MIKE PESCA, host:
Everyone knows where they were when, I don't know, when JFK was shot. They either remember it completely, or they know they weren't born yet, or were too young to have memories. That's how it works with milestones. Then there's what I call centimeter stones. It's those events that you either have complete recognition of or just utter indifference. Like, where were you for the last airing of "Melrose Place"? The answer is something like, Jody's house, red couch, third cushion, or "Melrose" what?
And this all leads us to Wacky Packages. Maybe you instantly remember the stickers that lampoon products, like Crest toothpaste become Crust, and Shake 'n Bake repackaged as Ache 'n Quake, or maybe you have no idea why anyone would care. Maybe you remember Garbage Pail Kids. They were kind of a sequel to Wacky Packages. Same deal, offensive to parents, funny to nine-year-old kids. And the kids would collect and trade them all. Jay Lynch was a gag man and an artist for Topps, where he created a lot of the Wacky Packages. Hey, Jay. Thanks for coming in.
Mr. JAY LYNCH (Underground Comix Cartoonist): Thanks for having me.
PESCA: So, maybe it was my neighborhood, but I always called them Wacky Packs.
Mr. LYNCH: Yeah. Pe - a lot of people called them wacky packs. I think Topps put out one little version of packaging, where they actually used the name Wacky Packs, but most of the time it was Wacky Packages.
PESCA: And what did you and the artists call them? Or how did you think of them, even?
Mr. LYNCH: We called them Wackies (ph).
PESCA: Wackies?
Mr. LYNCH: Yeah.
PESCA: And were they just - were they beloved by you, a means to an end? What did you think of them?
Mr. LYNCH: They - well, we do them for Topps. Art and I were - Art Spiegelman, who was the editor more or less of this series, along with Len Brown and Woody Gelman, we were underground cartoonists basically at the time, and the important work that we were doing, was the underground comics, and we did the Wacky Packages mainly to make a living.
PESCA: And what years are we talking about? What's the timeframe?
Mr. LYNCH: The first time that they attempted Wacky Packs was 1967, when it came out in another incarnation as Wacky Billboards, but Wacky Packs really hit their stride in 1972-'73, something like that.
PESCA: And in this new book of not all the Wacky Packages, but a lot of the most remembered and beloved ones, Art Spiegelman writes the introduction, and it was weird. In the intro he said he was called in by the editor, and the idea was not to even lampoon products, just to give kids stickers of, like, the actual Pepsi bottle or a pack of Marlboros. Why would anyone think...
Mr. LYNCH: That was the original idea.
PESCA: Why would anyone think that would work?
Mr. LYNCH: There wasn't that much satire then. It was only Mad Magazine and things that Harvey Kurtzman did, the guy who was the former editor of Mad.
PESCA: So if Art Spiegelman at that moment hadn't said, actually, let's lampoon the products, this thing might never have gotten off the ground? It was all due to that one moment of insight on Spiegelman's behalf?
Mr. LYNCH: They were brought up on Mad Magazine, so they just developed Wackies as parodies, so that it was, you know, mocking the products, rather than literally advertising them.
PESCA: Now, some of these - I don't know if you internally had - I do know, whenever an artist gets really deep into something, they think about it more so than the consumer or - of that product would think about it. So I don't know how much you really dissected the taxonomy of the Wacky Packs, but I find there were a couple major categories. One is the category of packages where it really does describe how that package works in real life - so Crayola Crayons becomes Crackola, because the crayons were always cracked inside the box...
Mr. LYNCH: Uh-huh.
PESCA: But the other big category are things that are just total flights of fancy, like "Co-Duck Film," the film for ducks. I don't think anyone ever thought that that was what the film was for. What was your - what's your...
Mr. LYNCH: It's in another world where ducks buy cameras, you know?
PESCA: OK. So, some of it was like - or like Heinz Baked Bears. What was - what's that about?
Mr. LYNCH: Or Bear Aspirin, Aspirin for Bears.
PESCA: Aspirin for Bears.
Mr. LYNCH: B-E-A-R Aspirin. We just wanted the money. Yeah, there's Skimpy Peanut Butter - oh, actually, one of the ones that tells what it is, it was Good and Empty, instead of Good and Plenty. Because, you know, you used to buy a box of Good and Plenty's, and half the box would be empty, you know, and it was sealed, that's - that was, like, just a statement.
PESCA: So how did you get your ideas? Was it really easy to come by? Did you go through the supermarket aisles to brainstorm?
Mr. LYNCH: Well, the book prints this chart, we figured out vowel combinations - Art figured out all the possible vowel combinations, so if you get something like Tide, you'd go ide (ph), bide, cide (ph), dide (ph), fide, gide (ph), all the way through the alphabet, and if you don't come up with anything, the second letter being an I, you only have to replace it with vowels, so it's tade (ph), tide, ted, ultimately, toad.
PESCA: Toad!
Mr. LYNCH: And then it becomes Toad, the laundry detergent for frogs.
PESCA: So when we talk about creative inspiration, this is a formula. This is a real formula. A computer could be taught to make Wacky Packs.
Mr. LYNCH: Yeah, but nobody can understand it outside of the Topps company.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. LYNCH: It's like - so, in this book it reprints the secret code. You, too, can write Wackies.
PESCA: Well, then there were different categories, crazy, puns, sports, dizziness, noisiness.
Mr. LYNCH: Yeah. Well, these were the categories of 1970.
PESCA: Yeah.
Mr. LYNCH: Something might not be as funny now, like sal - we used to think salami was funny, but it's less funny now.
PESCA: Bears are still pretty funny, though.
Mr. LYNCH: Yeah, Stephen Colbert.
PESCA: Do you keep up with hipster comics now?
Mr. LYNCH: I do. This is only - the only really pure bastion of it is a magazine called Mineshaft Magazine. The hippies are now all - the former hippies are like all now 65, and then there after hippies there were, you know, alternative comics, like Daniel Clowes, Dan Clowes' stuff, "Eightball," those guys are in their 40s, and then there's guys under them.
When we started underground comix, me, Crumb and Gilbert Shelton put out the first three underground comix, "Zap," "Bijou," and "Feds 'n' Heads," and it was just, you know, black and white - comic books that weren't distributed by the Marvel or DC. They were not good comics code, and today there's like 50,000 different titles in that genre.
PESCA: I was going to ask, do you see all the - the fact that, you know, the world has so many more parodies than it did 30 years ago, do you think the things that you were doing with either the underground comix or these Wacky Packs have anything to do with the, you know, constantly lampooned world we live in today?
Mr. LYNCH: Wacky Packs taught kids to be - not to accept things blindly, you know, to be questioning of all things in society. It's a different mindset than those who would follow Indiana Jones cards, or the sports cards, or things that are - you know, it's that wise-guy skeptic kid that bought the Wackies, as opposed to those who liked phys ed.
PESCA: Jay Lynch, one of the main wacky brains behind Wacky Packages. Thanks very much for being with us, Jay.
Mr. LYNCH: Thank you. You are a New Yorker.
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