Tigers and Cranes

no, the above title isn’t something i hammered out on the keyboard while drunk.

lotte is a giant snack conglomerate that has a long history in both japan and korea. lotte was established in tokyo in 1948 by a korean dude named shin kyuk-ho as a maker of bubble gum [”fusen gum”], and ever since, has expanded to included all manner of snacks and junkfood. lotte has set up overseas branch of itself over the years, south korea being one of its largest markets.

in fact, lotte department store and lotte world in seoul are, yep, you guessed it, owned by lotte. lotte also owns baseball teams, namely chiba lotte marines, as well as lotte giants in korea.

oh yeah, lotteria(the burger place which i love) is also owned by this conglomerate. apparently, the only business lotte hasn’t got its fingers in is producing weapons, but i’m sure they’re working on that too.

a little trivia: the name “lotte” is short for charlotte, a character from the german novel “the sorrows of young werther” by goethe. so says wiki.

sure, these days lotte is an unstoppable cash machine that deals with finance, IT, hotels, chemicals, electronics(!), along with a thousand other disparate endeavors, but in the 80’s, they had some really retarded ideas, like “lotte screwbar”.

no, it’s not a construction implement, rather, it’s a popsicle that is twisted along its z-axis. i found this unintentinally hilarious and disturbing korean commercial from the 80s feauturing, inexplicably, korean harem girls(i think), a horrible animated cartoon character(i think he was feautured in comic strips called “go in dol”), and a pretty awful “arabian music”.

i wish they still sold this. so i could say “hey, you wanna screwbar?”

and get slapped.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 10:00 pm and is filed under random, korea, japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.