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Jail-O, anyone?

Wacky Packages, the hand-drawn parodies of consumer products sold as stickers in the 1970s, are coming back.

NEW YORK - Somewhere, in a junior high locker, sits a faded sticker: "Weakies, the Breakfast of Chumps."

Time to scrape it off and make room for a new generation of pop-culture spoofs. Wacky Packages, the hot 1970s fad parodying popular household products, is revamped and ready for the 21st century.

Earlier this year, the Topps Co. re-released Wacky Packages with one view to the nostalgia market and another on kids brought up in the computer age. The company hopes its product can transcend time and the generation gap.

"Poking fun at things, making parody, is a long accepted form of entertainment and one we think transcends generations," said Ira Friedman, vice president of new products at Topps. "But the question remains: Aside from the adult market, will it resonate with younger kids today? We hope so."

Born in 1967, Wacky Packages were hand-drawn parodies done with Mad magazine style-humor, placed on punched-out cardboard with a lick-and-stick back, and sold like baseball cards in a pack with a piece of gum.

Early artists included pulp-novel cover master Norman Saunders, who also created the Mars Attacks series for Topps, and Art Spiegelman, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his illustrated holocaust narratives Maus and Maus II.

Everything was fair game. Jell-O became "Jail-O" - a metal file hidden in a Jell-O mold and billed as Sing-Sing's favorite dessert. Gravy-Train Dog Food became "Grave Train," with a picture of a dead dog and the grim tag line, "Your dog will never eat anything else."

Topps even took swipes at its own products, turning Bazooka gum into "Gadzooka."

Initially, the cards were not successful. But when they were brought back in 1973 as stickers, they quickly became the biggest thing since white rice (or "Minute Lice," as the stickers would have it).

"Anyone who was 7 years old in 1973 who wasn't really square was into this stuff," said Greg Grant, a University of Pennsylvania research mathematician who runs an elaborate Wacky Packages Web site.

With their booming popularity back then, New York Magazine put them on the front page, the New York Times gave them a large spread and kids all over the country affixed them to school desks and lockers.

"It's an inherently common pastime for kids to take a printed sticker and - as a from of expression, mind you - put it on something," said John Williams, the creative series manager at Topps. "It's kind of like graffiti, I suppose, just maybe not as messy."

By 1976, Topps began running out of ideas, and called it quits after printing the 16th series.

Briefly in early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, Topps came out with new Wacky Packages series, but they never took off. The problem with those, Grant said, is that they went "just too far into gross-out humor."

Oddly, the Topps folks decided on the re-release after the success of last summer's encore of the gross Wacky-Pack successor, the Garbage Pail Kids.

The new series will feature art from some of the original artists and with takeoffs on modern products like baboon-flavored "Chimp Stick" (Chap Stick), "Mr. Coffin Casket Liners" (Mr. Coffee coffee liners), and blue snazazberry flavored "Bling Pups" (Topps' own Ring Pops).

[Last modified July 9, 2004, 12:20:38]