kitch/nostalgia

I'm not a huge fan of American kitsch, but it has an appeal that i think i understand...
it's like the consumer culture equivalent to taking your new girlfriend to the same restaurant that you met your old girlfriend at. It messes with continuity and uniqueness in a way that is somehow simultaneously comforting and perversely thrilling.
It takes generally accepted ideas of 'old fashioned' and by trivializing (and often sexualizing) them it validates the fact that we've changed while also erasing the need to remember/forget that we have. or something.

What i don't understand is when other cultures appropriate American kitsch as a non-referential aesthetic form.
The photo on the right is from a box of corona chocolates i bought in Egypt. While i suppose there's a possibility that they actually have been using the box design since the 50's, (they do still have fido dido on the 7ups) it seems more likely that it's some bizarro world attempt to imitate American kitsch culture. But why?

I dunno... it just strikes me as perverse to sell chocolates using a throwback white american child to a country that has no cultural appreciation of irony, nor (understandably) the information to appreciate this manifestation of it.

It also takes the kitsch selling point ("life was simple in the past, buy this chocolate to recapture the simple pleasures of eating chocolate as kid... oh + Irony") and reduces it to pure imagery (a white kid is eating this chocolate.) And that is kind of fucked up.

So... fast forward a month to Korea, where there is a home decorating store a block from my house exclusively selling 50's style americana embroidered pillows and the like. There's also a 50's era faux car advertisement that says "way my woody!" (referring to the woody wagon) and a rustic crate filled with billy idol vinyls. Huh? What's the appeal? Afterall, no one here knows enough English to understand the literal meaning of the car ad, let alone its double entendre-atic brilliance. And even if someone did understand these things, it would still be nothing more than vulgarly pointless without the cultural cues and references that locate it as kitsch.
Where the hell does this stuff come from?
any ideas?
anyone?