General Mills Polaroid Camera offer - My arteries hurt.

As the ever-more-premature American holiday season would like you to know, Christmas is coming. It's time to start thinking about how you'll capture your holiday mishegas, and there's no better method of mishegas capturement than with your brand new Polaroid InstaTragic camera that you got by eating cubic yards of fried CornFatSalt!

The Polaroid Land camera was a breakthrough technical achievement. It was also a revolutionary design that looked like it was engineered by Vogons. Many old cameras are Bauhaus beautiful, but this Polaroid just looks like some bits from a coffee maker randomly screwed together.

Anyway, General Mills would send you one if you ate varying amounts of their crunchy snacks, with names of varying hilariousness. Some of their snack names are so dull they may have been devised by a senate subcommittee, like "Potato Crisps". At the other end of the range are "Willikers". I think the funnyness of a snack name varies in inverse proprtion to it's descriptiveness. "Pizza Spins" is a pretty weak effort, but you can tell which actual food they're supposed to simulate but "Whistles" could be just about anything.

To get the camera totally free, General Mills wanted you to eat 50 boxes of their snacks. This ad ran in the November 13th, 1970 issue of LIFE. That left the truly ambitious family about a month to eat 50 friggin' boxes of fried fat and salt, allowing for an unlikely two weeks for shipping and handling. To eat that much fried shit in one month without a stay in the hospital coronary ward, you'd need a family the size of six Brady Bunches! I feel sick just thinking about it, but not too sick to come up with this helpful list of improved snack names. You're welcome, General Mills.

You-Chew-Ums

Nixonoids

Hippie Dips

Groove Tubes

Flounder Fluffs

Ransom Notes

Manson Munch

Wheat Planks

Helter Skelters

Puke-Ems

Crunch-O-Trons

Corn Substance

Spud-Niks

Hendrix Jimmy-Jams

Snicker-Snax

Steppenwads

Viet-Nums!

Candy Warballs

Beetles

Apollo Salteens

Tonkin Tots

Thalido-Mighties
Asbestos Whoopsies
Corn Clogs

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