Barnum's Non-Human Animal Companions - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Barnum’s Non-Human Animal Companions

Nabisco, now a subsidiary of Mondelez International, which used to be Kraft Something-or-Other, grovels to The Loud People Who Are Against Things to prove that it is a good corporate comrade. Nabisco has redesigned its famous circus trailer cookie box to free the cartoon animals from their cartoon cages.

Barnum’s Animal Crackers are little cookies shaped like animals. In your ‘umble scrivener’s youth they were packaged in a little box printed as a circus wagon. The wheels of the wagon continued from the sides to the bottom and were perforated as cutouts so that the little wagon could stand on its four wheels. Printed on the sides of the box were cages of critters which varied from time to time, but the essential nature of the box, complete with a little string for carrying it or hanging it from a Christmas tree, didn’t change until The Glorious Ever-Now.

This month Barnum’s animals are free of their cages, roaming in good fellowship across a printed veldt. The gorilla, being somewhat arboreal, is probably unhappy about this. All the animals, both arboreal and nonarboreal, carnivorous and herbivorous, stroll toward the viewer in oneness ‘n’ peace ‘n’ love, surely wanting a hug.

That famous rhetorical question still obtains: how many people has Walt Disney killed?

As the old alligator might say of its latest human meal, “New Look – Same Great Taste!”

Now that the cartoon animals are free to roam, perhaps someone could redesign our cities, beginning with Chicago, so that the humans could also roam free.

Given that the Mondolez-Nabisco Barnum’s Animals box has been purged of anti-social elements, the animal cookies inside could be next.

Instead of little lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) the cookies could be shaped as carrots and kumquats and corn (oh, ich!), and made from reprocessed soy beans. The boxes could be printed with inspiring mottos: “Good Little Comrades Love Brussels Sprouts” and “Good Little Comrades Report Global-Warming Detractors to their Block Wardens.”

On one side of the box could show pictures of happy children being devoured by bears and alligators, with the enlightening reminder that “Good Little Comrades Always Remember That Animals Were Here First.”

And now we turn to the cultural insensitivity of Eskimo Pies.

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