Is it just me, or does the vision of Happy HoHo emerging from the tender, yielding petal seem a bit, uh, suggestive?
We'll not say a word about the creamy filling, or the kids urging their mom to "Take a bite," or Mom's dazed, happy-for-the-moment-but-how-long-can-this ecstasy-last reaction to Happy's chocolaty goodness. After all, any subtext in this commercial was surely unintentional.
And as for this:
"Draw a banana and give it a hat"? Huh.
What's weird is, as a child of the seventies, I took all this in stride. Happy HoHo was just an ambulatory snack treat, not a walking, talking (and surprisingly diminutive) representation of African-American manhood. And Charles Nelson Reilly wasn't a squishy yellow Freudian nightmare, but just, you know, a big banana. Nothing odd, nothing troubling. Nothing to embed itself into the collective subconscious of an entire generation, who purely by coincidence came of age in the era of Prozac.
On the other hand:
A huge, property-smashing pitcher offering children the drink of choice from Jonestown? Even as a kid, I found that terrifying.
