmm... Donald Duck seems to pop up on this blog somewhat regularly (although not as often as Reddy Kilowatt). I did a post about a 1937 Donald Duck collectible glass here, and the sailor-suited waterfowl appeared on this post about the Arlington Traction Company. And he even showed up (in fact, was literally dug up) for this entry about a guerrilla archeology trip to the now-demolished Captain Aaron Root house.