Character Spotlight: Ding-A-Ling Family

Shout-out to Thomas Parks for suggesting this one!

Last week we featured a character who originated in an ad, and this week we have some other ones. If you're not aware, in the 60s and 70s, it was common for ads to feature comic book and comic strip characters and be done in the same style as the real stories featuring those characters. Although the ads were often made by the real comics creators - because ads had a higher pay rate - they were designed by the ad teams who often put no thought into the world these stories are taking place in, meaning they often used original villains. This phenomenon is no stranger to this blog.

These particular characters are the Ding-A-Ling Family, and they appeared in a Hostess Fruit Pies ad from 1977 that featured Thor.

Why not a Ding Dong ad, you may ask? Those kinds of questions are beyond the scope of this blog, but I'm wondering right along with you.

At any rate, they briefly appeared in Silver Surfer #7 (November 2014) in a flashback where they had abducted the Silver Surfer's companion, Dawn, and they even have Fruit Pies!

The book doesn't explain how the hillbillies got out into space, but I guess the original ad doesn't either. Silver Surfer was a great book where anything could happen, and this is just one small example of that!