CSotD: Sugar Corn Pop Culture
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Cul de Sac presents the perfect strip for Saturday morning, the day with no rules. Only atheist grownups can sleep in on Sunday, so the social contract declares that the TV people will watch your kids Saturday morning, if you promise not to get up and see what's going on down there.
With the right promotion, kids will eat anything. If tofu was Day-Glo, turned ordinary kids into superheroes and came with a free toy surprise, kids would be rioting in the aisle with the case-next-to-the-dairy-case, demanding that their parents buy the stuff. (Or maybe it wouldn't have to go that far — adding Day-Glo color and lots of sugar has done wonders for yoghurt. Speaking of turning your innards neon orange.)
Anyway, you can sell anything. You've just got to position the product right. And live in a world without rules from 6 am to noon on Saturdays.
I grew up in an age before disclaimers. In this 1954 commercial, "Look how real" was a clear order to ignore how lame, and the explanation of the fuel is funnier than the cartoons that surrounded it, but the real sales point is the exploding ship. That's where we've moved from "puffery" to "lying to the kids."
I don't remember these frogmen — hey, I was four years old — but I remember that my brother sent for a submarine that never arrived. This was a great disappointment, but probably not as much of a disappointment as it would have been if it had arrived.
Kids' cereals always came with something, either a toy in the box or a toy you could send for. Toy-in-the-box was better, since it provided instant gratification for us and less frantic leaping and fretting at mail time for our parents to deal with.
There being several of us in the toy-wanting age cohort at any given time, my mother had (A) a system of keeping track of whose turn it was to get the toy and (B) a rule that we could only have one sugared and one non-sugared cereal open at a time. My mother was younger then than my children are now, but she was smarter than a bunch of people whose ages were still in one digit.
And, while the non-sugared cereal was usually Wheaties or Corn Flakes, Shredded Wheat had a tie-in with Rin-tin-tin and offered various premiums on the cardboard that divided the layers of what I thought was inedible cereal but which I choked down to get the plastic bugle. (Couldn't send away until the cereal was gone. That was rule (C).)
Cereal wasn't the only way to get stuff. There was a brand of canned tamales (motto: "Doing for Mexican food what Franco-American does for Italian cuisine.") that offered giveaways and I believe was the source of little license plates — collect all 48! — while Kraft made a line of spreadable cheese in various flavors that came in what were then pretty nice little juice glasses. We also got jelly in larger glasses, and I remember some with presidents and their homes, though we only had Thomas Jefferson/Monticello and Andrew Jackson/The Hermitage. Someone also gave away little college pennants, which at least promoted education. Can't remember who.
But, with or without premiums, the product hawking was a part of the medium right from the start. (And had begun earlier, on the radio, as with the tie-ins between Little Orphan Annie and Ovaltine, etc.)
Subtle, eh?
After a decade or so of this approach, Post cereals realized that there was a better way to promote their products than latching on to a popular kids' show, and that was to create one entirely populated by their own mascots.
"Linus the Lionhearted" was the mascot for Crispy Critters, a sugar-coated animal-shaped cereal, and star of his own Saturday morning cartoon show, which also featured Lovable Truly (Alpha-Bits), So Hi (Rice Krinkles), Rory Raccoon (Post Toasties) and Sugar Bear (Sugar Pops).
By 1964, when this show debuted, I was a little out of the demographic, though I still liked cartoons and would watch. And I still liked junk food, too, so that part worked for me as well. Much more Petey than Alice, however.
But Linus only ran five years and then the FCC apparently got up early one Saturday morning and turned on their TV, because, in 1969, they decreed that characters couldn't sell things within their own shows. Which was the end of the "Linus the Lionhearted Show."
Not to fear. Turn on your TV. There's enough product placement that actually having the characters urge kids to buy things would be superfluous.
Happy Saturday. And don't mess with perfection.
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