Jack Box (full name Jack I. Box or simply known as Jack) is the primary mascot of the Jack in the Box fast food restaurant chain. In television commercials, he is the founder, CEO and ad spokesman for the chain. His appearance is that of a typical male, with the exception of his huge spherical white head, blue dot eyes, conical black pointed nose and curvilinear red smile. He is most of the time seen wearing his trademark yellow clown cap and business suit. The company has used the Jack Box mascot in its advertising since 1994 and has won a number of advertising awards for the long campaign. History Prior to 1980, the chain used a huge clown head as its symbol, which sat atop the drive-thru menus in the 1960s and early 1970s. A rotating clown head was also atop the large signs at each location. In 1980, the chain decided to establish a more "mature" image by introducing a wider variety of menu items and (most notably) discontinuing the use of Jack. A series of television commercials announced that "now we stand for great new food", to which the commercials showed the dramatic destruction of the notorious clown heads (most commonly through explosion, also dropping them from a crane and launching them like a rocket). Throughout the late 1980s to the 1990s, Jack in the Box tried to position itself as a premium fast food alternative, with varying results. In 1993, a major food contamination crisis was linked to Jack in the Box restaurants. By 1994, a series of lawsuits and negative publicity took their tolls and pushed their corporate parent, Foodmaker Inc. to the verge of bankruptcy. In the short term, they decided to promote their initiatives on food safety. Management then approved a new guerilla advertising campaign created by Richard "Rick" Sittig, then working at the TBWA\Chiat\Day ad agency in Santa Monica, California. The concept brought back the original company mascot, Jack, but now in the form of a savvy and no-nonsense businessman who happened to have an enormous round clown head. A series of new commercials featured a new and more serious Jack with a smaller head and wearing a business suit (according to him, "thanks to the miracle of plastic surgery"). In the very first of these new commercials, he blew up the board of directors as retribution for his supposed destruction in