Vintage Metal Lunch Box Articles

Paileontology: A history of the lunchbox
By wholepop.com
There was a time not so long ago that the lunchbox was the ultimate in personal expression. More than mere carrying case for peanut butter and bologna sandwiches, your lunchbox showed who you were and who you aspired to be.
The pretty-in-pink girls carried Barbie or teen dream Bobby Sherman; tomboys carried Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman or Annie Oakley; boys carried Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers or GI Joe; little kids carried Disney, the Peanuts gang or the Jetsons...and the completely clueless carried the generic Thermos plaid pattern. Lunchboxes back during the Golden Age (1950-1980) were what T-shirts and fan web pages are today: a way to advertise to a largely indifferent world about your heroes — or at least your favorite TV show, movie star, cartoon character, or rock band.

1953 Hoppy Tails
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, another cowboy star was jealous. Roy Rogers wanted his own box, but Aladdin had turned him down with "one cowboy is enough."
So Roy saddled up Trigger and rode north to American Thermos in Connecticut, which also had been feeling slumping sales from its lunch box / thermos sets, and especially now with Aladdin's success. AT decided to do Aladdin one better by using bright, full-color lithography on all sides of the box instead of a decal on one face. They sold 2 1/2 million Roy Rogers & Dale Evans boxes in 1953, increasing their total sales 20% in one year.
Aladdin retooled and adapted full-lunch box lithography for their 1954 line. So did some newcomers, ADCO Liberty and Universal, as well as another old-style lunch pail manufacturer, Ohio Art (which a few years later, flush with lunch box profits, diversified into making toys including Etch-A-Sketch). The box wars had begun, as manufacturers scrambled to be the first to tie up rights to the hot new TV shows.
In 1962, Aladdin added another trademark feature: They stamped the designs into the metal, giving a bas relief, 3-D effect.

1957 Domes
Square boxes were great for their TV screen-like dimensions, but much of the highest artistry went onto the "domes" with rounded tips which aped the shape of the original workingman's lunch pail. Ironically, though now much sought-after for their designs, they were begun as a cost-cutting measure. t....
You see, the cost of buying rights to licensed characters and TV shows, some of which would be canceled before the box had a chance to sell, was becoming astronomical. Aladdin decided to create some generic-subject boxes and decided the new shape would be a novelty selling point. Its artists rose to the challenge, given a bigger canvas and freed of the tyranny of having to please temperamental producers and stars (Rex Harrison, for example, bounced the art for the Dr. Dolittle box six times before okaying it).
Aladdin's first dome, "Buccaneer" in 1957, capitalized on a pirate craze that had been spurred on by Peter Pan and other movies of the era. It was a huge success. From there, domes featured other whimsical patterns, some of which — like the VW Bus and the Disney Schoolbus, which at 9 million units was the biggest seller of all time — used the shape of the boxes to brilliant effect.

1987 Decline and Fall
Lunchboxes had had a good run, selling about 120 million between 1950 and 1970, but the box boom couldn't last. ADCO stopped making in 1956; Universal in 1963; Ohio Arts in 1985 What happened?
Blame it on kids, who came up with other status symbols to beg their parents for. Blame it on manufactures who in 1972 began switching to plastic molded — inferior in every aesthetic way to metal — to cut manufacturing costs. And blame it on crusading mothers and pandering legislators who began passing legislation to ban metal as dangerous assault weapons. The last metal lunch box of the Steel Age, fittingly depicted that hailed conking hero, Rambo. That was in 1987.
Even with plastics, Aladdin announced that it was giving up the lunch box business completely in 1998, leaving only Thermos standing tall. And yet....

2003 Lunchbox Come Back
Despite the "death" of quality, they're slowly coming back. Thermos slipped a few metal boxes into their lunch lines last season, and if you take a look around department stores and gift shops, you might just find some neo-nostalgia metal boxes by little-known names like the candy-filled, made-in-China boxes of American Specialty Confections: Some are reissues of classic designs of the past, others are new but with a retro look.
The other thing is that some of the new aren't so bad. Although too many are still just a standardized plastic box with a sticker slapped on it, some of the Thermos fabric soft-sides like Winnie the Pooh are colorful and fun. Or their whimsically-shaped Barbie Dream house. While the metal boxes still seem aimed squarely at aging Baby Boomers, could it be that the lunchbox as a form of popular art will rise again among elementary school trendsetters? Surprisingly, schools now allow metal lunchboxes once again! Will lunchboxes survive?