SpaghettiOs

In 1965, Campbell Soup Company's Franco-American brand launched SpaghettiOs — canned pasta, not soup, despite where memory tends to file it. Creator Donald Goerke, a Campbell marketing man who developed over a hundred products in his 35-year career and is remembered as "the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs," auditioned several shapes before settling on the ring: cowboys, astronauts, stars, and sports shapes were all considered and passed over. A year later came the varieties with meatballs and sliced franks, and the lunch-counter lineup was set before most of its eventual superfans were born.

The spoon was the whole pitch. "The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon," Jimmie Rodgers sang in the jingle — kids loved the autonomy, parents loved the contained mess. And then there's "Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!", the catchphrase that escaped its commercials entirely and became a general-purpose American response to minor disaster. Somewhere along the way the words stopped meaning the product and started meaning "whoops" — the surest sign a slogan has won.

More than sixty years on, SpaghettiOs still line supermarket shelves under the Campbell's label, and every millennial who grew up on them is quietly convinced the orange rings were invented for their generation specifically. They weren't — that's just what a perfect kid-food does to the people who ate it.