Appeasing aggression simply invites more aggression, corporate people! First you caved in to demands from the Hydrox hippies that you bring back their subversive little devil snack and now look — you've got to consider bringing back Kellog's OKs cereal, Hit Parade cigarettes and the most awful thing ever made, Postum, which is beloved only by some Seventh-Day Adventists and a handful of Mormons and which was mercifully put out of its misery late last year. Some of the more terrifying information on Postum's Wikipedia page reveals:

Postum was a powdered roasted grain beverage sold by the Kraft Foods company as a coffee substitute. The caffeine-free beverage mix was created by company founder C. W. Post in 1895 and produced and marketed by Postum Cereal Co. as a healthy alternative to coffee...Postum was made from wheat bran, wheat, molasses, and maltodextrin from corn...



Postum was sometimes marketed by an invisible cartoon ghost named, "Mister Coffee Nerves" [please do click that link], who would appear in situations wherein normal human characters were shown in uncomfortable life-situations (e.g. irritability, lack of sleep, loss of athletic prowess) due to their use of coffee and its negative effects. These cartoons always ended with the humans switching to Postum and Mister Coffee Nerves running away until the next cartoon.

Companies are under pressure to consider reviving bizarrely beloved products like Postum, the Times reports, as slowing consumer spending discourages investment in new products. Internet obsessives accelerate this process, from their basements.

Maybe we'll get Plymouth cars back, along with Duz detergent and Sunshine Lemon Coolers cookies (they killed those??). Don't forget Mello Yello, which become impossible to find before I was even old enough to buy it. (Memo to self: Start Mello Yello blog. No, wait, Tumblr — it's mello-er.)

[Times]