Preeeeesenting…three and a half minutes of commercials for Bosco, the chocolate syrup that seemed to sponsor about half of the shows I watched when I was a youth. Of interest in the spots is Bosco's identity crisis: Sometimes, they tried to sell it as something that was good-tasting and decadent, and sometimes it was a "milk amplifier" that added vitamins to the cow juice. After all, we all know how milk isn't healthy for children unless you add a lot of sugar to it.
Also of interest is that one of the commercials features Dick Van Dyke as spokesguy. I'm guessing this was from around (or slightly after) 1956 when CBS was using Mr. Van Dyke to host kid-oriented programming like Cartoon Theater and the occasional family movie special. This was before he starred on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie and well before The Dick Van Dyke Show. I wonder who the cartoonist is in this spot.
Bosco was introduced in 1928 and it's still available in stores. They have the original chocolate flavor (natural cocoa with malt extract) but there's also a strawberry version, a "berry blue" variety, a caramel Bosco, a sugar-free chocolate Bosco and Sugar-Free Bosco Pancake Syrup. My impression is that Bosco once had a pretty large share of the market but then the Hershey's and Nestlé's corporations made a move on the syrup shelves and managed to whittle Bosco down to a smaller company. One of these days, I'll have to edit and upload a series of Bosco commercials that Daws Butler did which were, like everything Daws did, marvelously entertaining.
