I was rifling though my personal cabinet at work looking for my sketchbook when I came across this sheet of Robo Force puffy stickers that I meant to scan and write about awhile ago.  Though I'm sure there was a name brand version of these stickers, I've only ever seen them issued as generic unbranded knock-offs on eBay and elsewhere.  I'm pretty sure these were released in 1984 along with the rest of the toy-line and Robo Force merchandise before the franchise took a nose dive into obscurity.  I've written about these toys on the site before, and actually I just recently managed to find a mint in box S.O.T.A. figure (pictured in the stickers below to the left) to add to my 80s robot collection…

The other sticker featured is Wrecker which has a bit of resonance with me since he was the only Robo Force figure I had as a kid.  The missing sticker on this sheet featured one of the cooler Robo Force characters, Sentinel, which is probably why he's absent.  There was also a second set of three sticker availalbe that featured the main hero and some of the villains from the line (Hun-Dred, Cruel, and Max Steele himself).  I'd also like to point out that these stickers were gifted to my by the gracious Jerzy Drozd of the Art & Story and Comics Are Great podcasts.

In other Peel Here news, yours truly was referenced on the Retroist website recently in a wonderfully odd Alternate History of the Sticker by none other than the Claymation Werewolf himself, J.C. Beirau.  I can only hope to be half as reclusive in my old age as he made me out to be…

Today's PCP spotlight is on Jose Gonzales, one of the nicest and most supportive people I've ever met online.  I first got a chance to chat with Jose years ago via the Art & Story podcast as we were both avid listeners and part of the same Twitter circle. I've also gotten a chance to see Jose grow as an artist through his site The Mad Scientist's Art Laboratory, which has been really cool.

For his picture with the TMNT postcard I sent out earlier in the year, Jose pulled out all the stops and broke out his samurai sword for a photo-op.  Leonardo would be proud!

If you get a chance, seek out Jose in Twitter, or take a gander at some of his artwork on his site.  You'll be glad you did!

A couple weeks ago I was in a rush during the morning routine.  For some reason it seemed like I had two hundred things to do before running out the door to go to work, and right when I thought I'd finished everything, I remembered that I'd intended on updating Branded with a quick post during lunch.  What was I going to write about though?  There was nothing on the hopper and I didn't have time to sit down and get a bunch of screen caps from a cartoon, so I quickly ran into out home office and grabbed a magazine advertisement blindly from a stack on my desk and stuffed it into my bag.  Problem solved, or so I thought.  When I got to work and got a second to catch my breath I pulled out the ad to see what I'd ended up with.  It was an ad for Nabisco Snack Mate, the spray cheese we know as Kraft Easy Cheese these days, from a 1981 issue of Woman's Day.  I'd originally torn it out because I thought the artwork on all the little cheesy hors d'oeuvres was fun and it made for a striking image overall.

So I scanned the ad on my lunch break and got ready to fire off a few short thoughts about Easy Cheese when I noticed the small section at the bottom that featured a mail-away Snack Mate cookbook.  How weird I thought, that a culinary product this mocked and reviled had an entire cookbook dedicated to it.  I took a second to try and postulate what sort of interesting concoctions one would come up with that included spray cheese.  Then a scene from Weird Al Yankovic's UHF popped into my head, the one where his character George and his friend Bob both get fired from their umpteenth lackluster job and in trying to cheer Bob up, George makes him the heartburn-inducing delight known as a Twinkie Wiener Sandwich!  I figured there was no way something that crazy was in the mail-away cookbook, but I couldn't help but wonder what was in that book.

Before I knew it my lunch was over, I hadn't eaten a thing, and I suddenly realized that this quick post for the site wasn't going to happen without some more research.  I felt I needed to get some screenshots of Weird Al building a Twinkie Wiener Dog for starters, but if I was going to mention that, it seemed only natural to mention some other theatrical appearances of Easy Cheese.  Since I was digging that deep I figured I might as well go a bit farther and track down some other Snack Mate ads, as well as trying to figure out where this amazing cheese innovation got its start.  Most importantly I needed to get my hands on a copy of that cookbook!  By the end of the day I'd put the wheels in motion to do just that.

Today I'm just going to concentrate on the history. In addition to the ad I found (at the top of the article), I managed to locate a few more that date back to the introduction of this pressurized pseudo-dairy treat which was introduced sometime in 1966.  The oldest ad I was able to track down is from a 1967 issue of Life magazine and features three of the four original flavors, American, Cheddar, and Pimento (Nabisco also offered the cheese in a Swiss variety.)  From what I gather the canned spray cheese phenomenon began as an affordable and easy way for families to prepare nicely plated and pretty hors d'oeuvres for dinner parties.  Burgeoning household gourmands were popping up everywhere in the 60s, and Nabisco wanted a piece of that action, as well as creating a product that would require purchasing their mainstay line of snack crackers.  Design-wise, I actually think the decision to include the frosting-esque applicator tip was a stroke of genius and it beats the hell out of melting your own cheese and trying to scoop it into and dispense it from a piping bag.

It's also interesting to note the difference between what was considered pretty and chic (in food presentation) back in 1966 versus what we typically think of today.  Plating was a lot more architectural or sculptural in nature 55 years ago, and the idea of building up a cracker with mounds of immaculately sliced olives (pimento included), lump crab meat, and a heaping yet frilly helping of creamy processed cheese so that it looked like a work of modern art was the goal.  If watching 7 billion food-centric shows on TV has taught me nothing else, today's presentation is more about simplicity and sparseness.  I'm betting the Easy Cheese (which, let's face it, would never make it to the plate unless we're watching an episode of Chopped) would be applied in a single dollop only to be smeared in a pleasing arc along side a crisscrossed stack of two grilled baguette croutons over a bead of lightly blanched asparagus.  Or something like that.

I think by 1969 the idea of using pasteurized, processed cheese in a can for froufrou parties wasn't catching on and as you can see in the next advertisement Nabisco was having a little more fun with dressing up their crackers.  Now the user was encouraged to make cheesy smiley faces, more along the lines of pleasing one's family instead of guests.  We also get to see a new option of cheese, French Onion.  Also notice that in the line-up of cracker options there is still a Nabisco bacon variety.  I remember eating these, or something similar, as a kid and marveling at the baked-in bacon bits.  In today's salty-pork belly obsessed world, I'm surprised these haven't made a comeback.  I mean Chicken in a Biskit crackers are still around, why not Bacon in a Biskit.  I wonder if that rings too much with a dog treat sort of feel?

The only Snack Mate ad I could locate from the 70s was this next one featuring a much more robust line of spray cheese varieties.  Unfortunately I can't make out the new varieties, though it looks like one might be a Swiss/American blend.

By the 2000's I know there were at least seven more varieties introduced including Nacho Cheese, Pizza, Shrimp Cocktail, Bacon, Sharp Cheddar, Roasted Garlic and Philly Cream Cheese.  The product was also known as Snack Mate up until the 80s when Kraft Foods bought Nabisco and rebranded the product as Kraft Easy Cheese.  Today there are only four varieties offered, Sharp and regular Cheddar, American and Bacon flavored.  I'm also kind of bummed out in that the Bacon option has changed over time.  From what I remember in the 80s, there were actual bacon bits mixed in with the cheese as opposed to today where there is just a smoky bacon flavor added to the cheese.  I'm sure it's cheaper to produce, but it's kind of a letdown.

Next week I'm hopefully going to have part two of this crazy article up featuring some of my own memories of the product, the various cinematic appearances of Snack Mate/Easy Cheese, as well as a the 1981 cookbook, and a bit of fun with the Twinkie Wiener Sandwich!

**Update** Alright, I picked three names at random from a hat (well, empty coffee mug) and the lucky winners are: Laura I., Jeremy T H., Khris L.  Congrats guys and gals (I've notified you through the FB messaging system for your snail mail address) and thanks to everyone else for entering!

So I came home yesterday and found a package waiting for me at the door, and upon cracking it open I was excited to see this…

These came courtesy of a contest in the premiere issue of the Strange Kids Club Comix Anthology, and I couldn't wait to dig into the individual boxes to get a glimpse at the loot.  These Cereal Killer trading cards are pretty darn cool and they follow in the tradition of Topps Wacky Packs and Garbage Pail Kids.  The brainchild of artist Joe Simko, this set of spoofs perfectly blends a childhood love of sugary cereal with a score of monsters and horror movie icons.  These sets come with three mini cereal boxes, each containing 20 cards, a special prize and a gross piece of eyeball gum.  As for the special prizes you can expect to find black-light stickers, magnets, gold foil cards, and if you're lucky an original sketch card from Joe himself.

One of the cool aspects of the set is the social networking built into trying to complete a set.  Wax Eye has set up a thread for trading doubles over at the Wacky Packages forum.  Sure you can buy additional packages, but it's kind of cool to get back to what it was like in elementary school trading with classmates trying to complete the latest series of Garbage Pail Kids.

In the spirit of this, I've decided to hold a mini contest to get my doubles out into the world.  I'm offering up three prizes, a stack of 20 cards, a stack of 10 cards, and one of the super cool black-light stickers.  To get your grubby hands on these all you have to do is head on over to the Branded Facebook Page and leave a comment in the Discussions tab on the left (you can also click on the cards below).  I'll be picking three winners at random this Friday, May 20th at 3:00pm est.  Good luck, and go check out Joe Simko's Cereal Killers trading cards!

Today's PCP spotlight is on Micki who hails from the other side of the pond, all the way over in Spain!  Micki runs a site called El Escalon Imaginario, and though there's a bit of a language barrier, just one look at his scans and photos and I know our Venn diagram of overlapping interests is practically a solid circle.  Hell, in the picture he sent he's reading his postcard with a severed hand!  Now that's style…

Also, if you look closely in the above picture you'll see some pretty cool stuff.  In addition to the severed hand prop I spied a Super Mario Bros pin, Zuul, He-Man's power sword, and a Breakfast Club poster…

I also really dig his graphic design style on the site, in particular his header.  If I'm getting the point correctly, with the picture of Humpty Dumpty on the wall and all the cool stuff underneath, then the implication is that after Humpty fell all sorts of awesome 80s and 90s era stuff fell out.  That is pretty darn cool.  I also love that he managed to Photoshop a portion of the TMNT postcard I send into an Ozzy Ozbourne record cover almost perfectly.

So if you get a second and want to get lost in the archives of an awesome Spanish blog, head on over to El Escalon Imaginario (oh, and Google translate is a great tool for getting over the language barrier…)

Today is Friday the 13th which seems like the perfect opportunity to share some cool Jason Vorhees themed bits of Wax Paper Pop Art, but alas none exist.  This reminds me of one of my favorite blogs that is sadly defunct, the Bubblegum Fink.  BF was a huge influence on Branded, and one of the really cool things he did was to create sets of digital trading cards that aped the style of Topps sets back in the 70s and 80s.  One of my favorite would-be sets was for Friday the 13th, and it would have been awesome had it actually existed.  I never saved any of the images sadly, but here's a post of someone else who took notice of these awesome pieces of should-be-nostalgia…

Anyway, in lieu of simplistic Hockey Mask art I thought I'd share a set of some of my favorite Topps card wrappers from the Masters of the Universe series circa 1984…

These images, in particular of He-Man and Skeletor were very prevalent on MOTU merchandising back in the day.  Actually both of them also grace the two Lazer Blazer sticker sets as well.  It's kind of cool to get a chance to see the same image in so many iterations over the years…

I talked about the sticker cards from this set, as well as a bunch of other MOTU stickers in an older Peel Here column.

The last few years we've been going through a relative drought of 80s cartoons on DVD.  Though I was super happy with Shout! Factory re-issuing Transformers (recently vastly encheapened) and G.I. Joe on DVD in the past couple of years, there are still some big holes in my collection that seemed would go unfilled forever.  Well some 80s cartoon god must have heard my laments because there are a ton of new to DVD titles coming in the next six months or so!

As you can see from the advertisement above, the Warner Archive (manufactured on demand DVDs) is releasing some great catalog titles including the Go Bots (shipping on May 17th), Mr. T (shipping today), and finally a complete set of the Herculoids (shipping on June 14th) on DVD!

In addition to these awesome WB titles, Shout! Factory is currently prepping releases of M.A.S.K. (shipping in August), the Japanese Transformers Headmasters series (shipping on July 5th), as well as a re-issue of Jem (to be announced officially soon) on DVD.

Still keeping my fingers crossed that the Warner Archive will release the second half of the Silverhawks someday…

Today's PCP spotlight is on J.C & Leslie Beirau, a couple of cool folks out of Ohio that have an appreciation for all things geeky and nostalgic.  J.C., potentially better known as the Claymation Werewolf, has recently started writing for the The Retroist's website as well as hosting a blog called the CW Digital Digest…

Check out that awesome pumpkin-topped watertower in the background!  Apparently there is a witchy/halloweeny theme going on in their town which makes me so jealous!

If you get a chance, check out J.C.'s alternate retro-histories at the Retroist!

I've spent an inordinate amount of time in my life combing through paper.  Aside from the thousands of hours of flipping through comics that I've logged since I was a kid, sorting and folding paper was a large part of my day-job for years.  Every day I'd sift though reams of medical claims, arranging them into piles by insurance company so that I could send out as many in bulk as possible.  But there was always a pile of singles left over, two to three hundred a day that needed to be folded by hand.  Yes, I'm well aware that there are machines built for this task, and believe me our office had one that must have been constructed around the turn of the century.  It was older than sin and only worked about a fourth of the time.  Even then it would eat up and shred claims which was more of a headache than folding them by hand.  Besides, there was no way that company was going to invest in a new folder/stuffer when they were already paying me.  I became so adept at sorting and folding that I was almost as fast as the machine when it was working properly.  At one point I started having nightmares about spending the rest of my life folding paper and stuffing it into envelopes.  It was around this time that I came up with the brilliant idea of securing a second job, working nights at my local Kinko's.  Yet more paper.  Sorting, folding, and stuffing.

Around five years ago I made the jump into IT, laughing manically as I left the paper behind.  The blurred sorter's vision, the constant paper-cuts, and the smell of printers ink on my hands were all fading away.  Of course, around five years ago I also started this site, and thus began a second wave of kneeling before the gods of paper as ephemera because an important passion in my life.  I've replaced the medical billing clearinghouse drudgery with the never-ending search for amazing forgotten tidbits that are hidden in million comic long-boxes, tucked away in the corner of an antique store cubical, and buried in mountains of 30 year-old stacks of magazines. Articles, postcards, stickers, posters, packaging, calendars, flyers, magazines, books, and of course, advertisements; this is the ephemera that keeps this site running.  Sometimes, in the middle of investigating every page of practically every single issue of Woman's Day magazine from 1983, I swear that I'm going to go blind (just like Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape.)  But every so often I find something so irrevocably awesome, that it makes the whole process completely worth the struggle.  Below is one of those finds.

Maybe I've built this up a bit too much with this long-winded intro, but every time I set eyes on this poster (which will hopefully soon be hanging in my office) I get a bit giddy because it transports me so effortlessly back in time to when I was six and my family was having cable TV installed for the first time.  1983 was my first introduction to the wonder of the classic children's programming on the first channel devoted to kids, Nickelodeon…

The only thing keeping this poster from being the perfect piece of 80s era Nickelodeon ephemera is that it was released about a year and a half before the network really came into its own with the introduction of all sorts of animated series and game shows.  Even so, 1983 was the year that they really took a step in the right direction with the debut of Mr. Wizard's World, which cemented the last corner of the triumvirate of series (along with Pinwheel and You Can't Do That on Television) that more or less defined the look and feel of early Nickelodeon.  And that is what this poster is all about!

Well actually this poster is all about the 1983 Nickelodeon Sweepstakes.  In an effort to get the word out about the network to the millions of new cable subscribers during the boom in the early 80s, Nickelodeon concentrated their efforts on two fronts, non-violence and educational programming.  This Sweepstakes offered one lucky kid a $10,000 dollar college scholarship (though in the fine print you can see that this can be transferred to a cash payout when the winner turns 18, I guess in case attending college just wasn't in the cards.)  You can tell, from the pages that make up the back of the poster below, that a lot of the original programming on the network was geared more towards education than entertainment.  Of course there was always the Canadian sketch comedy of YCDToTV and the insanity of Wild Ride, the live action series hosted by Matt Dillon focusing on the countries best roller coasters and thrill rides.

Anyway, back to the poster.  It was painted by a fella named W.S. "Bill" Purdom, a talented artist who's worked with huge companies on everything from advertising to movie posters, and is currently specializing in capturing classic moments from baseball on canvas.  The poster features a ton of celebrities and characters including Reggie Jackson, Mr. Wizard, Matt Dillon, Chris Makepeace (from Meatballs and My Bodyguard fame), Leonard Nimory, Bill Bixby, Slim Goodbody, Christine McGlade and Les Lye (from YCDToTV), as well as Jake, Coco, Plus & Minus, Aurelia, Ebeneezer T. Squint, Silas the Snail, Luigi, and Admiral Bird from pinwheel.  Hell, even the Nickelodeon pinball makes an appearance!  Sigh.

Yup, finding a poster like this tucked away in a 28 year-old issue of Woman's Day is the whole reason that Branded in the 80s exists.  It makes all the work, the hunting, the sorting, the flipping, the scanning & digital enhancement, and all the ailments, the paper-cuts, the old-mildewy-ink-stink on my fingers, completely worth it.  Hope you guys dig seeing stuff like this as much as I do.

Before I get into the spotlight I just wanted to say thanks to all the wonderful folks who requested one of the second wave DC Comics postcards!  Every single one of them has been spoken for, including the oddly specific Christmas, Birthday and Get Well Soon cards.  I'll be sending the last batch out today so you should all be receiving them within a week or so.  Remember, if you want you can take some pictures with the card and send them on in with a link to your blog or what-have-you and I'll make sure to spotlight you on an upcoming edition of the PCP.  Oh, and if you wanted a card but didn't get a request in on time, don't fret, in the coming months I'll have another wave that I'm super excited about.  They're a bit older than the 80s, but the cards are tied into the origin of one of my favorite things from my childhood so it should be fun!

Today's PCP spotlight is on TL from the ever awesome Neighborhoodarchive.com. I first got to know TL through one of his other sites, Flashlights are Something to Eat, which features some blasts from the past that are dear to my heart.  He's got a great eye for detail (check out some of his movie scene breakdowns), and some great observations on the pop culture of the 70s and 80s.

TL's heart seems to lie with championing the work of Fred Rogers, which is a worthy cause in my book.  I was lucky enough that TL took a stroll into the Neighborhood of Make-Believe with the TMNT postcard I sent out, and he even got a second with King Friday.  I think his majesty was a bit disappointed that the card wasn't mailed directly to him, but at the end of the day everyone got a chance to see Donatello kicking Rocksteady's butt a little, so it's all good…

If you get a chance, make sure to head on over to some of TL's sites and don't forget to check out his Mr. Rogers podcast.  You'll be glad you did!