6.4 KiB
Citogenesis gone... right?
I remember his name for the first time and having ths probably intended "huh, that's odd" reaction a long time ago. If you look at the Wikipedia article for Pringles and search for "Julius", it should be relatively easy to not only find his name, but also validate this claim through a citation linking to an official document by Kellogg Company, the owners of the Pringles brand.
This should be the end of the story, an odd name for an odd character, on a product oddly compared to potato chips, that's just good marketting. It is not hard to confirm this name comes directly from the Kellogg company. But there is one small question, where did it come from?
A quick web search will show you many many many many many many (though one may wonder why the last article is so skeptical of the name) more reasons to assure yourself this is definitely real. There was even a Jeopardy question (answer?) concreting his name!
I know it might be more normal for me to write about my weird tech hacks, or at least something vaguely related to my area of expertise, but I found this just interesting enough and digging up weird things is always enticing to me.
I was browinsg a Bird Website™ briefly when I came across the weirdest claim I have perhaps ever seen in my life, it was what appeared at first to be some classic internet hyperbole, a claim along the lines of "The birds work for the bourgeoisie". This time, a user was claiming to be the author of Mr Pringles' first name, although entirely by accident, while trolling on Wikipedia. I almost dismissed it, but I at least wanted to deconfirm it first, so that in case this became a popular myth I could help dispel it. It appeared that this user had posted about this a few times, but why would I trust their tweet instead of the official Pringles Twitter helping bring us back to reality, and remind us that this claim is silly.
Meet "Playpus Man" (@Platypus222), the person apparently responsible for this name (and ludicrous explanation). According to this tweet and subsequent replies, they moderated Wikipedia articles with a great reputation, and then abused their trust to inject various made-up "facts". They expanded on this to also credit @therealwiseman as the "true" source of the name, both explaining that they worked together on this alleged hoax.
"Short version is that I made up a name for a mustached snack food mascot, added it to Wikipedia, and over time due to luck and a change of ownership it stuck and the company now claims ownership of it."
That's a lot to hear, but it should be pretty easy to confirm or deny, Wikipedia has an edit history after all. So I picked up a "blame" tool and found the exact edit responsible for introducing the word "Julius" here - it was authored by a user named "Platypus222" in 2006, well there we go, we've confirmed it! Well, not quite. The mysterious "Platypus Man" himself also said "Some will claim that the company probably just used it before that but you'll never find proof of that.", so despite his suspious uncited insertation, this may have been an existing name, and the addition of "you'll never find proof of that" sounds like a challenge to me.
True, it appears very difficult to find any source of that name pre-dating that Wikipedia edit, but not impossible. Curiously, one of the few results I could find, was a drawing from Danbooru.
The date on the left clearly shows this was uploaded in 2005, seemingly disproving this asinine story, albeit in one of the weirdest ways possible. Although, after asking the Platypus about this image, and looking into it more myself, it appears the julius_pringles tag appeared around 2021, and the upload date is questionable given the uploader joined the site in 2007.
With that out of the way, it truly does seem as if the Wikipedia edit was the original source of this name (please contact me if I am wrong), but what the hell can we do about that? Wikipedia has such a concept as citogenesis, where an article copying from Wikipedia becomes a source on Wikipedia, concreting falsities, but what if it wasn't an article copying from Wikipedia, what if it was the primary source itself?
The name "Julius Pringles" appeared in reputable media extremely rarely up until his name became legitimized by the Pringles brand around 2013, which curiously aligns with the Kellogg Company aquisition of Pringles in 2012. Apparently, during their purchase of the brand and collection of all trademarks, they had mixed up a joke on the Wikipedia article as one of their assets, and continued using it.