Delightfully Anachronistic Package Design: Jason Bread Crumbs!

Ever since I got whacked in the head with a bright green vinyl-covered putter by some obnoxious six-year-old in the unruly golfing party (“mob” was more like it) behind us some years ago at Putt-Putt Palace down in Redondo (Long gone! Closed down after the settlement!) I’ve had this admittedly unusual preoccupation with anachronistic package design.

You see, when I happen upon a package of something that looks particularly old, I say to myself, “My, but that package looks rather anachronistic; that is to say, it exists here in the present yet is representative of a previous time – and I find this delightful.”

Recently I was in my local ethniceteria, that is to say, a place that sells foods that exist here in this country yet are representative of other cultures – a sort of exotic food “bazaar” if you will –  and I found this:

Above: Jason Bread Crumbs! Also available in blue!

And as you would be – hell, as you are now, just looking at it here on my site – I was positively enchanted by this package design. I know you’ll agree that it looks like something we’d find if we had a chance to root around Saul Bass’s kitchen cupboards in the late 1970s.

Unfortunately, I was not the grand prize winner in the 1978 Lawry’s Seasoned Salt “Root Around Saul Bass’s Kitchen Cupboards” Sweepstakes so we’ll never know exactly what was in there. (And lucky winner Della Frankinhoff passed away in 1998 before I got a chance to interview her.)

I did get a third place t-shirt though. My hyperhidrosis (chronic sweating) coupled with my chromhidrosis (colored sweat, in my case, yellow-green due to a neonatal addiction to pistachio instant pudding) rendered it unwearable in a matter of weeks. But thank God for old family snapshots, right?!

On an unrelated note, I really need to hire some sort of online marketing guru to figure out why no one seems to visit this site more than once.

Posted by Ted on April 9, 2012, 12:30 AM.