Donald Duck Orange Juice Squeezed Out of the Picture

Everyone's familiar with Walt Disney's famous cartoon character Donald Duck. Thanks to his comical temper tantrums, during which he quacks angrily (and unintelligibly), the sailor-suit-wearing waterfowl is arguably more popular than Mickey Mouse.

Well, here's something that's really going to ruffle Donald's feathers: his same-named orange juice – first introduced in 1940 – has been quietly discontinued. 

It disappeared from shelves in the Lorain area more than a month ago – first the cartons (available at Fligner's) and then the small bottles at Dollar Tree. An online search showed that it had been available at Walmart, but was out of stock.

Since Donald Duck Orange Juice was my favorite, I contacted Florida's Natural Growers, the manufacturer, to ask where I could find it.

A Consumer Affairs representative responded. "Unfortunately, we have discontinued our line of Donald Duck products, including the Donald Duck Orange Juice No Pulp, Donald Duck Orange Juice with Pulp, Donald Duck Orange Juice with Calcium, Donald Duck Apple Juice, Donald Duck Kiwi Strawberry Juice Cocktail and Donald Duck Fruit Punch Juice Cocktail. 

"This elimination of Donald Duck products was undertaken in order to focus on our flagship Florida’s Natural brand of juices, lemonades and drinks as well as other existing and emerging brands in our portfolio," she concluded.

Ah, there is no joy in Duckburg tonight.

Anyway, I first wrote about Donald Duck Orange Juice here and here. It had been one of the longest running products featuring a popular, licensed character. Most of all, it tasted good. But for Florida's Natural, eliminating the product was probably a way to save a lot of money. 

And so a mighty brand ducks out.

In happier times, when a statue of Donald Duck
greeted visitors to the orange juice plant

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Do you start your day with a glass of orange juice? I do, but it wasn't always like that. 

When I was a kid, orange juice was something we only had on Sunday mornings, along with a Sara Lee coffee cake or Hough Bakeries küchen. And it was always the frozen, canned variety. But later, after I came home from Ohio State (where we had it every day at breakfast in the dormitory cafeteria), Mom started buying it regularly for me. And she and Dad drank it everyday from then on.

I've had house guests who preferred freshly squeezed (something I only did once in my life). I actually like the concentrate version better myself. As long as the container has a picture of an orange on it, I'll drink it. 

Guess I'll have to find another brand now. Hey, maybe I should consider the longtime choice of Der Bingle.

Another Serving of Donald Duck Orange Juice

Remember my post late last year about Donald Duck Orange Juice? 

I mentioned how I used to buy it and pack it in my lunch. I thought it was kind of cool that the product – which dated back to the earliest days of character licensing – was still around. But then the label was redesigned, and I grumbled how Disney now felt the need to slap its corporate name on the product.

Well, since that post, I’ve noticed even more changes, courtesy of the Disney bean counters and suits. 

The canned orange juice product seems to have disappeared; at least I can’t find it at my local grocery. Now it only comes in plastic bottles, which you can buy at Dollar Tree. The Donald Duck product line has also been expanded (although the grapefruit juice has apparently been squeezed out of the lineup).

While in Fligner’s recently, I noticed that Donald Duck Orange Juice now comes in big half-gallon cartons too.

The package is very colorful, with a bio of Donald on the side panel for those kiddies that are too young to have witnessed his animated antics and might be wondering who he is. But note how the orange juice has now been designated “OUTRAGEOUS.” 

Hmmm. Google the word ‘outrageous’ and the first definition that pops up is ‘shockingly bad’ – not the best description for something you’re about to drink.

Anyway, despite how I feel about the over-designed packaging, it is very good orange juice. 

A cashier at the Dollar Tree in Vermilion put it best: “It’s not too sweet and it’s not too tart. It’s just right.”

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Hey, why not watch a really funny Donald Duck cartoon – How to Have An Accident At Work (1959) – while you sip your Donald Duck orange juice?

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.

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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.

Walt Disney Place Mats at Gulf – Dec. 1970

These days, The Walt Disney Company seems to own just about everything in the entertainment industry. 

You head can spin just trying to take it all in. There are the studios (its own namesake studios as well as as Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Blue Sky Studios, 20th Century Studios, etc.), the theme parks, resorts and cruise lines (Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Disneyland Paris, Disney Cruise Line, etc.), the networks (Disney Channel, ABC, ESPN, FX, National Geographic, etc.) the various film franchises (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Avatar, Ice Age, etc.) Even the Muppets.

And that’s not even mentioning the incredibly popular actual Disney film series of recent years (Frozen) and the live-action remakes of animated classics, the musicals based on the films...

Whew!

That’s why it’s almost comical (to me, at least) to see that fifty years ago, Walt Disney was pushing... place mats. 

Yes, place mats with Mickey Mouse (who’s he?), Donald Duck and the whole Disney cartoon menagerie, FREE at your local Gulf dealer with a three dollar gasoline purchase. Here’s the promotional ad that ran in the Journal on December 4, 1970.

What’s interesting is that the ad appears to have been put together at the Journal. The off-model drawings of Donald Duck and Jiminy Cricket aren’t bad, but they would probably trigger the Disney lawyers picking up the phone today, and threatening legal action.

What’s funny to me is that we had some of those place mats in the Brady household, although the connection with Gulf gasoline surprised me. Dad was more of a Sohio or Sunoco guy.

Anyway, here are a few that I know we had in our collection, which I found on eBay. (They were photographed against a wooden backdrop.) I always thought the one with Donald Duck and a miniature Mickey Mouse looking up at him was strange (although Mickey is a mouse, after all).

All I know is that the place mats were in our basement for years. They may still be there.

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