Hello Woodsy
I looked at the weekend and found just one of the designs I did for the Star Wars Chocolate Bar, the b/w version. I'll keep looking for the colour collectable version.
I think I told you the back story of the Star Wars bar. The husband of one of my sister-in-laws co-workers when a student near Milwaukee had sold the idea of a chocolate bar to the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Team with their team logo on it. The bar was sold in the stadium and in some local stores.
He had tried to sell the idea to other teams but was contacted by the legal department of the National League and was told he had to pay a fee to them if he wanted to expand to other teams.
This would have reduced his profits and on hearing I was a graphic designer he approached me to develop his new ideas. The first was a chocolate bar called The Flicks.
It would have wrappers with images from old movies and would be sold at Cinemas. The idea was that they could charge more for a chocolate bar to a captive audience as no outside food is the basic rule.
I did a few designs using photos from famous movies such as Seven Year Itch which is the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate with a blast of air lifting her skirt. While he was marketing this idea he diverted his attention to George Lucas and Star Wars.
The reply from Lucas Films was that 'junk food' would not be licensed as Star Wars...........How times have changed. Disney who own the brand will market anything as Star Wars.
In the end the genius with these ideas had a nervous breakdown, walked out on his wife and kids and was never heard from again.
Any work I did was on 'spec' against a percentage if an idea took off. As far as I know he went out of business and The Brewers Bar only lasted another year or so. So none of the designs I worked on made it to market.
The chocolate company he had worked with was an independant novelty maker, foil wrapped rabbits for Easter and Santas for Christmas and private brand chocolate bars for supermarkets etc.
The chocolate quality was pretty good the basic bar was either milk chocolate or with rice crispies in it.
If a more stable person was behind the idea The Flicks bar could have been quite successful with collectable wrappers. Very Willy Wonka!
What I do remember was my tax return for the year I did these as it included 'research', which in my case was returning from the UK with a suitcase full of chocolate bars. I probably have the wrappers somewhere.
Which also reminds me to remind you to watch SPACEBALLS given last weeks mention of all those obscure SF movies you remembered.
Regards,
Terranova47
Manhattan Base
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