Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and seventy-second installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

The DC superheroes in the Hostess ads were never supposed to actually eat the snacks.

STATUS:

True

Comic book readers who read comic books (or even back issues of comic books) from the late 1970s/early 1980s are well aware of the ubiquitous advertisements that used to run in the comic books that featured DC and Marvel's superheroes fighting bad guys with Hostess snack foods, such as Twinkies, cupcakes and fruit pies.

Occasionally the ads would feature actual supervillains, like the Red Skull...

But for the most part, they would be new supervillains facing heroes like Batman and the Flash...

And the main reason behind this is an interesting restriction that the DC Comics writers were stuck with when they did these ads.

Bob Rozakis, who wrote a number of DC's ads during the era, recalled in an interview with famed Hostess comics "scholar", Seanbaby:

The heroes were chosen in advance, usually to fit a schedule that somebody (probably Sol Harrison and the agency) had set up. We were instructed that the heroes could never eat the cupcakes, Twinkies or fruit pies, because that could be interpreted as an endorsement of the product. So, we were always pressed to come up with some interesting way to stop a crime or a riot or something else using a dessert.

I have no idea why Hostess DIDN'T want the superheroes to be seen as endorsing their products, but in any event, that's why the ads always had the villains (or other characters) eating the snacks, because the superhero couldn't!

It is fair to note that maybe Marvel had different rules and perhaps only DC was bound by this!

There were so many of these ads done, that I doubt that this rule was strictly enforced even at DC, but I believe Rozakis that it WAS, in fact, a rule.

Thanks to Bob and Seanbaby for the awesome piece of information!

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Check out some entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:

1. Did MTV Cancel the Reality Show Fear Because a Contestant Died During the Filming of the Series?

2. Was Die Hard an Adaptation of a SEQUEL to a Book That Was ALSO Made Into a Film?

3. Was Hanna-Barbera’s Fonz and the Happy Days Gang Originally a Doctor Who Cartoon Series?

4. Was Die Hard With a Vengeance Originally Written as Lethal Weapon 4?

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Check back later for part 2 of this installment's legends!

Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com