Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Marvel's Super Slurpee Fun Game

What's the ad for?
7-11's Super Slurpee Fun Game
Year
1981
Spotted in...

The Scoop
To celebrate the near start of summer I thought I would share this Marvel Slurpee ad/contest. Your chance to win thousands of dollars in cash. I like the instructions on how to play...
"With the edge of a coin, gently scratch-ff the gold squares on the front of your game card."
Like that needs explaining? Then again, this was 1981. Perhaps the concept of scratch-and-win was new. When I was a kid in junior high (Calgary, 1989/90), Hostess potato chips ran a contest featuring a scratch-and-win Nintendo Power Pad. Every card was a winner; you just had to scratch the correct squares to get matching symbols. Someone in my school came up with the idea of carefully placing pieces of Scotch Tape onto the squares and then slowly pealing the tape off. A thin layer of the silver scratching material would come off with the tape. Now if you held the Power Pad game card up to the light, you could make out all the symbols hidden underneath. Most cards won you a free bag of chips or a bottle of pop but soon kids started showing up with wearing Nintendo swag (T-shirts and hats). It was a good run for us and I'm sure we all gained a few potato chip pounds but when your young it didn't matter, we were outside riding our bicycles and playing street hockey all the time anyway.

Then in the fall a new contest started. In each bag of potato chips was another scratch-and-win game card, this time featuring NHL teams. Same concept, this time match the team logos and win something. Every card was a potential winner. We tried the same trick again but it didn't work. The game cards were now made of thicker paper. There was no way you were going to see through these ones. I wonder how much money Hostess lost because someone decided to "save" costs on thinner paper.

I find it hard to believe that it was only the population my junior high whom were doing this. Did anyone else remember doing this? There were even rumors of a local kid ratting us out by telling Hostess what we were doing, which in turn lead to the thicker paper being used for the next contest. Supposedly he received boxes of free chips and stuff. In retrospect I don't think that was the case but you never know.

2 comments:

  1. Amazing. I was having a flashback of being a child and my older brother showing me how to win those Nintendo scratch cards with tape and a flashlight, also in Calgary, Springbank to be specific. Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone else had that memory, and Google shows me that you did! Thanks for the nostalgia.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cool! Yeah I did the same thing, Googling to see who else did this...nothing. Pre-internet eh!

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