Thursday, October 18, 2018

FOR ERIC BEHEIM


Posted by Chic Silber at 10/18/2018 09:44:00 AM

4 comments:

Eric said...

Some years ago, I had a chance to meet Richard Webb, who played CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT on TV back in the 1950s. The sponsor of that show was OVALTINE and one of the premiums that was advertised was a CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT Decoder Badge that you could get by sending in 25 cents and the seal from an Ovaltine jar. At the end of each program, Captain Midnight would read off some numbers which, when matched up with the decoder badge’s letters gave some hint about what would happen in the next week’s episode. (One message I recall was “Watch Out for Trap.” Sure enough, in the next week, Captain Midnight narrowly escapes from a native pit trap in some jungle setting.) In the 1980’s, when the musical ANNIE was popular, Ovaltine offered a reproduction of its Little Orphan Annie shake up mug.

18 October, 2018 11:58
Chic Silber said...


My wife wanted to throw out

this perfectly good Ovaltine

saying it was beyond use by date

However I managed to salvage it

(truthfully I never liked it)

18 October, 2018 12:11
Eric said...

When I was growing up, Ovaltine, along with Quaker Oats and Malt-O-Meal were food products that I would request only when I wanted to some premium they were offering.

One of the most unique and memorable of these television premiums was offered in 1955 by the Quaker Oats Company, the sponsor of SERGEANT PRESTON OF THE YUKON. Quaker Oats bought a 19-acre parcel of government land in Sgt. Preston’s Yukon Territory, and then subdivided it into square-inch lots. Official-looking deeds were printed up and numbered consecutively according to a master plan that made it possible to locate any one particular square inch in the subdivision. These deeds were then inserted into Quaker Oats cereal boxes. Advertisements promised that, after buying the cereal and retrieving the deed, “You’ll actually own one square inch of Yukon land in the famous gold country.” Response to this One Inch of the Yukon promotion was phenomenal and boxes of Quaker cereals sold as fast as the deeds could be printed and stuffed into them. Taking advantage of all the accompanying publicity, the television show Truth or Consequences actually paid to send the holder of one of these deeds to the Yukon, where he was filmed panning for gold on his one square inch of property. Hundreds of these deeds still survive today and turn up on eBay all the time. (I still have mine.) But the holders of these deeds who think that they own a piece of the Yukon are likely to be disappointed since those 19-acres of land were repossessed by the Canadian government years ago for non-payment of $37.20 in taxes.

18 October, 2018 16:03
Cindy Potter said...

WHEN MY BROTHER WAS LEARNING TO TALK, HE COULDN'T PRONOUNCE "OVALTINE." IT CAME OUT
'WOBBLETINE!!"
:-)
Cindy

18 October, 2018 17:24

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