Studies in Crap goes where no Big Boy has gone before

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Adventures of Shoney’s Big Boy No. 51

Publisher: Paragon Products, Pompano Beach, Florida
Date: 1981
Discovered at: Independence antique mall

The Cover Promises: The Big Boy has a hidden message for you!
Also: The Big Boy is friends with a  blonde who lives in a pop-up book and a ginger boy with a TRS 80 for a Torso.

Representative Quote:
“Dear Big Boy —
I am a big fan of yours. I like fancy sports cars and playing polo. I hope to grow up to be just like you.
— William Ogden, Texarkana, TX.”

The surprises in this freebie Big Boy comic book start right with the name. By the ’80s, the Big Boy — that plastic, pompadoured monument to the ass-widening effects of a burgers-and-boulevards lifestyle — had ended his long affiliation with the Bob’s Big Boy Restaurant chain.
Now, he shilled for Shoney’s — the chain of choice for those who find the fanciness of a Denny’s alienating.
 
At the time, some considered this a violation of a great American tradition. Your Crap Archivst can’t work up much feeling for the sanctity of old advertising logos, but I can see how the Big Boy’s post-Bob’s gig seem demeaning, something like a hangdog boxing champ meet-and-greeting the mobs at Caesar’s. Still, he was engineered to sell hamburgers, so what’s he going to do? A big boy’s gotta eat.