Cartoon Glasses

Now that I've got kids of my own, I find myself spoiling them a little.  When they want a ball at the store, I usually buy it.  If there is some fabulous prize at McDonald's (yeah, right!) we usually end up with it.  One of the things I wanted growing up, that I could never get my hands on, were cartoon glasses.  You know the kind.  They were drinking glasses given away at different restaurants when you made some pre-set purchase.  They had images of favorite cartoon characters on the outside, and to a kid, they were pretty attractive.

The funny thing is, for all of my begging for them back then, I had no intention of preserving them as collectibles.  I just wanted the cool glasses with Bugs Bunny and friends plastered on the outside.  It turns out that now they are pretty darn collectible.  I have since found articles about them that actually say that the ones I wanted are some of the most collected today.  The 1974 Pepsi glasses were what I really wanted!

From what I've observed, mostly from the selling end, Pepsi cartoon glasses are some of the most coveted promotional glasses going. I suppose that makes sense since they featured extremely popular characters like the Tasmanian Devil, Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck...The list goes on and on, but when little kids saw them, they wanted them, A LOT. I should mention that it wasn't only Looney Tunes characters that were really popular. Less well known characters like Underdog and his buddies showed up too.

Many times, people assume that the only way to get their hands on these glasses is to either scour garage sales and flea markets or head straight to eBay. eBay is probably the place where you will find the most old cartoon glasses listed for sale, but I have been finding more and more of them showing up on Amazon. Although the selection is much smaller, the advantage of looking for vintage glasses on Amazon is that there is much less competition and the price is fixed (usually at a lower price than eBay). If you collect, it is worth checking out.

I find old Peanuts glasses a lot as I go from sale to sale.  I mostly find them at flea markets run by churches.  That seems to be where people unload a lot of old stuff they meant to collect at one time.  If you are a collector, you might want to check out some of those sales.  The only problem is that you really never know what you will find.  Most times, if you are looking for something specific, you don't find it.  Part of the reason that I have so much collectible stuff around here is that I pretty much bought everything anyone could ever want to collect!  That in addition to some purchases of bulk estate stuff fills the house in a hurry.  Sorry, I went majorly off topic there for a minute.  The Peanuts glasses I have around here (and will be listing) are mostly from 1965.  That's a little before my time, but they must have sold a ton of them.  I've got shelves full.

I was looking around for an interesting video to put here that showed some promotional glasses being sold.  I found the following video that I liked even more.  This is a 1970s McDonald's commercial that will probably make some younger people do a double take it is so different from what you see today.  If you look closely at this commercial, you'll see some faces you have probably seen before from TV shows.

Tags: Bugs Bunny, Burger King, Charlie Brown, glasses, Looney Tunes, McDonald's, Peanuts, Pepsi, pepsi cartoon glasses, promotional, promotional glasses, vintage pepsi glasses

Category: Games and Toys, old collectibles