Screaming Yellow Zonkers – You Kind Of Had To Be There

We have not waxed poetic about an obsolete snack food for quite awhile now. But I am kind of hungry for something, and thought of something I had not thought of in years – Screaming Yellow Zonkers. What, you might ask, are Screaming Yellow Zonkers? Or what WERE they, might be a more appropriate question. The answer, like with so many things that came about in the late 1960’s is that you kind of had to be there.

1968 was one of those times that is hard to understand for those who were not around. The youth market was king, as the earliest of the big demographic blob otherwise known as the Baby Boomers, became old enough to start spending their own money on things. Muscle cars like the Plymouth Road Runner were in auto showrooms, and innumerable new rock groups had shoved old timers like Sinatra from the radio waves. It was no different with snack foods.

Snack foods must have been the place to be in the business world in the 1960’s. A Swiss concern called the Wander Company (which made Ovaltine in the U.S.) bought the rights to a candy-glazed popcorn/nut product called Poppycock from a Detroit confectioner in 1960. It merged with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz in 1968, to become the Sandoz-Wander company, and set up a division to make the snack foods in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fittingly (and rather unimaginatively) they called it Lincoln Snacks Company.

Lincoln set out to expand its offerings (hey, it was the 60’s and everything was growth, growth, growth) and they added a toffee-glazed popcorn with peanuts, which they called Fiddle Faddle. That same year came another product, with a sweet butter-glazed popcorn that needed a name. It may be presumed that names like “Nonsense” or “Gobbledygook” were considered, but passed over. Instead, some Chicago ad agencies were asked to pitch their ideas for a name and packaging for the product. The small shop of Hurvis, Binzer & Churchill was on the job and came up with a perfect name for 1968: Screaming Yellow Zonkers.

If ever there was a snack food that was more about the clever name and packaging than about the snack itself, it was Screaming Yellow Zonkers. The glaze on the popcorn was a bright yellow, so at least that part of the name made sense. The rest of it? It wasn’t really supposed to make sense, other than as a way for a division of a big multi-national company to capitalize on the anti-establishment zeitgeist of the time. In that, it kind of succeeded.

There was clever and snarky language on the packaging, with was itself bold and oh, so very 60’s. What do do with Screaming Yellow Zonkers? Why, read to them, of course. But don’t buy them a new car. How helpful.

And there was some television advertising, too (of course) – at least early on. Like these – this clip has two. The first one is interesting, and the second gives those who weren’t there an idea of what 1968 was like to live through. And there is a bit of trivia – did you know that Lincoln’s parent company Sandoz-Wander was the maker of LSD? Maybe now this is all starting to make sense.

I remember the stuff being the topic of conversation among the older members of my extended family – sort of like “Can you believe THAT?” But it worked well enough for at least one box of the stuff to make it into my mother’s shopping cart. I wish I could say that the product itself was memorable, but it really wasn’t. It seemed enough that we had broken the generation gap at in our little suburban, midwestern neighborhood where people still bought Oldsmobile sedans in sedate browns and greens, with a brightly lettered box of SCREAMING YELLOW ZONKERS. Sorry, but that just seems like a name that, well, screams out for capital letters. Amiright?

In at least one way, Lincoln’s bet failed to pay off. I, as one of the later boomers, don’t believe that I ever spent any of my own money on Screaming Yellow Zonkers. I remember seeing the box on store shelves (at least occasionally) far after they had ceased to be hip and cool. A little research reveals that they lasted until 2007, when Lincoln was acquired by ConAgra. Fiddle Faddle and Poppycock survived the merger, but SYZ fell victim to the knives of the new owners. Who was buying these during the George W. Bush administration? Maybe the same people who were following The Grateful Dead?

Until it made a limited comeback in 2012 as part of a promotion with Walgreen stores. But I don’t think the revival lasted long, and they went away again.

As I think about it, I hear lots of people my age (as we fall victim to nostalgia) pine for all kinds of foods we ate growing up. There are lots of them, and I can imagine everyone who reads this will have his or her own short list. But have you ever heard anyone sigh and say “You know what I really miss from when I was a kid? Screaming Yellow Zonkers.” At least not with a straight face.

46 thoughts on “Screaming Yellow Zonkers – You Kind Of Had To Be There”

  1. Remember them, and eating them, like it was yesterday! I pretty much remember they were like, or gave a similar effect to, any of those glazed popcorn specialties at the time. My local has about five versions of this type of stuff, most made by local popcorn companies, on the shelves today. This was in an era where ad agencies, in the early sixties, had become famous to the general public, for things like the Volkswagen campaign, and small ad shops and marketing departments in corporations in the fly-over were playing catch-up to hipness! Unfortunately, the product name, while being able to guarantee that almost anyone might buy a box to see what the hub-bub was about, was not going to age well! The name alone guaranteed that it would end up being as fresh as a Nehru jacket a few years after the launch.

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    • I think the mid 60’s may have been the end of the golden age of ad agencies – those guys earned their money on this one, at least for the first few years.

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      • Allan Katz here, creator of Zonkers. Funny that somebody would mention Laugh–In and The Farkle Family, because when Zonkers first came out George Schlatter who was putting Laugh-In together tracked me down in Chicago, flew me to LA and at age 25 I became one of the youngest writers on the show.

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      • Thanks so much for your comment, Allan! It is amazing how you found yourself in the middle of so many threads of 1960’s pop culture.

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      • Thank you to Mr. Katz!

        The boxes weren’t just zany… and they were that… But the boxes were laugh out loud funny.

        When I read some of the text I had to repeat it out loud to whoever was near.

        The product name and the text captured what was unique and righteous about that era.

        Mr. Katz, you are so fly!

        Thank you very much.

        Steve Richards, humble fan#1.

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    • I have probably consumed at least a little of the entire set. Those kinds of candied popcorn snacks always appeal to me, at least for a few handfuls.

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    • I think these were probably a bit pricey for what they were. I know I always felt that way about Fiddle-Faddle. A big bag of caramel popcorn from one of the regional snack companies always seemed a better value.

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  4. Never heard of them here, at first glace I thought the package was a movie in a VHS box.
    Screaming Yellow Zonkers sounds more interesting as a film than a snack. Perhaps starring Gene Wilder…

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    • Once more, the Canada/USA border comes between us in the world of snack foods. I think you are absolutely right – nobody would have sounded as right sayin “screaming yellow zonkers” over and over as Gene Wilder. Except for maybe Mel Brooks.

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  5. SYZ’s ad agency earned their money because the name sticks with me after all these years. As you say, the product itself took a back seat to the packaging – can’t even claim I ate any since the description reminds me just as much of Cracker Jack and Fiddle Faddle. We just watched “10 Things I Hate About You” for the first time. Throughout the movie I was thinking, “Remember when society was so free and easy?” Not sure I’d ever go back to those days but I get nostalgic for them every now and then.

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    • Now you have made me hungry for a box of Cracker Jack! Except that I always wished there was a higher peanut-to-popcorn ratio.

      I have never seen that movie, maybe I will have to look for it and give it a watch. I suspect that the past always seems simpler, except back when we were actually living it. 🙂

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      • JP, you said a mouthful! The peanut to popcorn ratio of Cracker Jack seems to have been dwindling over the years! You could probably date the manufacturing era by calculating the peanut to popcorn ratio. Once again, if you have a local purveyor of popcorn related treats, if may be possible to find a near clone of Cracker Jack with a substantial amount of peanuts in it, thank God!

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  8. DougD nailed it – this does look like VHS movie packing. Perhaps due to coming along after 1968, and not being a fan of popcorn, I have never heard of these until today.

    The people that named these were geniuses.

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    • I think these faded to some pretty inconspicuous self space by the time you were old enough to pay attention. In with the boxes of stuff that is too expensive for what it is.

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  9. Boy, talk about encapsualting the Sixties. I remember seeing them sometimes but I never bought them. The advertisements you include were typical of the times, like the Uncola ones. They have Fiddle-Faddle at the Dollar Tree.

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    • Now you have me wondering how long it has been since I have bought either Fiddle-Faddle or Poppycock. The snack food kind, anyway. We all seem to buy a lot of it in political news these days.

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  10. On the one hand, I can’t tell you the last time I thought about Screaming Yellow Zonkers. On the other hand, the moment I saw the title I pictured and tasted them. I won’t swear to it, but I kind of think we ate them as part of a homemade Chex mix sort of thing, probably when we would go up North in the summer, so mid to late ’70s. Best served with various flavors of Faygo.

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  11. I wonder why I don’t remember Screaming Yellow Zonkers but I do remember Fiddle Faddle and we used to have it for a snack, maybe watching TV on Saturday night. So I guess we were a “Fiddle Faddle family”. The second clip was fun and yes, it did give you a nice snapshot of life in 1968, especially the styles which I remember well having grown up in that era. 🙂

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  12. I remember Fiddle Faddle, but honestly can’t remember this one. At least one vendor at every street festival and county fair I’ve ever attended has offered something like this. So the basic snack lives on in spirit, if not in name.

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  13. I remember Fiddle Faddle, but not this one. At least one vendor has offered this snack at every street festival and county fair I’ve ever attended, so the basic snack lives on in spirit.

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  15. Allan Katz here, copywriter for the original SYZ box, the second box (circus) and the first two animated commercials. Them to try to save money, the parent company, Ovaltine, decided to write the next couple of boxes and commercials themselves. Screaming Yellow Zonkers soon disappeared and I headed off to Hollywood and as one of the writers of Laugh-In.

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    • Thanks so much for coming to comment!! That’s always the way, isn’t it? Some creative person captures lightning in a bottle and then the financial types decide that anyone can do it and for a lot less money. The results are predictable.

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