Moodle-agic: Good and Plenty (and Weird)

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - by Jamie

I recently came across this wonderfully bizarre series of Good and Plenty commercials that ran around 1959.

I’m not a big fan of licorice. Perhaps that’s why I don’t have the ability to make quarters cry, as our young friend George does in the first commercial of the series. For some reason, a bouncing piece of candy (a Good? a Plenty? Help me out here, Caitlin!) decides to share some moodle-agic tricks with George, which George then shares with his friends, including one girl who is wayyyy too turned on by all of this.

The bouncing piece of candy communicates with George through “Oodle-talk”, which, apparently, is a language much like English, but with unnecessary oodles thrown in. In the third commercial of the series, we are given a quick “Oodle-talk” run through by two more bouncing pieces of candy, who simplify it for us by spelling out the nonsense on the screen: good becomes goodle, delicious becomes doodleicious, and Mary becomes Moodleary, which, sadly, she has probably been called since 1959.

The best moment in the clip occurs in the fourth commercial: a genuinely creepy shot that has now instilled in me a deep fear of all things Good and or Plenty. A young girl makes her candy stealing friend disappear, then turns to the camera with a look that makes one wonder if, perhaps, evil comes in oodle form. I still don’t like Good and Plenty, but after seeing her face, there is no frooodleakin way that I’ll mess with anyone who does for a very loodleong time.