Tuesday, June 15, 2010
12:40 AM
The Frito Bandito
Fritos had a very popular advertising campaign when I was in 1st and 2nd grade starring the fictitious character, The Frito Bandito. We kids loved him so when Frito ran a promotional wherein they gave away FB erasers with every box of Fritos multi-packs, we all scrambled to collect them. Fritos have always been one of my mom's favorite snack foods so we went through a lot of them in our house. I also used to take them in my lunch everyday so it didn't take me long to collect multiple bandito erasers in every color. They didn't erase very well at all but I didn't care. I thought they were super cool. Back then, ANYTHING advertised on television was a must-have item for us kids.The FB campaign ended abruptly after only a couple of years because the Mexican community went PC on us and complained that it showed them in an unflattering light. Frito Lay dumped the character and campaign immediately. Such was the foreshadowing of ACLU-ish things to come. Thanks to that organization, everyone is offended by everything all of the time for no reason other than because we've been told we should be.