Cracker Jack

I’ve just rediscovered Cracker Jack. I haven’t seen, much less eaten, this snack in at least 20 years. On a road trip with the family, I had to stop in a convenience store to pick up some snacks, and I found a near-forgotten childhood memory between the potato chips and pretzels.

Of course I picked up the bag and bought a taste of my youth. It’s in a bag now, instead of the original box. And the pieces are pretty uniformly round, instead of randomly deformed as normal for popped corn.

They taste just as I remember them, popcorn coated with caramel, and mixed with some peanuts. Still great. I highly recommend them.

But has the Cracker Jack treat really been missing for all these years, or have I just not noticed them? Surely they didn’t just fall off my radar? I did some quick looking around the Internet, and I can’t find any reference to Cracker Jack “coming back.” So I have to presume they have always been around through all these years, and I’ve just been a growing old putz with a blind spot. Sad, really.

Now, how about the prize? As it should be, the prize was very near the bottom. I’d eaten probably 80% of the bag before feeling it with my fingers. A small paper packet, about 2″ square, with red and white stripes, the icon characters, Sailor Jack and Bingo, and blue circles with the text:

Surprise Inside
Guess What’s Inside?

Hmm. Um. What the heck is this? Titled “Smart Mouth,” it is a color image of what might be a clam on one side, and is a cow on the other. Perforations and dotted lines criss-cross the images. The numbered directions explain how to fold the paper and then manipulate it to make the picture move. Okay, let’s try this out. Hold please. . .

Alrighty, I see, now. Folding it and manipulating it properly makes it look like the animal’s (the cow in this case) mouth is moving, as if speaking. Kind of cute, in a very simple way. The more I sit here and fiddle with it, the cuter it gets. Clever, sort of.

I manipulated it for the wife, ventriloquizing, “Hey, baby. Gimme a kiss.”

She smiled and said, “It doesn’t take much to entertain you, does it?”

I’ll have to work it for the kids and see their reaction. At the back of the little prize packet, is a “Fun Facts” page:

When triggered, a Venus flytrap closes in less than 100 milliseconds. It takes about 10 days for the trap to digest an insect.

Fun toy and fun facts in one simple paper prize. Edutainment at its finest.

Bullgrit