What a waste of cereal...
"Our lieutenant is the up-and-coming type
Played with soldiers as a boy, you just can bet
It is written in the stars
He will get his captain's bars,
But he hasn't got enough box tops yet!"
Played with soldiers as a boy, you just can bet
It is written in the stars
He will get his captain's bars,
But he hasn't got enough box tops yet!"
— Tom Lehrer, "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier", An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer
There are promotions in Real Life by companies that work like this: On each package of the product there's a coupon, you collect X coupons, send them in, and win a prize. X may be a reasonable number, but can also be ridiculously high. Often used to gauge and improve customer loyalty. A common marketing trick.
Sometimes, this works like a lottery: Your chance of winning increases if you send in more coupons.
In fiction, the first prize is something the protagonist really wants; like an all-inclusive holiday in Hawaii for the whole family. Hijinks may include:
- The protagonist buys so many cans/packages of the product that it fills his house.
- The family is seen eating nothing but the product, implying that they spent all their money for it. (Maybe even more than the prize is worth.) The question of tossing or giving away the product may or may not be asked, but the answer usually comes down to "we bought the it, so we must eat it".
- The protagonist goes to extreme measures to acquire yet another pack of the product when he finds out he has exactly 9,999 coupons and needs 10,000 of them.
- The protagonist doesn't get the prize he wanted, but instead... a month's/year's/lifetime's supply of the product.
Compare and contrast Free Prize at the Bottom. The most literal type of Plot Coupon. One of the types of prizes could be sea-monkeys.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Chapter 75 of Kaguya-sama: Love is War has Miko get the entire student council to collect bellmarks (basically the Japanese equivelent to boxtops) for charity, with the added rule that they can only use ones from products that they've already bought. Ironically, Kaguya only manages to get 10 of them due to everything in her house being imported. She spends the rest of the chapter trying to render Fujiwara and Ishigami's much larger collections invalid so that Shirogane won't think that she's worthless (and so the fact that Hayasaka had to cut up a precious childhood memento to get her those ten won't be for nothing).
- In Pokémon: The Original Series, Ash wears the hat he won from a competition of this type. This is explained in the episode "Primeape Goes Bananas", in which the aforementioned monkey-like Pokémon steals Ash's cap and he spends the whole episode fighting to get it back.
Comic Strips
- Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes once sent in coupons for a propeller beanie. In his case, the biggest problem was that he had no patience waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Also, he is disappointed to find once it arrives that he can't use it to fly.
- In the Dennis the Menace (US) comic book story "Dennis vs. Television", which was also translated into Spanish, Dennis collected cereal box tops without actually buying the cereal, hoping to win a big prize.
Film — Live-Action
- Played for Laughs in Better Off Dead, where Lane's younger brother cuts the coupons out of every box in the house, before using up the contents, leading to a Running Gag of characters pulling boxes out of the kitchen cupboards only for everything to spill out. Among the prizes he wins are a fully functional Ray Gun, a book on how to pick up "trashy women", and a construction kit for an actual working space shuttle, which he uses to fly off into space at the end of the movie.
- In A Christmas Story, Ralphie collects label after label from containers of Ovaltine, coming to hate the stuff, but drinking it anyway because he knows if he collects enough labels he'll get that coveted Little Orphan Annie decoder ring. When he finally gets the ring and decodes the secret message, he discovers that the message reads: Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
- Played for Drama in Punch-Drunk Love, in which Barry Egan's obsession with getting enough promotional coupons to trade for frequent flyer miles just comes across to those close to him as more evidence that he is an unstable Cloudcuckoolander. It becomes more heartwarming when he proposes to his Love Interest and adds that he'll be able to get enough airline miles to accompany her anywhere in the world on her frequent overseas business trips. Barry’s Competition Coupon Madness is justified as he realizes that an oversight by the company running the promotion means that, of the various products included in the promotion, the purchase price of a six pack of pudding cups is far less than the value of the frequent flyer miles that can be redeemed. Also he owns and runs his own business in a warehouse facility, so logistically it is very easy for him buy and store hundreds of boxes of pudding cups.
- A variation in Real Genius: In a minor subplot, Lazlo Holyfield is revealed to be using a printer in his Hacker Cave to mass-produce entries to a Frito Lay sweepstakes because he is exploiting the loophole of "enter as many times as you want, no purchase necessary". The printer manufactures one million entries, which Lazlo calculates would be enough for him to win 32% of the sweepstakes prizes… which is revealed in the epilogue would add up to a brand new RV dragging a small trailer full of gadgets.
- Up in the Air: Ryan Bingham collects airline miles, as getting to ten million will give him a shiny new membership card and he'll get to meet the pilot of the plane he's on. However, he gradually grows depressed as he realizes he travels so much but has no one in his life to stay with. In the end he donates his miles to his sister and her new husband so they can have a honeymoon around the world.
Literature
- In the Aussie Bites book, Nathan and the Ice Rockets, the titular protagonist sets out to win a limited edition bike from a competition by eating a lot of the titular ice lollies and collecting the required popsicle sticks to do so, while the school bully proceeds to show off his own bike to the rest of the school. While Nathan never gets the required coupons to win the bike, he wins over a group of new friends and becomes the most popular kid in school while word gets out that the school bully got his bike destroyed by mistake by leaving it out on the driveway.
- Gordon Korman's Everest starts with a kid winning the chance to climb Mount Everest by collecting the wrappers of protein bars and the bottle caps of energy drinks.
- Robert A. Heinlein's Have Space Suit – Will Travel: Clifford Russell enters a Skyway Soap contest with the grand prize of a trip to the Moon. Each soap wrapper sent in counts as an entry. He wins a used spacesuit, and as a result ends up going on an adventure that takes him to the Moon...and beyond.
- In Homer Price the local children proudly show off the jacks sets and tops they received from sending in Whoopsy-Doodle Breakfast Food box tops to Grampa Hercules, who reminisces about saving chewing tobacco plugs to earn a music box.
- In the Dorothy Sayers novel Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter Wimsey comes up with a marketing campaign based on this scheme while working undercover in an advertising agency. The Lemony Narrator says the one thing you cannot buy with Wifflet cigarette coupons is a coffin, it not being admitted that a Wiffler will ever need one.
- In Louise Hawes' Nelson Malone Meets the Man from Mush-Nut Nelson complains after his sister Robin throws out all of his junk. He's especially bitter about the Mush-Nut wrappers, stating that he only needed 43 more to get the "Whammo Magic Kit, including the trick of the disappearing dime".
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who: In "Orphan 55", Graham had to collect six coupons in order for the team to earn an all-inclusive vacation at Tranquillity Spa.
- In the Father Ted episode "Grant Unto Him Eternal Rest", when Ted discovers Father Dougal isn't sure he believes in an afterlife, he asks "Dougal, how did you enter the church? Was it like, collect six crisp packets and become a priest?"
- The Goodies: In "It Might As Ell Be String", one of the violent advertisements the ad industry has sunk to at the start of the episode involves Captain Fisheye (a parody of Captain Birdseye) announcing that he has your children and will only release them if you send in box tops from 10 packets of Fisheye Fish Fingers.
- Shining Time Station: In "Wrong Track", the kids throw Stacy a party when her plan to visit her sister Tracy gets cancelled. At the party, a package arrives for Schemer, who reveals that he sent in 300 Cowboy Carl's Crunchy Cowpoke Cereal box tops and 937 nickelsnote to get an official Cowboy Carl cowboy costume. However, it is revealed that he was sent a cowgirl costume by mistake, as Ginny quickly points out that it comes with a skirt instead of pants. Since Schemer has no use for a cowgirl costume, he decides to give it to Stacy.
- In an episode
of Victorious, the main characters buy a ridiculous amount of ice cream, in order to win a free Kesha concert.
- An episode of Brit Com The Worker, starring Charlie Drake, has his character buying hundreds of boxes of cereal so he can find a Golden Ticket to a prize contest. He then spends weeks training for the contest until he's fully confident of winning but shows up on the wrong day.
Music
- Jan and Dean's "Popsicle":
Save popsicle wrappers and before long
You'll win a phonograph to play this record on - Tom Lehrer's "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier", on the album An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, parodies this, or rather parodies the military's staffing standards of the time through the medium of this trope. An up-and-coming young Lieutenant is said to be destined for a promotion to Captain... once he collects enough box tops.
Theatre
- Michel Tremblay's play Les Belles-sœurs centres on a working-class Montreal woman, Germaine, who has just won a million trading stamps in a contest. She recruits fourteen female friends and relatives to help her paste them into the necessary booklets. Her sudden wealth elicits jealousy that boils over into strife and anger toward Germaine (with some of the characters helping themselves to her stamps), amongst the rest of the women, and by the women against their husbands, their families, and their lot in life.
Video Games
- In Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, Colias Palaeno, the Ambassador of Babahl, keeps handing out coupons in order to drum up tourism — they can only be redeemed in Babahl, not the Babahl portion of the embassy they're in unless they're specifically for the embassy's cafeteria.
Palaeno: Would you like some more ink? I've got plenty!
Edgeworth: Ah... thank you, I shouldn't need any more.
Palaeno: Oh... in that case, let me make it up to you with some coupons!
Edgeworth: I-I have plenty of those, too! (Where is he conjuring them up from?!) - Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet begins with Sam eating a bunch of cookies so he can send the box tops to get a Pajama Man toy. There are multiple box tops throughout the game that, if all of them are collected, add pictures of Sam playing with a Pajama Man toy during the credits.
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "specially marked", Strong Bad really doesn't like cereals that make you cut off and mail in tons of box tops or UPC bar codes just to get a crappy prize. The only thing he hates more are cereals that don't even bother with a Free Prize at the Bottom.
Western Animation
- In The Angry Beavers episode "Box Top Beavers", Dag picks brands of cereal that have cheap toys in the box, while Norb picks brands of cereal that give you cool toys for sending in the box tops. When Dag decides to go for the cool prize (a street sweeper), and finally finishes eating 10,000 boxes of cereal, he finds out that the sponsors have discontinued the promotion, and the brothers infiltrate the factory to get the prize.
- The Bump in the Night episode "Made in Japan" had Mr. Bumpy save some box tops from Choco Space Flakes cereal to receive a Turbo Totrenoid robot. When disappointed by the robot being tiny and non-threatening, he and Squishington then decide to mail Little Robot back for a full refund and start saving up on box tops from Sugar Frosted Shark Puffs in order to get a toy submarine.* In the Hey Arnold! episode "Salley's Comet", Arnold and Gerald need to collect 50 cereal box coupons to earn a children's telescope so they can see an upcoming passing comet. Since they collected half of the coupons, they invite their friends and neighbors for the remaining cereal.
- Count Duckula: "The Vampire Strikes Back" begins with Duckula trying to collect 15,000 Crunchy Munchies box tops so he can send away for a Tremendous Terrance protective space helmet and supersonic x-ray goggles. Midway through the episode, he, Igor, and Nanny meet up with Tremendous Terrance when they get launched into space by Dr. Von Goosewing and are able to cash in the box tops.
- Fillmore!: In "The Currency of Doubt", Tina and Toby are the stars of the school at both dancing and smoit-collecting. Smoits are tokens found on dairy bars and packets of chips used to buy basically anything a kid could want once enough of them are saved up. Their smoit stash (a briefcase full to the point of bursting) goes missing, and Fillmore and Ingrid go undercover in X's steamy underground casino scene.
- The Muppet Babies (1984) episode "Six-to-Eight Weeks" has a scene where this trope is discussed, with Fozzie going on a bizarre tangent on why he thinks the cereal companies need box tops in exchange for the prizes.
- In "Girl of Steal" from My Life as a Teenage Robot, the Cool Toy is the Musique. Tucker wants one so badly that he steals box tops from everybody in the neighborhood then brings them to the Musique store and has a fit when the store manager tells him he has to send the box tops in and wait for the Musique to arrive in the mail.
- In the A Pup Named Scooby-Doo episode "Terror, Thy Name is Zombo", Scooby and Shaggy go through 450 boxes of cereal to be the first to ride a new roller coaster at a local amusement park. When the park owner asks in astonishment how they were able to eat that much cereal, Shaggy replies, "Like, we were hungry."
- An episode of The Raccoons has Bert attempting to win a bike by putting together a jigsaw puzzle from pieces that come in a brand of crisps/potato chips with combinations that many would consider disgusting (not knowing that Cyril Sneer deliberately left out one piece of the puzzle in an attempt to rig the competition so no one can win, and make more money). Hilarity ensues, doubly so when the Piglets accidentally drop the single copy of the necessary piece in a crisp shipment and it results in a Big Ball of Violence. The episode has an Earn Your Happy Ending after Bert has a Heel Realization of how he treated his friends for prizes in a crisp packet; the moral is "Don't sell out your friends for a prize in snack foods", which isn't a bad aesop to include and relevant even now.
- In The Real Ghostbusters, the Slimer! segment "Dr. Strangedog" had Slimer consuming numerous boxes of Freaky Flakes in order to save 100 coupons for a Super Duper Spy Kit.
- On Rocky and Bullwinkle, Boris and Natasha produce counterfeit box tops to get all the prizes and undermine the world's economy. General Mills (which not only sponsored the show, but owned it outright) was not amused and forced the producers to end the story earlier than planned. The drama in that arc is that Bullwinkle had an impossible number of legit box tops because he 'couldn't decide what to get.'
- Seven Little Monsters:
- In "Losing Sam", Seven mentions that he sent a lot of box tops for his bronze statue of Johannes Stauss the Elder.
- "Voyage to the Bottom of the Cereal Box" has Three mail 50 cereal box tops for a submarine, expecting to get a real one and being disappointed when it turns out to only be a toy submarine.
- The Simpsons examples:
- In "The Otto Show", as Bart and Milhouse get ready to go to a Spinal Tap concert, we get a throw-in joke:
Bart: Nice jacket!
Milhouse: Thanks, it cost me 50,000 Bazooka Joe comics!- In "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson", Barney Gumble drank half a million Duff beer bottles to get Duffman to arrive to Moe's Bar for a night of partying. Unfortunately for Barney, that night is the night he is forced to be a designated driver. Him taking a drunk Homer home and driving away with Homer's car for a month of booze-fueled Noodle Incident that at some point led to him leaving said car parked in front of the Twin Towers is what causes the rest of the episode's plot.
- Space Goofs: In "Flashman vs. Zork", Bud mentions that he saved cereal box tops for 16 years in order to get an inflatable doll of Ladrax the Vermin.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Waiting" had SpongeBob devouring 100 boxes of Kelpo cereal practically all at one sitting, all in order to get the box tops needed to send in for a free toy. He then realizes he didn't necessarily have to eat all the cereal in the aforementioned boxes before mailing the box tops.
Real Life
- Burma-Shave once offered a mock promotion that promised a trip to Mars for anyone who collected 900 empty jars. When Arlyss French, a grocery store owner, managed to actually collect them, Burma-Shave responded, "If a trip to Mars you earn/Remember, friend, there's no return." After French collected another 900 jars for the return trip, they decided to go ahead and send him to Moers, Germany. French was happy about the trip, and Burma-Shave was happy about the good publicity generated from the deal.
- They still have these. Labels for Education, Coke Points/Pepsi Points, Camel Cash... A variation is/was "Green Stamps", which you could earn in several different places and then redeem for stuff.
- In 1999, California engineer David Phillips did the math and found that a particular promotion, in which a food company offered airline frequent flyer miles in exchange for inexpensive food purchases, was a phenomenally good value. For about $3000, he was able to buy enough pudding to redeem for over a million airline miles — enough to fly just about anywhere, first class, dozens of times over. And he donated the food to charity, and he got an $800 tax break for the donation. This story was used for the movie Punch-Drunk Love.
- Pepsi ran an ad for its "Pepsi Points" program that advertised an AV-8 Harrier in exchange for 7,000,000 points. As you might expect, a man presented them with the cash value for the points and demanded the fighter jet. When they refused, he sued and lost, in an entertaining ruling in which the judge reluctantly finds herself explaining the indicia that the Pepsi commercial was a joke. The judgment was upheld on appeal.
- My Little Pony for several generations of toys put Horseshoe Points (called Pony Points during Gen 3) on the packages—small value coupons that could be sent in along with a shipping and handling fee for mail-order exclusive items. This mostly included unique or special toy ponies, but Generation Three Hasbro also released a three-foot-tall stuffed pony of Frilly Frocks for a whopping 250 points—and then forgot to make the shipping the right cost, so many people were able to order her for the points and just $2.50 in shipping and handling, same as smaller items. This was later raised to a more logical $25, and Hasbro honored the lower cost for any orders that had been sent in.
- The Transformers had a similar thing with Robot Points. They were printed on the toy packaging, and had a small value number which could vary between characters. They were required to mail-order merch and exclusive characters who only appeared in the pack-in flyers. The practice started with the first series and continued past Beast Wars.