Unit 2 Childhood Ad/Tootsie Roll Pop

"The Original Tootsie Roll Pop"

    In 1970, Tootsie Roll Industries produced the famous and iconic children’s animated commercial, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” , this catch phrase has made famous the world’s number #1- selling candy-filled lollipop. This ad was marketed toward candy eating children through animals and a young wondering boy. The ad uses the appeal that you will be rewarded only once you lick or bite your way through the hard candy coating to expose the Tootsie Roll center. In the television ad, a boy poses the question to four animated characters; a cow, a cool but clever fox with sunglasses, an aging turtle and finally the wisest of all the animals, Mr. Owl wearing his professor’s cap and studious looking glasses. Each one of the first three animals tells the boy to ask the next “wiser” animal, explaining that they’d bite a Tootsie Pop every time they lick one. Eventually, he asks Mr. Owl, who starts licking it, counts one, two, then three licks before crunching down to reach the embedded Tootsie Roll prize. The commercial ends with the line "The World May Never Know."

 Many have tried, and failed, to lick their way to the center of the Tootsie Pop. The temptation to bite and reach the embedded Tootsie Roll prize has proven too great. The television ad above and the print ads below are realistic because you will be rewarded with a chewy, Tootsie Roll center. It was the first lollipop providing an embedded candy “prize.” The marketers of Tootsie Roll Industries want children to believe simply that if you buy this candy that there will be this grand adventure or game along with a great reward of chewy chocolate candy.

Rumors and Culture

There is a legend associated with the wrapper of Tootsie Pop lollipops. The rumor is that if you come across a wrapper with a picture of a boy in an Indian costume shooting an arrow at a star, and you send that wrapper to the company that makes Tootsie Pops, you will receive either a free lollipop or a case of lollipops. The company maintains there was never any sort of official promotion or contest associated with Tootsie Pop wrappers. For many years the company responded to kids who wrote in to claim their free Tootsie Pop with an apologetic letter, but since 1982 they’ve also enclosed a short work of fiction called “The Legend of the Indian Wrapper.” In this short letter, it tells of a man "long, long ago, when all lollipops were made alike," who wanted to make a new kind of sucker with something special inside. But he couldn't figure out how. Well, one day the man awoke "to find a grand Indian chief smiling at him. The chief told the man that he would help him make a lollipop with a chewy candy center, if the man promised the chief that he would never, ever, stop making them for people. The man promised. ... The 'Indian Wrapper' is supposedly a sign that the grand chief has personally checked that particular lollipop for the chewy candy center."

Reference:http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/business/a/tootsie_pop.htm