Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Gumball Machine Cards of the 60's-70's

I recently purchased a small stack of vintage gumball machine cards-- and wow, what a delirious assortment of memories! Kooky characters bearing tingly-tangy names that perfectly time capsule the 60's and 70's with sugar-powered notions of space travel, circus clowns, and dirty hippies-- you can't help but want to plunk down a coin for one of these tooth destroying treats!























Manufacturers in today's post include: Sconza, Leaf, and Herman Goelitz, while the bulk of the more mindbending samples come from Standard Specialty and feature their cute "Pat and Lyn" mascots with the teasing tagline: "They're Fresh!" I wonder, are they talking about the candy, or about Pat and Lyn?

8 comments:

  1. Man, these are great. Groovy banana bubble gum is so awesome.

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  2. love these things and jeez, i really could use a big piece of grape-flavored gum right about now...

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  3. ...but i think that peanut in the trenchcoat just flashed me!

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  4. >i think that peanut in the trenchcoat just flashed me!

    Mr Planters Peanut's koo-koo cracked cousin from the city... the shiney candy coating seeped into his brain as a child.

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  5. So these are the title cards inserted into the machines themselves, right? These would change based on the what flavor ammo was being reloading each week? I never thought about anyone collecting these before--or even that these existed, really--how cool.

    I like how that circumsized rocket is crashing right into the surface of the moon there. Looks like the cheese-flavored gum lobby had some pretty low hopes for the future of the space race.

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  6. >So these are the title cards inserted into the machines themselves, right?

    Correct, and on a few of them you can see where space is left blank for the vendor to write in their own price too. Similarly, machines that carried toys sometimes glue examples of the toy itself right onto these cards so the kid's can see what they're getting. I think I have a few of those around here somewhere too for a possible future post.

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  7. Sour Sweets were my vending-machine favorites.

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  8. The last two, Candy Coated P-nuts haunts me to this day!

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