Presented by Todd Chamberlain and Mike Mensinger.

Todd:
“We have a lot of slides, so we’ll probably go a little bit fast in some areas. If there’s anything you want to ask about at the end, we can do that. Mike and I, we’re both pretty……we like this topic a lot, so we want to try to get as much into the presentation as we could. We’re go ahead and get going. Start with the Star Wars promotions from Burger King……Burger Chef.

This is going to get a little confusing, the first fast food promotion was a set of four posters, and there were three different ways that they were distributed. Some were distributed through Burger Chef, some were done through Burger King, although the Burger Kings ones I believe were done in ’78 not ‘77, and then Coca Cola selling outlets like movie theaters and other places like that would also sell these posters.

This is a point of purchase display, it’s a poster for Burger Chef. I tend to find the Burger Chef displays tend to be a bit harder to find than Burger King items that’s because Burger Chef was more kinda a mid West regional chain, where as Burger King had a bit wider distribution.

This is a Burger King display, and is one of the pretty tough items. I think I’ve only seen or know of like 3 or 4 in different collections. This would have hung above the cash registers, and they would have changed the dangler on the bottom each week to indicate the poster that was being sold that week.

I had noted earlier that Burger King, Burger Chef and Coke sold posters, and there are actually variations. There are at least four different variations and maybe as many as five different variations. Some of them have white border around the outside, some of them are a full bleed, and the artwork runs all the way to the edge. And so for Burger King there’s a full bleed and a white bordered version, for Burger Chef they’re all the full bleed, they don’t have the white border. Ad the Coca Cola ones, the ones that just only Coca Cola, they don’t say Burger King or Burger Chef, tend to be the hardest ones to find. Actually, last week I discovered that there’s an Australian version that has a big red Coke logo on it, that I had never seen before. Unfortunately, I only won half the set and somebody outbid me on ebay for the other 2.

The next promotion was a Burger Chef item from 1978. These were kid’s meal trays. There were 7 different ones that you could get. The ones we’ll show here are all unused flats, they were never folded up into meals.

Here’s another Store Display poster for that promotion from Burger Chef.

The next promotion in the summer of ’78, Burger Kind did its first set of glasses. This, I think, tends to be for most people, like the promotion that people think of the most for Burger King the vintage era, is the glasses promotion. There again, the Star Wars phenomena kind of caught a lot of people off guard, so a lot of folks didn’t get their promotions going until 1978. By that time they were able to get a license, and get the product together.

So, you get a different glass each week. This is a mobile, that would have hung up in the restaurant, before to advertise [that] the promotion was coming. It shows all four glasses.

Here’s a counter display. Personally, I like the counter displays best of all the display items, because it is able to present the product to you. You can see it all together in a nice graphic image.

Here’s a translite. It [goes on the] menu board above [the counter], and it’s made to shine light through. The colors are really brilliant when you are able to shine light behind it.

Here’s a drive through Translite. The drive through translights are a little bit smaller than the large size translights, but they’re a lot harder to find.

Similar to the poster mobile that I showed earlier, this is a mobile for the glasses. You can change out the bottom piece each week for different glasses.

This is a register card. It would have been just like put right on top of the cash register to show what glass they were [offering]. There’s one for each glass.

This is one of the more unusual items that I’ve been able to find. I sort of took a chance on Ebay. Sometimes when one takes a chance on ebay, and you get the piece, and you think “this is not what I expected”. When I [saw it] this was advertised as like a Star Wars mirror. I some how found it in a search [because it said] Burger King on it. It looks like a bootleg carnival item or something maybe. They didn’t say what it was, they didn’t say what the text is. It turns out it’s actually like an internal employee award. It has the name of somebody who worked there, kind of like congratulating them for their work on the campaign. I thought it was pretty exciting thing to actually get that, and be like “wow, never thought I’d find something like that."

Mike’s going to talk about the Empire Strikes Back and Jedi promotions.”

Mike:
“Yeah, we’re going to move into the Empire Strikes Back promotion first. First we’re going to start off with glasses. Similar to the Star Wars glasses, it was a “Collect all 4 glasses” and they offered a new glass each week. The photo here is of one of the store displays, and you can see that it holds the 4 on the bottom as well as has a spot near the middle of the display for the current week’s glass.

These are 2 pretty interesting store displays for that glasses promotion. The one on the left there is a 3PO and R2 pole display, it’s fairly difficult to find that. It’s a pretty fragile display, so it’s a pretty neat one to have. The other one is kind of a pre-promo translight just to indicate that the glasses were coming, as Todd mentioned they were used up on the menu board [and] backlight.

Here’s another translite, this one actually features each glass. The Empire translights are a little bit easier to find than the Star Wars ones. The Star Wars ones tend to be the rarer ones.

These are actually here menu trays……not menu trays, but tray liners. They just put these down when you got your food served. It just kind of serves as an advertising piece, there are 2 different styles there for the glasses.

Next we’ll move onto the ’81 promotion, which was the super scenes. This promotion basically had little sticker stamps that you could use. They were kind of randomly assorted on stamp strips, and then there was an album that you could paste them into and the stamps all made a neat scene.

This is a little register card. In the middle of that it shows the actual book where you would take the stickers and make the little scenes with them.

Okay, up next is the everybody wins game promotion. It was in 1981. There was a lot of different prizes you could win, [it] basically featured kind of lottery styled scratch and win tickets. One of the things you could win was trading cards. There was a set of 36 trading cards, and they came in uncut strips. That you could get those. So that’s again an unused card [strip].

Again, here’s another translight showing the premium. It shows some of the other things that you could win. You could win an Atari system, which was quite popular at the time. There was an Empire frisbee, you can see that on the left hand side. Some little hand held electronic games, and again, the trading cards.

This is another one of the tray liners, similar to what they had for the glasses. It just shows some of the details of the promotion.” Todd:
“I guess, just to make a point there, one of the things I find interesting about any given hobby, is when you [can] continue to find things that you didn’t know existed. Where ever it isn’t well cataloged necessarily. Action figures is pretty well cataloged, but this is an area (fast food items) that in my experience where there isn’t real detailed cataloging or anything. That’s an item that I just found a month ago, and before I found it I had never seen another one. (inaudible)”

Mike:
“This is an Everybody Wins, it’s kind of a pole display, very similar to the R2 and 3PO one that we saw earlier. It’s exceedingly rare, I guess only a few examples.”

Todd:
“I only know of 2 of this display, and this one is actually missing the base. So, I think it is probably the same base as the R2 and 3PO. This item is listed in Steve Sansweet’s Tomart price guide, and I kept like asking, “Steve, “Star Wars kids space display” what is this thing?” and he’s like “I don’t know. I got it somewhere in my place you’d have to kind of dig it out.” Then fortunately, I was able to find one in a collection last year. So, I was pretty excited about finally being able to see it.”

Mike:
“We also have……these are Burger Chef. This was Burger Chef’s basically their last promotion. Which ran in 1980, they had 3 different posters, this is a display for those. Showing….”

Todd:
“[It’s a] counter display.”

Mike:
“Yeah, shows one of the posters there.

This is a translite for that offer. A little bit longer in length than the Burger Kings ones were.

Again, here’s another display for that promotion. You can see they only sold for 25 cents at that time. Not a bad price.

This is really a rare piece, it’s a McDonald’s Empire promotion. Not too many McDonald’s promotions were done since Burger King took over most of it. Again 1980 promotion, you could also get 3 cups. This is a little version of the display, we got a bigger picture next. This is from Todd’s collection……”

Todd:
“Mike asked me why I had 2 pictures, he’s like “there are 2 images of this display in there and why [did you do that]?” and I’m like “I just really like the display, and I wanted a bigger picture of it in there.” So……”

Mike:
“Okay, now we’re going to move into the Return of the Jedi one.

Again, this is a promotional poster, indicating when the promotion was coming.

When Jedi was coming along. Here’s the set of 4 glasses, again similar to the Star Wars and Empire ones, we start with the 4 glasses in 1983. Again, they had a new glass each week, and the restaurants were fairly strict about trying to keep it to only getting that certain glass per week, and then some of the promo guides indicate that there was like kind of a clean up period where they would kind of go with the left overs that you could get. So, it’s kind of interesting that they tried to be fairly strict with only one glass per week.

This is another, this is one of the neater ones that I really like. It’s again one of the glasses counter displays. I love these pieces. You put all three of them together on a shelf, and they really look……they really make the glasses look a lot more attractive on display.”

Todd:
“Not that they weren’t attractive in the first place.”

Mike:
(Laughing) “Yeah. Again, here’s another translight, this one features some pretty interesting artwork.

And again, one of the tray liners here. It’s just, tray liners are neat because they’re not super expensive so they offer a nice [low] price point item along with the glasses themselves. Very affordable, but still interesting.

Okay, I’m going to turn it back over to Todd for some of the newer items.”

Click here for the second half of the panel