Jingle blog. (And I don’t mean bells).

Today wasn’t a total loss. While I was on hold briefly, I heard, unexpectedly—who would expect such a thing, dragged from deep in the pit of popular memory, steaming with associations of long-gone days in front of the TV, representing… but I run on at the keyboard. There I was, making a business call, and what do I hear but—something I don’t think I’ve heard for 30 years, mind you, something virtually everyone my age would recognize, but also something that probably couldn’t be made now, so dated does it sound…

Yes, it was the Armour Hot Dog song. Part of which goes:

“What kind of kids eat Armour hot dogs?

Fat kids, skinny kids,

Kids who climb on rocks.

Tough kids, sissy kids,

Even kids with chicken pox

Love hot dogs

Armour hot dogs…”

I doubt that very many kids exhibited much brand loyalty to hot dogs in the late 1960s, when this jingle was current, or even now, but I suppose some parents did. The really striking thing about the lyric isn’t the sales aspect, though. It’s the reference to fat kids and sissy kids—something I don’t think would fly at many ad agencies these days, so entrenched are overwrought notions of self-esteem in our time.