Hulk smile at you, BUT HULK WAG FIST AT YOU TOO.

I’ve posted the DC Comics Joker/Milk Duds version of this ad before. This one lacks the negative “poison foodstuffs” associations, but if I might make one brief observation about the cheerful characters below:

Well, a few observations. First, Red Sonja should go easier on the rouge. “Back off the red, Red!” Second, that may be the dumbest Ben Grimm has ever looked, like someone just popped him in the face and he’s seeing stars. Or he’s drunk. Third, Spider-Man’s pose for some reason (maybe it’s that the webbing print forms an optical illusion that his hands are facing the other way, I don’t know) makes me think of Liberace. “I wish my Uncle Ben was here.”

The last thing. Remember the Comedy Central cartoon Dr. Katz? In it, a psychologist would counsel a stream of comedians/celebrities that plopped themselves on his couch, all of whom did their routines or recounted stories of varying hilarity. One “patient” was funyman Lew Schneider. He had a spiel about the conflicted way that men hug, with the pat on the back that goes along with the embrace. “I’m hugging you, BUT I’M HITTING YOU.” View any episode of The Sopranos for countless examples of the man-hug.

The cheerful Hulk above, with his toothy grin and clenched ham hock fist, reminded me a lot of that routine. HULK HAVE TROUBLE ARTICULATING EMOTIONS.

Captain America is the only one that comes out of this thing unscathed. He must have a good agent.

Anyway, you could certainly win a whole lot of crap in this sweepstakes. Here’s the rest of the booty:

I had a couple of parachutes for my G.I. Joe and Cobra figures as a kid. They somehow violated all laws of physics by making the plummeting men fall faster than they would unaided. The parachutes were a lot of fun, that is, if you enjoyed watching your beloved toys violently corkscrew into the ground from an upper-storey window. It doesn’t look like the chute above is of vastly superior quality.