Bessie the cow used to rule the roost as well as the range. Now upstarts like Charlie Tuna and the Maytag repairman are replacing the cow in our national psyche.

No Name Cow



If our old friend the cow didn't have enough problems. First he eats a
fellow traveler and goes mad. Then she is shot by the millions. Then she is
the butt of all butt jokes. And now she has to play second fiddle to Charlie
the Tuna, the Jolly Green Giant and even that boring Maytag repairman who
makes watching paint dry seem like a contact sport.

In this age burning with nostalgia magazine, newspaper and TV editors ranked
the classic ad characters, based on how many news stories they appeared in.
Why intelligent men and women would waste their time on such an assignment
is not clear.  At the very least they might be revealing something about
their lives. The Jolly Green Giant got a fairly high rating, as did Mr.
Whipple who has a fetish for toilet paper. Charlie the Tuna is right up
there. Now is there anything more you want to know about these editors.

But Betty Crocker, new, improved, and relaunched, took all the marbles,
going away. This victory at the very least proves that America's diet has
not changed very much or the editors like puffy white cake with fake
frosting.

Elsie the Cow is left out in the cold meadow cursing Borden for the lack of
advertising support. Personally, I loved the Carnation cow who didn't even
make the long list. The Cow, once a mushy symbol of milky American family
values, has been yanked from the center of our cultural psyche. There is
reason to ache. All the noisy hip-hop artists wearing silly white milk
moustaches won't change this sad fact.

The mad cow episode left the British beef industry in shambles. In America
we paid an equally heavy price.

The Cow is no longer considered cute.