Aladdin decided to create some generic-subject boxes and decided the new shape would be a novelty selling point.
#Lunch buckets tv#
You see, the cost of buying rights to licensed characters and TV shows, some of which would be canceled before the box had a chance to sell, was becoming astronomical. Ironically, though now much sought-after for their designs, they were begun as a cost-cutting measure. Square boxes were great for their TV screen-like dimensions, but much of the highest artistry went onto the "domes" with rounded tips which aped the shape of the original workingman's lunch pail. In 1962, Aladdin added another trademark feature: They stamped the designs into the metal, giving a bas relief, 3-D effect. The box wars had begun, as manufacturers scrambled to be the first to tie up rights to the hot new TV shows. So did some newcomers, ADCO Liberty and Universal, as well as another old-style lunch pail manufacturer, Ohio Art (which a few years later, flush with lunch box profits, diversified into making toys including Etch-A-Sketch). They sold 2 1/2 million Roy Rogers & Dale Evans boxes in 1953, increasing their total sales 20% in one year.Īladdin retooled and adapted full-lunch box lithography for their 1954 line. AT decided to do Aladdin one better by using bright, full-color lithography on all sides of the box instead of a decal on one face. So Roy saddled up Trigger and rode north to American Thermos in Connecticut, which also had been feeling slumping sales from its lunch box / thermos sets, and especially now with Aladdin's success. Roy Rogers wanted his own box, but Aladdin had turned him down with "one cowboy is enough." Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another cowboy star was jealous. (They had even greater success in 1952 with another decal of another hot show: Tom Corbin, Space Cadet.) Fueled by a craze for anything seen on TV, Aladdin sold 600,000 at $2.39 each in their first year. To everyone's surprise, the "Hoppy" lunch box jumped off the shelves. On the strength of that, they convinced a big department store chain to make an advance order of 50,000. The company hired a top industrial designer who sketched out a prototype of the cowboy star, which they slapped onto the side of a red lunch box. "Not just cowboys and Indians, how about using a TV cowboy? Maybe Hopalong Cassidy?" Aladdin, taking a cue from the auto market, had stumbled into the idea of planned obsolescence in which people would replace perfectly good products for the sake of fleeting style. "Kids seem to like cowboys and Indians, and TV stations are showing a lot of old western movies to fill time." "We've got these plain boxes-why don't we jazz them up with decals?" Staring at charts of slumping sales, Aladdin execs started throwing around ideas: The postwar market had created a demand for all kinds of consumer goods which Aladdin had ridden for a few good years, but metal lunch boxes are durable and once you bought one, there was no reason to buy another for a decade or two. A company called Aladdin emerged from Nashville with the first in an odd postwar marriage of cold sandwiches and hot popular culture. Barnum, Buffalo Bill or Sousa's Band-it was shaped like a picnic basket with pictures of playing children lithographed on its side.Ī Mickey Mouse lunch box in 1935 was a forerunner to what was to come, but it wasn't until 1950 that the medium entered its prime. No, it didn't feature turn-of-the-century pop culture idols like P.
Still, children in the 1880s created their own school "lunch pails" out of the colorful tin boxes that once housed biscuits, cookies and tobacco.įrom there, it was a small step to a box specifically made for that purpose, and in 1902 the first true kids' lunch box came out. The lunch pail wasn't really a pail it was a latching, heavy-duty metal thing made from a toolbox-grade metal that would protect the working man's noontime meal from anything less powerful than a small bomb.Īt the time, a lunch pail wasn't chic-on the contrary, it was a sign you were far enough down the pay scale that you didn't have time or money for a decent hot noontime meal. According to The Whole Pop Magazine, before the lunch box was the lunch pail (and before the lunch pail there were oiled goatskins, but let's not go THAT far back).
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