History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
Danka was a tragically named breakfast pastry for toasters that existed in the late 1960s and early '70s.
From the advertising, Danka was for your square, sensible middle aged person who wanted their toaster pastries to do more than pop up. (Well, what do you want them to do then? Your taxes?)
In 1973, Jack In The Box ran a TV
commercial for it's Jumbo Jack burger featuring a cute little
kid named Rodney Allen Rippy, who held the Jumbo Jack in his hands
and said "It's too big to eat!". But being a little kid, it came out as "It's too big-a eat!". It became a national catch-phrase in 1973-1974.
This led to a 45 RPM single with Bell
Records called "Take Life A Little Easier". At age five, he also became the youngest person ever to have a Billboard charting pop hit. A record that to this very day, remains unbroken.
So whatever happened to Rodney Allen Rippy?
Well according to his website, after his Jack In The Box commercial run, he starred in other commercials, including Nehi soda, Chevrolet and others. He graduated from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 1995.He's taken on a few TV acting roles since his childhood stardom backin the early 1990s and appeared in the 2003 David Spade comedy Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. He also hosted a Los Angeles radio talk show.
Contrary to many internet hoaxes and urban legends, Rodney Allen Rippy is still very much alive and well. He was badly injured in a bike crash in 2010, but he's fully recovered.
The Lunch Man and Lunch Tunes lunch boxes were basic kids lunch boxes with one striking difference; They had built-in radios and headphones.
Unfortunately, they were AM radios at a time when Top 40 radio in the US had largely moved to FM. (They still had several AM Top 40s in Canada until the early 1990s.)
And it's doubtful many teachers or school lunch ladies thought these were a good idea either...
It all started with a fairly run of the mill TV commercial for national fast food chain Wendy's....
....that turned three words into the national catch phrase of 1984. And launched a tiny octogenarian lady named Clara Peller into viral superstardom.
This wasn't Clara Peller's only commercial. She starred in a few others prior to the Wendy's ads.
The Wendy's commercial debuted on January 10, 1984 and instantly caught on nationwide. Leading to several sequels to the original Wendy's commercial and a simply massive merchandising blitz.
She also had a small radio hit, which sampled her "Where's The Beef" phrase. Copies of the single were sold at Wendy's.
"Where's The Beef" Coyote McCloud feat. Clara Peller (1984)
The "Where's The Beef" commercials and product tie-ins made millions for Wendy's and brought them out of a deep sales slump. According to Wendy's, Clara Peller made $500,000 from the commercials, a number Clara Peller herself had disputed.
It even became a political comeback when former vice President and Democratic challenger to President Reagan, Walter Mondale used this line against his Democratic primary challenger Gary Hart.
However, the "Where's The Beef" mania didn't last long. (Oversaturation, as you can clearly see here, has a way of doing that.) But Clara Peller thought her Wendy's contract allowed her to do commercials for other products that didn't directly compete with Wendy's, such as Prego spaghetti sauce. Not so. Lawyers for Wendy's insisted "Where's the beef" meant ONLY Wendy's hamburgers and she was released from her contract.
She went on to use variants of the line in movies, TV and other commercials. But with no mention of the word "beef".
Here's a clip from the movie "Moving Violations", where she stars opposite Nedra Volz ("Different Strokes")
Clara Peller died on August 11, 1987, a week after her 85th birthday.
