jackassworld

Last week, Rick Kosick and I stopped by Podium Distribution to interview its VP, Tim Gavin, for our forthcoming Big Brother magazine retrospective. A former professional skateboarder on the Blind team while the magazine was still under Steve Rocco’s ownership, Tim was frequently hanging out around the office and he was almost always down for obliging our goofy requests. He was no dummy: publicity back then directly correlated to board sales (which wasn’t exactly a bad thing considering the industry was no bigger than the famously diminutive penis of G.G. Allin at the time), and he couldn’t have asked for a better promotional opportunity than when the idea for Issue #6 came along.

Packaged up in a “cereal box” complete with crappy premiums supplied by our advertisers, this particular issue of the magazine marked the undisputed pinnacle of Big Brother gimmicks and the last real instance of substantial involvement from Rocco. Although the issue proved to be immensely popular with readers this wasn’t exactly what you would call a winning marketing move. The added production costs of the box deep-sixed the magazine’s already non-existent revenue stream and permanently hemorrhaged the budget until Larry Flynt picked the title up in 1997 (Issue #6 came out in late spring ‘93).

Nowadays, the infamous “Sugar-Coated Penis Pops” box remains to be one of the most highly sought after Big Brother items on eBay. Finding an issue in its originally packaged form is rather hard to do, though, considering the box itself was pretty fucking flimsy and all we did prior to mailing the subscriber copies was shrinkwrap and slap a mailing label on them. Consequently, many of the boxes were squashed in the mail with the remnants haphazardly jammed into mailboxes across the nation.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Torrance, CA; 2008)