THE 'ORRIBLE 'OUSE OF TERRIBLE OLD TAT - Ghoulish Giveaways!

Welcome once again dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Last week we were celebrating the weird and wonderful world of Horror Bags, a range of macabre snacks made by Smiths Crisps back in the mid 1970s.  Now although this line of spooky snacks only lasted a handful of years - launching in 1974, but not surviving to the 1980s - while they were on the shelves, they were hugely popular. And a sign of how well-loved they were is the plethora of related tat they spawned.

Promotional items have long formed part of the marketing of many foods, in particular those that are aimed at children. The classic template has remained unchanged for decades - collect so many tokens or wrappers and send them off to get a free gift. Well, they say free, but in reality there was often a token amount of money involved too i.e. send off ten wrappers and a cheque or postal order for £1.99 to get your free Marketing Tat-o-tron! Anyhow, this kind of give-away offer was very popular back in the 1970s, a time when shopping by mail was exciting and rare, rather than the default as it is now. And while these items were often of the funny for five minutes type and were destined to end up in the bin very quickly, back then it was massively exciting to get something through the post, particularly you couldn't get anywhere else. Indeed, one of the most powerful tag-lines wielded by marketing departments in the 1970s was "not available in any shop!". Team up that line with a time limit, such as "send in before..."  or "only available until...", and you had a powerful formula for boosting your sales, and perhaps harvesting some additional pocket money too. It worked time and time again, even though it often took a ruddy age for the goodies to actually arrive - for "Please allow 28 days for delivery" was the dreaded line of small print in such offers.

Now this kind of promotional giveaway was a common feature with breakfast cereals aimed at kids, something that continues to this very day. However even in the golden age of collect and send in offers, for other food related brands such as sweets and crisps, they were more occasional. Usually they turned up when a new line was launched - with adverts on the telly sometimes, but more often in the pages of popular comics - or when a new flavour or variant was added to the range. Therefore the nature and frequency of such promotions was a very good gauge of how much traction assorted brands actually had. A send-in giveaway that would net you some merch that tied-in to some popular TV or film, or famous pop star or sportsman, showed that the brand was big enough in the playground to be seen as an effective form of marketing. However a product doing collect-and-send-ins for tat featuring its own brand showed that it was an even strong line. It was big enough not to need to hitch its wagon to other properties in the mediasphere, big enough to star in its own promotions as it were.Now Horror Bags started off in the usual fashion, with the earliest packets of Fangs and Bones running an offer for a free Dracula mask in late 1974.

However this item was just the first of a long line of ghoulish goodies that took an maddening 28 days for delivery. And over the years, Horror Bags did a massive amount of these giveaways - at least 15 by my count (and a few more may well have slipped under our nostalgia radar too). And given that they were only really on the shelves for around four years, it would appear that not only were they constantly running these giveaways, but also (according to my back of beermat mathematics) they were running these offers pretty much quarterly! What's more, all these giveaways were for Horror Bags related merch, with not one being done as a tie-in to some other popular property du jour! And that may well be some sort of record! Indeed, the only brand that seemed to run as many send-in-giveways was Trebor's Double Agents... but that's a story for another day! 

However all of this does leave us with a trickier question - why did Horror Bags disappear if they were so successful?  Well, it would seem that they were killed off to make way for a new rising star in the crisp world. For in 1977, Smiths decided to launch another horror themed snack - Monster Munch. And while Horror Bags gained a new flavour (and shape) in the form of Bats in 1978, at some point in the late 1970s it was decided that the line had had its day, and all future spooky snackery would be Monster Munch shaped. Possibly this was one of the many ripples in the great dank pond of pop culture caused by George Lucas dropping in a large rock named Star Wars.

For while spooky stuff had been very popular with kids in the 1970s, now the future looked scifi flavoured and possibly it was felt that as the fluffy creatures fronting Monster Munch weren't steeped in the macabre and the gothic, they could pass of the kind of weird aliens that populated the Cantina Bar. Indeed, if memory serves, the early telly ads for Monster Munch implied they lived on a planet of puppet monsters. But whatever the reason, Horror Bags disappeared from the shelves, while Monster Munch continues to thrive to this very day.

But even the mighty Monster Munch didn't have quite as many giveaways in its early years as its elder brother Horror Bags! And next time, we will be presenting the fun and freaky items that sending off empty packets of Fangs, Bones, Claws, Ribs, and Bats could net you!