You may at some point in your life have tasted and perhaps enjoyed a beverage made with water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, and less than 2% of: Concentrated Juices (Apple, Clarified Pineapple, Passion Fruit, Orange), Fruit Purees (Apricot, Papaya, Guava), Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Citric Acid, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Pectin, Acacia Gum, Ester Gum, Red 40, Blue 1, Sucralose and Potassium. Sounds tasty, right?
It's more commonly know as Hawaiian Punch and, of course, it was not invented in Hawaii. It was concocted in a garage in Fullerton, California by A.W. Leo, Tom Yeats, and Ralph Harrison, who thought of it originally as something to pour over vanilla ice cream. At the time, it contained five fruit juices — orange, pineapple, passion fruit, guava and papaya…and perhaps those real juices at one time comprised more than 2% of every can.
No, I did not know any of this by heart. I cribbed all this info off the Internet just as you would have. And whether or not you have ever tasted Hawaiian Punch, you probably have seen one of the many commercials featuring a little mascot they call Punchy. Here he is doing his one and only joke…
In high school, I had an Art Teacher whose names was not Mrs. Nyberg but I'm going to call her that in this article. She was very nice and she seemed to know her stuff and we got along well. At this stage of my life, I was aiming for the career I'd decided on back when my age was in single digits — Professional Writer — but I still thought of Artist as a side vocation. I liked to draw and later, I actually made some money (not much) doing it. I was not good compared to actual pro cartoonists but I wasn't bad compared to my classmates, and I was pretty decent at lettering.
One Friday, Mrs. Nyberg gave us the oddest homework assignment: Monday, we were to bring household trash to class. It had to be either an empty box — like a box that had held cereal or detergent or something — or a can that had held canned goods or a beverage. The box or can was to be completely empty and if it was a can, it was to have been rinsed out and clean. Oh — and it couldn't be damaged or dented or anything. We didn't understand why but we did as we were told.
Monday, she had a nice display on the front table of forty boxes or cans and she explained what we were going to do with them. Our assignment for the week — starting that day and finishing by the end of class on Friday — was to design a new label for one of these products and paste it on the box or can. "Imagine," she said, "that the company that makes this product has hired you to give them a whole new look for their product."
We all thought this was a great idea. It would be fun and for anyone considering a career in commercial art, it would get us to thinking about pleasing customers. She had all our names on little slips of paper in a bowl and she drew them out, one by one. When your name was called, you got to go up to the table and pick the empty box or can whose front you'd be redesigning. You weren't allowed to pick the one you'd brought to school.
I set my sights on either the box of Sugar Frosted Flakes or the one of Trix cereal. The cartoonist in me thought it would be fun to draw Tony the Tiger or The Trix Rabbit but other classmates beat me to those. When my name was called, I picked the empty can of Hawaiian Punch.
I already had my design in mind: On the front of the can, I'd draw their mascot, whose name I did not then know was Punchy. He'd be standing under the big new HAWAIIAN PUNCH logo I'd design and he'd have a word balloon. It would read, "How about a nice Hawaiian Punch?" Then on the back, we'd have things like ingredients and some sales copy and a shot of him punching that guy he always punched in the commercials. (If you were doing a box, you just had to do the front of it. If you were doing a can, your new label had to wrap all the way around.)
We spent the rest of the class doing rough sketches for our products. That evening, I went through some magazines we had at home until I found an ad I remembered of the mascot punching the guy and I used it as reference. I did a whole batch of sketches of the two characters in various poses. I did not copy or trace their poses from the ad.
The next day, my classmates were still working on rough sketches but I had my design all in my head. I picked out a kind of drawing paper that was thin but could handle ink and water color, and I cut it to the proper size to wrap around the can. I could probably have finished the whole thing on Wednesday but nobody likes a show-off so I took my time and finished when everyone else in class did on Friday.
Mrs. Nyberg was delighted with what some of us did. You kind of had to divide a class like that into two groups. You had the students who had no artistic ability or interest and were just taking the class because it was required. You also had students who had some talent and might continue to develop it either for career reasons or just as a pleasing hobby. Some in both groups did some pretty impressive designs.
Mine was pretty good and a lot of kids told me it was the best one. I hadn't done so well when Mrs. Nyberg had had us painting or sketching real objects. I was particularly bad at painting. But by turning the assignment into an effort of cartooning and lettering, I was playing to my few strengths. When Mrs. Nyberg was doling out the grades, I got an "A." Can't do better than that.
A week or two later, a note for me was delivered to my Homeroom/Period 1 class. It was from Mrs. Nyberg and it asked if I could come see her at our lunch period that afternoon. Lunch preceded my fifth period class…Art with Mrs. Nyberg. I had no idea what she wanted.
When I got there, I found out in a hurry what she wanted. She wanted to scold me, lower my grade on the Hawaiian Punch can, and tell me how deeply, deeply disappointed she was in me for plagiarism and passing someone else's work off as my own. Turned out she had never seen Punchy or the commercials and she'd thought I had designed that cute little cartoon character myself. Someone had told her I hadn't.
"Stunned" does not begin to describe what I felt. If she'd told me she was a werewolf from the planet Clarion, I could not have been more surprised. I stammered out, "It was just like on Bonnie's Sugar Frosted Flakes box when she drew Tony the Tiger or on Phil's Trix cereal box when he drew the rabbit on the package. They were drawing the established mascot for the product. That's what I did."
It turned out Mrs. Nyberg didn't know any of those characters. She didn't watch television and didn't buy those products and I guess she didn't look at ads in magazines. But she knew Tony the Tiger was on the Sugar Frosted Flakes box because he was on the real box Bonnie had modified, just as the Trix rabbit was on the box of Trix over which Phil pasted his new design. My crime was that Punchy had not been on the Hawaiian Punch can I'd redesigned. She said, "You thought I wouldn't know he was a pre-existing character."
I said, "No. I had no way of knowing you don't watch TV and had never seen a commercial that runs every six minutes. If I was going to steal a character design, I would have picked a character who isn't world famous!"
She said, "This character is not that famous. I'm going to have to lower your grade on this project to an 'F.'"
I said, "How about this? When class starts, you hold up my can and ask how many students in the room are sick of seeing that little guy on television. If even one student does not put up their hand, I'll accept an 'F." If it's unanimous, you let my 'A' stand."
She thought it over for a second, agreed, and when class convened and she polled the room, every single pupil raised a hand. Instantly. She nodded to me and then, without explaining why she'd asked, began that day's lesson. After class when we were briefly alone, she told me, "I'm sorry. I keep believing that because I'm a teacher, I'm expected to be right all the time."
When I graduated, she wrote in my yearbook, "Thank you for reminding me that teachers are human and we're allowed to make mistakes." I'd buried the whole incident in one of those corners of my mind where I rarely look but the inscription reminded me of it and I thought, "Hey, I oughta tell that story on the blog."
It's a good point and it's not just teachers. It's everybody — all of us — and it may even apply to guys who write comic books and blogs. Never admitting you're wrong is not the same thing as always being right.
Hell, it might even apply to those who hold or seek public office but few of them ever seem to learn it. Maybe we need Punchy to give some of them a nice Hawaiian Punch.
The last time I heard the name "RealNetworks" was in 2020 when I was surprised to learn that A) they still exist and B) they got a $2.8 million Payroll Protection Program loan that they did not give back. 
Mac OS 9 in an