This steel lunch box was made by Aladdin Industries in 1978. It has a metal clasp for hinged lid and collapsible orange plastic handle. The box has a maroon background with an orange rim, and pictures of images of couples dancing to disco on all exterior surfaces. This box tries to take advantage of the Disco dance craze popular in American in the late 19070s, which was at its peak in 1978, before the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night set off a backlash that made disco decidedly uncool.
This domed, tin lunch box was made by Aladdin Industries in 1961. It has two metal snaps for a hinged lid and a collapsible, yellow plastic handle. The box is in the shape of a school bus , and colorful portraits of Disney characters like Minnie, Mickey, Goofy, Pinocchio, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie Duck line the windows of the bus. Its eye-catching appearance made it the most popular lunch box ever, selling over 9 million units.
This steel lunch box was made by Aladdin Industries in 1971. It has a metal snap for hinged lid and collapsible red plastic handle. The box features raised images from Walt Disney’s 1940 film Pinocchio on all sides. The lid features an image of Pinocchio going to school with Jiminy Cricket giving chase, while the back shows the climactic scene of Pinocchio and Geppetto racing away from the whale Monstro, having just escaped from his belly.
This tin lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1985. This lunch box features the characters from the television series, The A-Team on the exterior. The A-Team ran from 1983-1987 on NBC, and the box shows some of the explosive action that The A-Team was known for.
This metal lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1964. It features images from the television show Fireball XL5, which ran on NBC from 1963-1965. Fireball XL5 was filmed used Supermarionation, a combination of animation and puppetry that was made famous by the show’s creators, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Fireball XL5 was another television show that took advantage of the public’s fascination with space, as does this lunch box, with its various images of rockets and space ships.
This tin lunch box was manufactured by Aladdin Industries in 1978. The lunch box is entitled, "The Skateboarder," and features colorful scenes of skateboarders in action on all exterior surfaces. This lunch box was one of the few that did not feature licensed images from television, and instead tried to cash in on the growing popularity of skateboarding.
This tin lunch box was manufactured by Aladdin Industries in 1979. The lunch box has a red and blue design depicting scenes from the television series, El Chapulin Colorado. El Chapulin Colorado (The Red Grasshopper) ran from 1972-1979 on the Mexican station Televisa. Originally created in Mexico, the show was popular in Latin America and the United Sates, and is credited as inspiring the character of Bumblebee Man from the Simpsons.
This metal lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1979. The lunch box features cartoon images of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on the front lid. The back shows the image of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy inside the USS Enterprise. Various show scenes along sides. White plastic handle and snap. This lunch box was based on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first Star Trek feature film released in 1979.
This steel lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1957. It features a metal snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible metal handle, and the exterior design simulates a brown leather suitcase.
This tin lunch box was manufactured by King Seeley Thermos in 1978. This National Football League lunchbox has a white plastic snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible white, plastic handle. This NFL box features images of several football players, including Tony Dorsett, Franco Harris, and Pat Haden on a stylized background.
This steel lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1962. The lunch box has a metal snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible red, plastic handle. This pets n’ pals lunch box features an image of the collie Lassie on one side, and the stallion Black Beauty on the other.
The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in late 1957 sparked interest in the United States in science education even among elementary school children. In 1958, King Seeley Thermos produced this imaginative box evoking space travel and landings on distant moons and planets. Children provided a receptive audience to this imaginary yet hopeful view of scientific achievement in the early years of the space race. This is one of the few pop culture lunch boxes from the late 1950s not designed around a television show.
Description
The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in late 1957 sparked interest in the United States in science education even among elementary school children. In 1958, King Seeley Thermos produced this imaginative box evoking space travel and landings on distant moons and planets. Children provided a receptive audience to this imaginary yet hopeful view of scientific achievement in the early years of the space race. This is one of the few pop culture lunch boxes from the late 1950s not designed around a television show.
This metal lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1957. This lunch box features images from the television show Brave Eagle. The sides feature colorful depictions of Indians hunting buffalo and in combat with each other. Brave Eagle was a short-lived TV series, airing one season in 1955-1956 on CBS. The show was notable because its main protagonist was Native American, and featured scenes of the West from the Native American point of view.
This metal lunch box was made by Thermos in 1927. It was painted blue in a faux leather pattern with a gold finished interior. The box has a leather handle, a single metal snap and vent holes.
This tin lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1961. It has a metal snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible red, plastic handle. The box features images from the television series Lawman, which ran from 1958-1962 on ABC. The show focused on the town of Laramie, Wyoming, and the action that happened around the Birdcage Saloon. Produced by Warner Brothers, The Lawman had several crossover episode with other Warner Brother westerns like The Maverick and Cheyenne.
This tin lunch box was manufactured by Thermos in 1970. The lunch box has a metal snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible red, plastic handle. The exterior features images from the country variety television show Hee Haw, on the lid, back and sides. Hee Haw ran from 1969-1992, with the first two years on CBS, and the rest in syndication.
This metal lunch box was made by Thermos in 1980. It has a yellow plastic snap for a hinged lid and a collapsible, yellow plastic handle. The box is decorated with colorful animated scenes of the television show Mork & Mindy. Mork & Mindy was a spinoff of Happy Days and helped launch Robin Williams to stardom. It ran from 1978-1982 on ABC and featured the adventures of the alien Mork living alongside a human companion Mindy, trying to learn the ways of humans.
This domed steel lunch box was manufactured by Aladdin Industries in 1969. This lunch box features a psychedelic pattern of swirling orange, red, pink and yellow. The wild design aesthetic is representative of the 1960’s ethos and evokes other sixties motifs like tie-dye and lava lamps.
This domed steel lunch was manufactured by Aladdin Industries in 1963. It features images from the popular television series, The Jetsons. The lunch box features images of the whole Jetson family, George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy, as well as Rosie the Household Robot and Astro the Dog. This box is one of the most coveted by collectors because of its great design, colorful art, and scarcity.
The Jetsons was an animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera that aired on ABC from 1962 to 1963 and in reruns for decades after. The primetime sitcom was set in Orbit City in the distant future and focused on the Jetson family – father George, who works at Spacely Space Sprockets, mother Jane, a homemaker, children Judy and Elroy, robot maid Rosie, and their dog Astro. Despite the high-tech gadgetry, labor-saving devices, flying cars, and space colonization of the Jetsons’ world, the series presented the family as a normative American nuclear family of the era, dealing with many of the same issues with work, family, and neighbors faced by the protagonists of The Honeymooners, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The Jetsons featured many futuristic technologies that have now become commonplace - video calling, tablet computers, robotic vacuums, smart watches, flatscreen televisions, drones, and holograms – as well as many others that seem misguided or still far-off such as flying cars, high quality instant food, robot housekeepers, and communities built on pillars in the sky.
The series drew from a rich American literary and entertainment genre of futuristic science fiction from Edward Bellamy’s 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward to the pulp and comic book adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, not to mention contemporary space travel entertainment like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Americans in the early 1960s were fascinated by the technological innovations of the Space Age and the brighter future promised by the flood of devices, services, and improvements that marketed “better living through chemistry” and material progress. The broad economic growth and prosperity of the post World War II era had allowed many middle-class Americans to purchase luxury goods and participate in leisure activities beyond what seemed possible in the difficult 1930s and 40s. Advertisers marketed new and more inexpensive consumer goods as modern, sleek, and forward-looking, while the NASA space program and race to land a man on the moon captured the world’s attention. The Jetsons premiered amidst this techno-utopianism and seemed to capture the national mood.
Description
Aladdin Industries profited from the success of The Jetsons television cartoon series in the fall of 1963 by introducing a domed lunch box featuring that space-traveling suburban family and their robotic maid. American notions of family life in the 1960s traveled effortlessly outward to interplanetary space on this fanciful box.
Domed metal lunch boxes traditionally were carried by factory employees and construction workers, but Aladdin and other makers found the curved shape made an excellent young person's landscape, ocean scene, or starry sky. Despite the more earth-bound adult concerns of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the Kennedy assassination, The Jetsons box and bottle showcase the metal lunch box at the zenith of its design life and its popularity among school children.
The Jetsons was an animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera that aired on ABC from 1962 to 1963 and in reruns for decades after. The primetime sitcom was set in Orbit City in the distant future and focused on the Jetson family – father George, who works at Spacely Space Sprockets, mother Jane, a homemaker, children Judy and Elroy, robot maid Rosie, and their dog Astro. Despite the high-tech gadgetry, labor-saving devices, flying cars, and space colonization of the Jetsons’ world, the series presented the family as a normative American nuclear family of the era, dealing with many of the same issues with work, family, and neighbors faced by the protagonists of The Honeymooners, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The Jetsons featured many futuristic technologies that have now become commonplace - video calling, tablet computers, robotic vacuums, smart watches, flatscreen televisions, drones, and holograms – as well as many others that seem misguided or still far-off such as flying cars, high quality instant food, robot housekeepers, and communities built on pillars in the sky.
The series drew from a rich American literary and entertainment genre of futuristic science fiction from Edward Bellamy’s 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward to the pulp and comic book adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, not to mention contemporary space travel entertainment like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Americans in the early 1960s were fascinated by the technological innovations of the Space Age and the brighter future promised by the flood of devices, services, and improvements that marketed “better living through chemistry” and material progress. The broad economic growth and prosperity of the post World War II era had allowed many middle-class Americans to purchase luxury goods and participate in leisure activities beyond what seemed possible in the difficult 1930s and 40s. Advertisers marketed new and more inexpensive consumer goods as modern, sleek, and forward-looking, while the NASA space program and race to land a man on the moon captured the world’s attention. The Jetsons premiered amidst this techno-utopianism and seemed to capture the national mood.
This hard red plastic lunch box was made by Aladdin in 1991. It has a hinged handle and closing snap for hinged lid. The lunch box features an image of Steve Urkel from the show Family Matters on lid. Family Matters ran from 1989-1997 on ABC and 1997-1998 on CBS, mainly part of ABC’s TGIF block of programming. With his catchphrase “Did I do that?” and distinctive laugh, Urkel became the breakout star of the show and is the star of this box.