The Stories Behind Cereal Mascots
How do you spend your Saturday mornings? I remember watching hours of cartoons on television and eating bowls of cereal. Mascots for cereal companies are one way the companies sell their product.
One of the grossest things about cold cereal is when it gets too soggy and turns mushy. Captain Horatio P. Crunch was born in response to a kids survey that said they hated soggy cereal.
Jay Ward drew the captain and, according to his daughter, based the cartoon on himself.
The honorable captain was charged with guarding the Crunch from the evil barefoot pirate Jean Le-Foote.
The Captain has protected his cereal from the menace of sogginess so well that there was a movement to promote him to the rank of Admiral.
Watch this early Captain Crunch commercial.
Rice Krispies is a cereal you can hear. A jingle for the noisy cereal inspired illustrator Vernon Grant to create the characters Snap, Crackle, and Pop:
“Listen to the fairy song of health, the merry chorus sung by Kellogg’s® Rice Krispies® as they merrily snap, crackle, and pop in a bowl of milk. If you’ve never heard food talking, now is your chance.”
Grant’s flair for fantasy caused him to draw the three characters as gnomes or elves. Snap was the first elf and appeared in a few solo ads before his brothers came along. When they first started appearing in nineteen hundred and thirty nine they fought against their rivals Soggy, Mushy and Tuffy for the hearts (and bowls) of the children. Once the television ads began to be seen by a larger and younger audience, Kellogg’s decided to modernize the three and make them more human-like. Snap, Crackle and Pop are now the longest-running cereal advertising campaign in history.
Watch this old television commercial for Rice Crispies.
Before he was a cartoon, the Trix rabbit was a hand puppet. The original tagline for the cereal was “I’m a rabbit and rabbits are supposed to like carrots. But I hate carrots. I like Trix.” Catchy, isn’t it?
General Mills knew that television was the best way to advertise to kids and they decided to spend ninety seven percent of their advertising budget on commercials. It paid off: the “Silly Rabbit” campaign was a hit.
By nineteen hundred sevey six, General Mills was worried it was sending the wrong message to kids by having the rabbit always fall short of his goal to have a bowl of cereal. They decided to do the American thing and let the kids vote whether the rabbit should get a bowl of cereal. The Rabbit’s campaign was so successful that more than ninety nine percent of kids voted to let the rabbit have a bowl.
The Rabbit has succeeded in grabbing bites here and there, but he hasn’t had a full bowl since 1980. And as you can see, it is probably a good thing because it seems to have some sort of weird effect on him.
Watch the commercial for Trix cereal.
Cartoon spokescharacters were all the rage in the 1950s. The Kellogg Company wanted an animal to advertise its new Sugar Frosted Flakes to appeal to the younger generation while reassuring mothers that it was OK to let their kids eat a sugared cereal for breakfast.
The Leo Burnett advertising agency came up with four different choices: Tony the Tiger, Katy the Kangaroo, Elmo the Elephant and Newt the Gnu.
When Tony first appeared on cereal boxes, advertising critic James D. Wolf said, I am very fond of breakfast cereals, but a tiger fails to give me a hankering. Evidently he didn’t realize how great Tony would become.
This is a picture of gnu. Do you think that Newt the Gnu would be a good cereal mascot. Why or why not?
Watch this early commercial for Frosted Flakes.
Marshmallows in a bowl is something kids would like, but the sugar content was a much harder sell for parents.
Lucky was created from a concept that based the marshmallows around a charm bracelet.
Lucky was replaced in the nineteen hundred and seventies by Waldo the Wizard, but the leprechaun came back within a year.
The marshmallows continued to evolve due to increased product sales every time a new one was added. Lucky’s original charm bracelet included yellow moons and stars, but now there are blue moons and shooting stars.
Kids could not resist trying to catch Lucky to get his marshmallow-filled cereal. Fortunately, Lucky provided the secret… go to the store and buy a box.
Watch the first television commercial made for Lucky Charms cereal.
So far this year, we have studied many different kinds of symbols.A symbols is something that stands for something else. It usually is trying to tell us something. It also helps us to remember something.
Tomorrow we will look back at all the symbols we have learned so far:
Olympic ring, vancouver mascots, inukshuks, Blade the Bear, cereal mascots