Episode 04: Reddy Kilowatt, Big Boy and Advertising Mascots

Two Designers Walk Into A Bar

Episode 04: Reddy Kilowatt, Big Boy and Advertising Mascots

Released October 28, 2020
© 2020 Two Designers Media, LLC

Welcome to Two Designers Walk Into a Bar. A place where pop culture, loving creatives, discover design icons that make us tick. And we share a few cocktails in the process.

Oh yeah! Today, we’re feeling grrrrrrreat in the land of advertising mascots. Where geckos, tigers and bunnies grow rich, the elves do the baking and they all want to sell us something. Join the Doughboys, the Crockers and the Choculas as we Cap’n Crunch through time to avoid the Noid when Two Designers Walk Into a Bar.

So Todd, today I am excited to share an advertising mascot, a personality that, again has been with me for a long time – ever since I was a little kid. I came to find out after doing some research he has actually been around much longer than I have.

It is the Trojan condom man?

Isn’t it. Because if it had been him then I would never have been around.

Oh, good catch. So, okay.

That’s not going to be the Trojan man’s tagline…“Wasn’t for me. You’d be here right now.”

No, I was thinking, “Good catch.”

Oh, okay. So your mascot has been around for a long time. What are we talking? We talking 50 years? A hundred years?

Closer to a hundred.

Oh, okay. Well interestingly enough, I have a mascot that has been in the public for coming up on a hundred years. Also probably probably close to like 90.

Okay. My guy may have an edge on yours by a few years.

We’ll see if your guy happens to turn out older and wiser and more successful than mine.

Sounds good. Hey, let’s jump in and get started.

All right, Todd. I would like to jump into a little bit of a guessing game with you. Let's have a little bit of fun if that’s okay. I feel like I tipped my hand a little bit in giving away a couple of things. One of the things was the fact that I said, “He.”

Okay, so right…That it gives away.

Then the other thing that I gave away was the approximate age, which is about a hundred years. Okay. So based on that, do you have any guesses or do we need to play 20 questions?

All right. I don’t think we have time or the audience for 20 questions, but let’s try two more questions. How about that?

We’re talking something that was invented around 1920 then?

Yeah. Give or take, or at least. Well, I say invented. It was discovered before that. Let’s just say widespread implementation. Okay?

So it’s a service of some kind?

Yes.

Okay, good. I’m getting warmer…

Its widespread service dates from 1920.

This could be an automobile? Or radio?

Getting warmer. What powers your radio? What do you need? What do you need for a radio to work?

What powers radio you ask? Electricity.

Exactly.

Oh!

Jump back, everybody. Todd’s hopping up and down.

Oh!

Go for it…

Mr. Reddy Kilowatt!

Bing! Bing! Bing! Reddy Kilowatt. Except no substitute.

That is cool, Elliot. A hundred years old? Wow.

So now your guy…you said you had a guy, correct?

Yeah. I could have teased you with this to find out if we also have the same one. My mascot is based on a chubby six-year old. Is Reddy Kilowatt based on a chubby six-year old?

Todd, I think a Reddy Kilowatt would have cooked a chubby six-year old. So gosh, a hundred years-old…I’m thinking…the first thing that pops into my mind…I gotta be honest with you…is like Spanky from the Little Rascals.

Right, right, right, right. Think of that but think of a product.

Eliiot, let me ask it this way.

Sure.

How would you describe Spanky?

Oh, I don’t want to go so far as to say like cherubic, but certainly round cheeked. I guess for lack of a better word – spunky or bouncy.

Elliot, you slipped and fell in it.

Yeah. And I think we slipped and fell into a nice little grease puddle from the griddle. Cause yeah, obviously a big boy – which is awesome.

Good! Bob’s Big Boy. Let me give you a little bit…

So are you going to whet my appetite?

I’m going to. Let’s say that. I’m going to whet your appetite. Speaking of your appetite…

Can I get a tidbit or two?

Aw geez. You can get a tidbit or two.

Well get your buns moving…

Oh my God. This is great. You’re on fire Elliot…

I don’t want to add extra cheese onto this podcast…You’re putting me in a pickle…Time to catch up.

You must-a heard. (laughter)

There’s a story that involves a lot of lament on my part, and a lot of joy on Todd’s part – for another day.

But let me tell you about the origins of Bob’s Big Boy. I'll start with a guy named “Bob Wian.” Who started a restaurant as you do.

He invented the double decker hamburger…

Todd, wait a second. I need to press pause right now. So it wasn’t, McDonald’s with the Big Mac?

It wasn’t.

This guy is a burger innovator? He was the first one in all of human history to stack two patties on top of one another?

He stacked two patties on top of one another. As a matter of fact, he was about 20 years ahead of McDonald’s. The franchisee that invented the Big Mac actually said, “Yeah, you know…I guess you can kind of say we borrowed that. It was not like he invented the light bulb. He just screwed in a different light bulb.”

That’s an actual quote from the franchisee of McDonald’s, but we’re not talking about McDonald’s right now.

Yeah. I’m really confused.

Hey, you talk light bulbs. Guess what? Reddy? Kilowatt’s nose is a light bulb.

Very cool. So was Reddy Kilowatt based on a person of some kind or what was he based on?

We’re gonna have the full backstory and links to this on our website, because it would really take…there is like an encyclopedic answer to this…but I’ll try to keep it fun. Again, it’s Two Designers Walk Into a Bar, right? I’ll give you the casual, ham-fisted answer that I’m so good at – with pretty much everything I address.

He was created basically to sell electricity to farmers. So around a hundred-years ago – when the depression hit – most of the United States outside of urban areas still didn’t have electricity. Electricity is – going back to my quiz with you about what powers the radio – you don’t see electricity. Electricity is kind of a thing that’s all around us.

So was it like in more rural areas? Like in the South where I grew up?

Yeah. I mean, it was basically targeting farmers and folks like this.

It was like the magic air. It was the magic air that they were trying to market. Wasn’t it?

Something like that? Yeah. I don’t think Reddy Kilowatt was a magician with a top hat and cape who like just magically held a light bulb in his hand and it lit up. He actually has lightening bolts for a body and he actually has little lightening bolt horns. Then his ears are sockets from an outlet. He has his light bulb nose, like we talked about and he has little Woody Woodpecker-ish sort of cartoon gloves and little elf boots.

Right. Reddy was a cartoon character, but he put a friendly face on something that was both abstract and potentially super dangerous – when you think about it. And that really made him friendly, right?

Made it accessible to these folks that had not been exposed to electricity – thinking it was voodoo and magic.

Right. Reddy was the brainchild of this guy named Ashton B. Collins, who. Worked at the time for Alabama Power. And in fact, this was so successful that he left Alabama Power and started his own marketing company – just a license Reddy Kilowatt to different electrical companies and utilities, not even just in the United States. Actually in his prime. Reddy was global.

Wow. No kidding.

So you, you reminded me of Big Boy with our friend Bob, who invented the double-decker hamburger.

We’ve already established that. Yes, innovator.

He also was an innovator when it came to franchises. But I’m going to get to that in just a second.

First of all, we got to talk about the name. He invented this double-decker hamburger…had two patties…lettuce…onion, special sauce…things like that on it. And he needed a name for it. Nothing was really ringing. At the same time – as the Gods would have it – this chubby six-year old who used to frequent Bob’s restaurant – then simply called Bob’s pantry.

And the little boy loved it so much. He would even do some odd jobs around the restaurant just to help out. His name was Richard Woodruff and he came bopping in one day – probably in the middle of the lunch weeds. Bob stressed, momentarily forgot his name…looked up and was like, “Hey, Big Boy!” The name stuck. Bam! You know, just like lightning and Bob’s Big Boy was born.

The name became so popular for the double-decker burger that he changed the name of his restaurant to Bob’s Big Boy.

So we’re all familiar with what Big Boy looks like, but he’s been through… he’s had some work done. Let’s just put it like that. Starting off – inspired by a chubby six-year old, the first person who actually captured little Ricky Woodruff’s likeness was a Warner Brothers animator by the name of Benny Washam.

Warner Brothers – for those of you who aren’t familiar with Burbank – is about a 15-minute walk from the original Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. So Benny Washam…regular customer…Bob asked him to draw a caricature of young Richard Woodruff to use for promotion. In exchange Benny Washam got a free lunch…

Todd, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. A free lunch? He got a free lunch. Yeah.

For drawing little Ricky Woodruff? What did little Ricky get?

Uh…diabetes…angina.

Heart disease…So the illustrator who creates this iconic thing gets a plate full of food. The little boy who literally inspired the name of an entire chain of restaurants, he got nothing? He got diddly squat?

I’m sure he got something. There’s no record of it anywhere, but I’m sure. he was a pretty healthy kid, so I’m sure he got a burger or two probably.

Yeah. Every time he rolled in there, I would think.

(Ed. note: After recording we found this obituary of Richard Woodruff where his brother mentions the food perks he would receive from Bob’s.)

We’re just lucky that Bob Wian happened to take a liking to little Ricky Woodruff otherwise we’d be sitting here talking about Bob’s Shit-For-Brains-Dumbass instead of Bob’s Big Boy. Not quite as palatable. I don’t think it rolls off the tongue as much does it?

No. No. I don’t think it has quite as broad appeal, you know, especially in the twenties and thirties across the Midwest, for example.

Elliot, I talked about the Warner Brothers animator who first drew Bob’s Big Boy. Tell me a little bit more about the guy that was the master behind Reddy Kilowatt. Sure.

I mentioned, Ashton B. Collins came up with the idea, right? He came up with the initial idea.

See Bob, being from California of course, he’s going to get a little work done.

Right?

He’s got to keep it up and he’s got to be able to keep looking good. You know, Reddy being from Alabama, he has a little bit more modesty. The first iteration of Reddy Kilowatt was developed internally by an engineer who he really wasn’t even an artist. You know, he would draw like schematics and things back at Alabama Power.

That lasted for a few years. Then it became fairly obvious to Collins that he needed to take Dan Clinton’s drawing. Dan Clinton was the original illustrator – and he needed to reboot this and make it feel a little bit more professional. So he tracked down a woman named Dorothy A. Warren who at the time was an unknown local artist in Alabama. I think she had started working on some children’s books…was a bit of a commercial artist…commercial illustrator. So she did the Reddy Kilowatt version that is the one we probably are more familiar with.

Because it spread more?

Yeah, it’s getting there.

Her version appeared in what today would essentially be a brand book or a brand guide. So it kind of started going in that direction. It was this guide called Reddy Kilowatt Art Service Reproduction Proofs Book. So you want to talk about things that don’t roll off the tongue?

Yeah, it doesn’t.

If you guys listened to our 1976 podcast. I mentioned that the bicentennial logo standards had been reproduced. Try as I might I wasn’t able to find any reproduction of the Reddy Kilowatt Proofs Book. No one has taken the baton. It has not been passed to anyone, yet. They have not taken up that project. But the one we’re familiar with today – if you go online and look around now… you mentioned Warner Brothers…sacrilege perhaps, I’m going to bring up a competitor to Warner Brothers, which is Walter Lantz. We remember Woody Woodpecker, right? That same guy was asked to redraw and refine Reddy. Part of the reason was this was in the fifties when a lot of different things are happening with electricity. You had suburbs being built, the highway system, post-World War II…all of these things are happening with rapid expansion, right?

Then you have people going to the movies. Television was starting to be in homes. What could we do with Reddy? He actually already existed in comic books and things like that so this was a way to animate Reddy and get even more people thinking about him…getting kids excited about him.

So Todd, I feel that it would be…what’s the right word here…inappropriate to not mention the merchandising opportunities for ad mascots.

A hundred percent.

Yeah. And believe me Reddy delivered on that promise. And I think our friend Collins did nothing to dissuade Reddy from being in every home in America. In fact he encouraged it, so Reddy was adopted by all of these different regional utilities across the country. As a result of that, they all had access to all of this different stuff and they wanted to promote electricity consumption. What do you do? Where is electricity used? It’s used in the kitchen. Well, let’s put Reddy Kilowatt on kitchen stuff. Electricity is used to read by. Let’s make a Reddy Kilowatt lamp, right? You know, he has a light bulb for a nose. If you go on eBay you will get buried in Reddy Kilowatt merchandise now. Reddy even appeared on utility bills saying, “Hey, thanks for paying my wages.” So it’s like, “Hey, we’re not paying this big faceless utility. We’re just helping Reddy. He’s got to eat like the rest of us, too.”

So Elliot, if we had sponsors right now, it’d be a good time for a commercial break.

Great idea, Todd, I bet Reddy and Bob are already at the bar getting their own drink refills. So how about we do the same and meet back here at the table in just a minute?

So this begs a question and I want to throw it back to you here. You mentioned Big Boy also went through a little bit of an evolution. I grew up in Ohio. I’m very familiar with Big Boy. Big Boy started in Southern California. Tell me about this spread across the country. Tell me about the evolution of Big Boy. There’s gotta be more to this story. The Big Boy spread as it were.

Okay. So I told you how he got his start. Flash forward to 1952 and Bob’s first franchise. He’s a guy named David Frisch. That probably sounds familiar to Ohioans like yourself.

Yes. So he licensed the Big Boy food, right?

Times were a little different then and David Frisch invented his own Big Boy character that became known as the East Coast Big Boy. Well, the…

Ho! I need to stop you.

Okay.

So you’re saying that…gosh…there’s East Coast and there’s West Coast and there’s a rivalry going on?

It’s tough out there for a pimp.

It is. I was going to say, this reminds me of something else. You know, they say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Just so everybody is clear.

This whole beef started in the fifties...You see what I did there? Well, I should say double beef really? The reality was there was no East Coast, West Coast rivalry because when it started, they were kind of like, “Yeah. No harm. No foul. We’re in California. You’re in the Midwest. Peace.”

Then David Frisch –in the Midwest started licensing to sub-franchisees, Manners and Azar’s. You’re probably familiar with them as well.

Yep.

Then it kind of became a thing. The name Big Boy was growing. The double-decker hamburger was growing. A character was growing…

All the customers’ waistlines were growing.

Yeah, that’s true. It was confusing because if as you traveled across the United States, one Big Boy looked different from another Big Boy. So back in Burbank in 1955 – you’re going to find this interesting – Bob laid to rest the original Benny Washam drawing and hired a guy named Manfred Bernhard...

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It sounds incredibly familiar.

Son of graphic designer Lucian Bernhard.

One of my favorite designers.

Obviously what do you do if you’re the son of a world famous designer? You design a new character for Big Boy, right?

So Todd, this begs a question. This guy is German.

Yeah.

He’s creative.

Yeah.

So that’s two marks in the win column – in terms of having an opinion…

He had an opinion. He was not impressed with the original Big Boy mascot saying – and this is a quote, “It was sloppy and had a moronic expression.” So West Coast Big Boy was revised. This is closer to what we have today that you see on buildings and statues.

You mentioned that Reddy was a comic book.

Among many, many, many other things. Manfred Bernhard also commissioned a company named Timely Comics to produce a comic book. Timely Comics went on to become…Uh…Mar…Marvel…I think is how you pronounce it. Marvel Comics.

It was written by a guy named Stan Lee.

Stan Lee wrote for Big Boy? That’s awesome.

Along with other luminaries from Marvel like Bill Everett and Sol Brodsky, Dan DeCarlo, Stan Lee continued to write for Big Boy comics until 1961.

Oh, I’m sure that was his release valve, right? That was what he could just sort of have fun with.

It’s still being produced today and it remains one of the longest running comic books still.

That’s awesome. I was about to ask, can you still lay your hands on these vintage comic books? These Big Boys?

They’re a monster. We’ll post some images on the website.

As you would probably guess they are light on the sex and violence. So they’re pretty appropriate for the family. We’ll post some of the great artwork that was done by then Timely Comics – which went on to be Marvel.

So let me wrap up this East Coast West Coast rivalry thing – which was not really a rivalry – It was like, “Okay, you do you. I’ll do me” but as the years were going on and more people were stopping at Big Boy restaurants because they were familiar with them. Big Boy was there and there was a need to really make these characters exactly the same. That was just part of the Big Boy branding. There ended up being…my gosh, I'm doing this from memory…something like 32 different franchisees. They all used their own names. That’s not number of restaurants. That’s number of names. It was Frisch’s Big Boy, Manners Big Boy, Azar’s Big Boy, Shoney’s Big Boy –which was here in the South. They all used the same name. They all used the same menu and of course the Big Boy.

So things came together for the Boy at that time.

Let’s hear it for the Boy.

Yes, let’s hear it for the Boy. Oh, I’m sorry…34 different names representing franchisees.

You did a quick Wikipedia search?

I actually had it in my notes that I wasn’t reading.

I see. Well, folks for those of you who don’t know, Todd would be long dead if it weren’t for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is what keeps him going.

Yes. So Elliot are you noticing some similarities here between our two choices of ad mascots we’re talking about today?

I am. Yeah. I would say the first thing I'm figuring out is each one was from a very distinct and specific part of the United States.

You know Southern California, Southern United States…Southeast, you know, with Alabama. I would say the second thing is while they were both created for a very small or very specific purpose, it really had this universal appeal. Everybody gets hungry. You know, and it’s a good burger, everybody sooner or later is going to need to use electricity for something.

And so this idea of franchising and licensing something.

Yeah. A lot of parallels. Again, I think that’s no accident since both of these mascots came of age as arguably the country went from being separate regions to really being a nation…to being connected…through the highway system and media and all of these other sorts of things.

Absolutely. A couple other things I noticed as well. Obviously what’s a mascot supposed to do, but to humanize the brand, right? With the restaurant, it gave it character. Obviously there were other restaurants out there that served similar food – as any kind of car hop drive-in restaurant would – this gave it character.

It told you who the restaurant was for. It was for families. I think in the case of Reddy Kilowatt, it took out the scary factor. Although he had a lightning bolt horns, but that’s okay. They were cute.

They took out the scary part and made that thing tangible that they were trying to spread.

Yeah. He wasn’t holding a trident or something. He wasn’t the devil incarnate, right?

Yeah. The other thing that is a bit obvious is that the market for products and things that have the likeness on them has really exploded for both of these mascots. Obviously, they’re each about a hundred years old. It is probably a key to know you’ve gotten a successful advertising mascot when people will actually pay money to get.

A sample of your brand to wear as a t-shirt or a hat or use as an ashtray or a comic book…calendar or something like that.

Todd, to me, that’s one of the most interesting things about design is the artifacts. When they exist beyond or outside of their initial intent. A lot of times the company itself has gone out of business or it’s merged with something else and it sort of disappeared.

Yet nostalgia is a very, very strong emotion with people. The reason you have this whole collectibles market is so people can sort of have these objects that are ‘days gone by’ of their youth or the memory of when they were little and as a six year old going to Big Boy and eating with their parents.

As we start to wrap this up, what is the state of Big Boy today as a mascot? Good question. He’s still being used. The company has been sold and has changed hands and they’re still using the Big Boy name. Frisch’s is still using the Big Boy name, but they’re no longer associated with the corporate Big Boy.

It’s an Ohio thing.

I don't know what to tell you, but you know the classic one – the oldest Big Boy in America – which is the one in Burbank is still around. Still hosting Saturday night classic car drive-ins. Really throwing back to that fifties era. And here’s a couple of little trivia tidbits Elliott to leave you with.

I’ll post this on our website as well, because Big Boy – obviously as a cultural icon…the restaurant and the mascot – in so much that when the Beatles were touring the U.S. in 1965, they wanted to eat at a real American diner. So they ended up going to the Burbank Big Boy. You can sit in the same booth they sat in. It might be a long wait, but you can still sit there. It’s marked with a plaque…another story. I’ll also post on the website – I won’t get into it now – but famous director, David Lynch…I heard the rumor that he would eat at Big Boy every day for seven years or something like that. He would have exactly the same meal every single day. While he was there, he would work on his ideas and writing. He would write script ideas on napkins and things like that. There’s a story that I’ll post, but just to think about that…you go to the same restaurant every single day and eat the same meal for seven years. It is crazy.

Wow. Okay. So Big Boy became Twin Peaks I guess, in some odd way or, you know inspired Eraserhead maybe because the fry cook in the back or something. I’m trying to connect the dots here.

You’ll have to look at the story on the website. I will tell you he started going halfway through Eraserhead and he stopped going at the end of Dune.

He must be pretty superstitious after the failure of Dune.

Getting back to Reddy for a second. Reddy today – He he’s largely disappeared through a number of mergers really. Reddy kind of had his peak in the sixties, right around the time of the 1965 World’s Fair in New York. Folks out there might be familiar with where it in Queens – the fairgrounds from the end of Men In Black with the UFOs and that kind of thing. So Reddy today is…through a series of mergers and things like this – it’s actually owned by Excel Energy. So it’s a big corporation. They’re not really doing anything with it. There’s a couple of reasons why. So one reason is exactly what I just mentioned. All of these regional little utilities…the little fish got eaten up by bigger fish, which in turn got eaten up by even bigger fish and this sort of thing. So all these little individual customers sort of disappeared. It’s now a handful of players. It’s more regional than it is local, if that makes sense.

Then the other reason he peaked in the mid-sixties is because going into the seventies you had an energy crisis, you had nuclear power that was taking over and certainly that’s still electrical, but it’s an entirely different thing. Burning coal kind of had a pollution aspect to it.

So you naturally had Earth Day and all these other things that were coming on and people trying to fight pollution. That’s an entirely different equation than like nuclear waste – trying to find a place for control rods or whatever. There were those sorts of things that were happening in the seventies. It wasn’t the most friendly time to be a utility.

Something like Reddy Kilowatt, one could argue was reminiscent of…let’s say a more naive time in America that really didn’t play in the seventies and the eighties and into the nineties. There are a handful of utilities from what I understand in my research that are still using Reddy.

Reddy is still I guess available to be licensed for this sort of thing. But, like Excel no one is out there readily pushing it. I believe in one of the places where he is still being used is on an Ecuadorian soccer team’s outfits. Their jerseys they’re using. From what I understand, the soccer team is owned by an electrical utility.

What about that? And I wonder if they even know all of the history of Reddy Kilowatt.

Now Todd, I don’t want to get you too excited, but this might be our in, into the Ecuadorian design market. You think we may pick up an extra listener in that group?

Maybe. Maybe two. You know, maybe if Google translate kicks in and it doesn’t think we’re too idiotic to translate into Spanish. We might have something. Absolutely.

I’m loving this advertising mascots [theme]. We could do another podcast on different advertising mascots because they’re so rich and there’s so many of them.

It’s interesting that we happened to pick in a general era, but two different swipes at it. That to me was really interesting.

Absolutely. And for folks out there listening, if you have any memories of going to a Big Boy or if you have any memories of seeing the utility truck in your neighborhood with Reddy Kilowatt, or if your dad worked for utility company, we would love to hear from you.

Because as I mentioned earlier, with nostalgia and the regional things becoming these national things – there’s so many – I’m sure – stories and personal connections to these advertising mascots. The fact that they’re a hundred years old, isn’t an accident, right?

Yeah. And they’re accessible things to all of us.

I’d love to hear some of the stories out there. All right. Folks, if you happen to have a Big Boy statue that you might want to unload, I know a buyer…just putting it out there.

All right, man. This is great.

Absolutely Todd. As always, it’s wonderful to learn from you and the Wikipedia that is in your head.

I would love to down the road, revisit advertising mascots again. So thank you for taking the time for such a fun conversation.

Absolutely man, always a joy to talk to you, always a learning experience, always a laugh. So take care till next time.

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