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Kool-Aid Man represents the laziest of all mascot designs -- he's just a face and limbs grafted onto the product he's selling. What made him unusual is that his only mode of transportation was charging through walls. For a sentient glass pitcher, that's closer to a suicide bombing than it is to refreshment. The Kool-Aid Man has filled more thirsty people with shrapnel than Angola.
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The idea of a drink running through walls is so insane that it may have started as a way for suffocating stuntmen to signal "Help, I need help!" from inside a scream-muffling drink costume. However, the Kool-Aid Man's smashing makes sense if you think about what he is. He's a creature made entirely out of tap water, sugar and a pouch of carcinogens. His body can't decide whether it wants to evacuate its liquid, run as fast as it can or die, so he just charges the nearest building in a desperate attempt at all three.
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After what must have been a casting director's paperwork error, Wilford Brimley did a long-running series of commercials for Quaker Oats in the '80s. It was an ad campaign based entirely around intimidation. There was virtually no sales pitch involved in the commercials. It was more like Wilford was leveling with you that oatmeal was what he fucking had for you and you're going to goddamn eat it.
In 1990, Kellogg's had the industrious idea to mix all their cereals together and put them in one box. The result was 
In 1948, Peter Wheat Bread started publishing a monthly comic about its corporate mascot, Peter Wheat, a creepy pope-hatted elf that wanted to be your pal. He's what babies see when you can't figure out why they're crying.
In 1960, Sugar Coated Rice Krinkles introduced its new culturally sensitive mascot: a Chinese boy named So-Hi. He got his name because he was only "so high," and his original Chinaman name probably just sounded like a bunch of doorbells going off. Eight years later, Post marketers came up with something less offensive:
With Krinkles the Clown as the mascot, every serving of Sugar Krinkles now had the vitamins and minerals of one handful of flesh and the fear you need to get you going in the morning. The prize inside every box was whispers. Whenever you lost a kitchen knife in 1969, you would somehow always find it inside Post's Sugar Krinkles. The side of the box had photos of missing children, but each of them was labeled "Ingredients."
When Snap!, Crackle! and Pop! first appeared in 1933, they were extremely old elves with white hair and gaping, toothless smiles. It looked like their names might have come from the sounds their joints made when they got near cold milk. In 1949, they were suddenly replaced by younger elves. The originals were never heard from again, nor were the three unlucky children who found miniature skeletons in their cereal.
Fast food burgers are mostly made out of victims of chemical toilet falls, so they rely heavily on advertising to draw customers in. Burger King never quite got the hang of this. Their first attempt at a Burger King character in the '60s looked like it was drawn by someone whose hands had already been ground into chicken tenders.
In the '70s, he became more of an actual king. There was even a Burger King Kingdom featuring such classic characters as a robot french fry wizard and a knight in drink cup armor. It was such a bad replica of McDonaldLand that returning Vietnam veterans thought they were VC traps.
No mascot has a stranger story than Popsicle Pete. Manly readers of 
Once Karl was made into "Popsicle Pete," he started appearing in two-page adventures in All-American Comics. I'm about to tell you how boring these adventures were, and you will never believe me. He collected stamps. He sent in Popsicle bags for baseball mitts. The Adventures of "Popsicle Pete" were so dull that police used him to bore child molesters into comas.
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