Jack Box (full name Jack I. Box or simply known as Jack) is the primary mascot of the Jack in the Box fast food restaurant chain. In television commercials, he is the founder, CEO and ad spokesman for the chain. His appearance is that of a typical male, with the exception of his spherical white head, blue dot eyes, conical black pointed nose and curvilinear red smile. He is most of the time seen wearing his trademark yellow clown cap and business suit.
The company has used the Jack Box mascot in its advertising since 1994 and has won a number of advertising awards for the long campaign.
History
Prior to 1980, the chain used Jack as its symbol, which sat atop the drive-thru menus in the 1960s and early 1970s. Jack's head was also atop the large signs at each location. In 1980, the chain decided to establish a more "mature" image by introducing a wider variety of menu items and (most notably) discontinuing the use of Jack. A series of television commercials announced that "now we stand for great new food", to which the commercials showed the dramatic destruction of the notorious clown heads (most commonly through explosion, also dropping them from a crane and launching them like a rocket). Throughout the late 1980s to the 1990s, Jack in the Box tried to position itself as a premium fast food alternative, with varying results.
In 1993, a major food contamination crisis was linked to Jack in the Box restaurants. By 1994, a series of lawsuits and negative publicity took their tolls and pushed their corporate parent, Foodmaker Inc. to the verge of bankruptcy. In the short term, they decided to promote their initiatives on food safety. Management then approved a new guerilla advertising campaign created by Richard "Rick" Sittig, then working at the TBWA\Chiat\Day ad agency in Santa Monica, California. The concept brought back the original company mascot, Jack, but now in the form of a savvy and no-nonsense businessman who happened to have an enormous round clown head.
A series of new commercials featured a new and more serious Jack with a smaller head and wearing a business suit (according to him, "thanks to the miracle of plastic surgery"). In the very first of these new commercials, he blew up the board of directors as retribution for his supposed destruction in 1980 (using the 7-note musical signature in its previous campaign as a tribute). The intent of the ad campaign was to prove to a wary public that the company was no longer the same restaurant chain plagued by the food safety scandal; since the commercials had a definite humorous element to them that undermined the alleged "retribution" that Jack was supposedly demonstrating, the public responded positively. Car antenna ornaments modeled after Jack's head became a mainstay of the restaurant chain's promotion for several years.
Fictional biography
The company's "biography" of him claims the following facts: According to his California driver's license, Jack I. Box is 6'8" tall and weighs 195 pounds. It also shows his birthday to be May 16. Jack was born on a cattle ranch in Colorado. He later moved to Southern California, where he met his blonde wife, Cricket, played by model Laura Dunn (1996–2010) and Gillian Vigman (2010–present). They now have a young son named Jack Jr. (who, like all males in the Box family tree, also has an oversized bald head). However, in May 2010, Jack appeared in a new commercial with a woman that did not resemble Cricket, who appeared with him in a commercial in 1997. The pair took in a movie where Jack complained and cried about the price of popcorn in relation to his low-priced menu. Jack revealed to his son that he really met Cricket at a concert at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, CA where Jack's heavy metal band, Meat Riot was playing their one hit wonder song, "Hot Mess" which was the opening act. Jack is an alumnus of Ball State University, a reference to his ball-shaped head. Jack, fluent in English, Spanish and Chinese, has starred in more than 300 television and radio commercials, including more than 100 Spanish-language ads. Jack's linguistic talents also include Mandarin, which he spoke in the 1999 television ad "Titans." Jack ran for president in 1996 and beat out Bill Clinton, Bob Dole and Dogbert in a national independent Virtual Vote poll; no recounts were required. During Super Bowl XXXV, Jack in the Box debuted a television commercial in which Jack announced his purchase of a professional American football team, the Carnivores. His team played against teams such as the Tofu Eaters and the Vegans.