Entry tags:

era: golden age, medium: advertisement, publisher: fox feature syndicate, status: public domain

If you were reading certain comics back in 1941, There was a series of rather ubiquitous ads for a soft drink unheard of today. A refreshing drink with Vitamin B1! Kooba Cola!


They clearly put a lot of effort into their advertising, working very closely with the people at Fox Features Syndicate to feature their product throughout their comics.


There were the two page spreads for the their bottlecap redemption offers...


There were various half page strips about the "Kooba Kid", how he drinks Kooba Cola, gets all muscular and beats up the town bullies...




The product even got shilled in the comics themselves as you can see in the Timothy Smith story down below. Timothy is an orphaned shoe shine boy who got whisked away to a magical world (or possibly a concussion induced coma after he got beaten up by a bully) where he goes on adventures with his gnomish pal Grimmage.


There was only one slight problem with Kooba Cola:

It never actually existed!

You see Victor Fox, the publisher of Fox Features Syndicate, was quite a character from the early years of the comic industry. He was also quite the schemer, and came up with this brilliant idea of doing this massive advertising campaign for Kooba in his comics in an attempt to create demand. He planned on selling the name off to some bottling company, but in the end that never materialized.