Tellingly, you won’t see this trend in other food products like cake mixes or bread or olives. It’s part of the trend for retro packaging in other junk food, such as Doritos or Mountain Dew. This packaging is nostalgia for grownups. Intuitively, I think that the order and simplicity of the older design would appeal more towards children than the current design.īut the order and reassurance of the Cap’n Crunch box isn’t primarily for kids. To bombard them with more aggressive colors and images in advertising and packaging seems like the marketing idea of someone that believes that children are loud and chaotic, so they should be marketed to using the same loudness and chaos. Children naturally seek to recreate worlds that they can comprehend and master, whether through wooden blocks, action figures, crayons and craft paper or science kits. Play isn’t about making chaos, but making order. Though I wasn’t able to articulate it at the time, as a child I felt that the world was chaotic and unintelligible enough.
The current use of louder, more aggressive, more obnoxious graphics to market to children always seemed counter intuitive to me. A recent study shows that cereal companies are trying to connect with young consumers by having cartoon spokes people look down to them, which this later Cap’n certainly does. And the dimensionality is of the later packaging of this cereal is trying to reach out to children in more than a metaphoric way. Ads have become louder, more aggressive, more in-your-face. It’s part of a larger trend in the marketing to children that’s taken place in the past few decades. There is a satisfying order to the retro packaging that the newer iterations doesn’t have. The logo of the original packaging is done in a straightforward Clarendon, with the retro packaging is a more whimsical original typeface that looks more retro than the 60s version. This is something that newer style of packaging doesn’t offer. If we compare it with the original packing of the cereal from the mid-60s, we see that the retro packaging keeps the original tag line of “Stays Crunchy… Even in Milk.” They also share the offering small collectible, with the original promising a stamp and the retro version advertising a collectible card. There is a straightforward order to the foreground/background relationship, with the cereal in the foreground. The Retro Crunch packaging by contrast is flatter and simpler. This dimensionality is further emphasized by the foreshortening of the Cap’n’s arm and spoon, which looks to break the plane of the box with the bowl and spill out into the cereal aisle. The logo also has volume, with shaded letters rolling back and pushing forward into space.
The shading of the newer Cap’n had added pillowy volume to the figure. The bolder, flatter style of the illustration and of the logo is a refreshing change from the modeled rendering of the newer packaging. In the summer of 2010, Quaker Oats released vintage-styled packaging for three of its Cap’n Crunch cereals – Peanut Butter Crunch, Crunchberry and the original Cap’n Crunch.
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