Random Retro Riffraff #7: The Jolly Green Giant Doll

Special offer for boys and girls who eat their vegetables: a lifetime of night terrors, courtesy of Green Giant.

Actually, the first line of this ad is pretty convincing; I can believe this 4-foot rag doll is “just the fellow you need at your house to get the children going on their vegetables.” If my mother had set an extra place at the table for this deadeyed goblin and suggested he was there to monitor my Green Giant intake, I’d have choked down two helpings of canned asparagus spears before the sauce had congealed on my Shells & Cheese. As a tool of intimidation, this thing is genius. The eerie attached earlobes, the weirdly furry nose, the wide glassy eyes that double as portals to the eternal void that awaits us all after death (which, by the way, will only come sooner if you don’t eat your peas). I’m thinking of investing in one for my daughter, except I love her too much to solve her vegetable problem with abject cruelty.

“Only in the 60s” advertising alert: bangs worn unironically an inch above the eyebrows; the copywriter’s insistence that “lightweight styrene fluffing” is a selling point.