General Mills' Cheerios marks its 75th anniversary next year. About a decade in, they introduced Cheerios Kid and his girlfriend, if you will, Sue, in a series of ads that ran until the mid-60's. Why they stopped, I don't know. The Kid & Sue would return briefly in the 80's in a new series that depicted Sue as being equal to the Kid, instead of being a damsel in distress, as she's shown in this 1961 ad.
An evil merman tries to claim Sue as his own for some reason. Heh, I think she's too young for him........
In 2012, the Kid & Sue returned again in an online ad campaign, but no new commercials came out of this. Hmmmm, don't you think it's time to bring them back to television?
4 comments:
Cereal mascots on the whole seem to be on the wane these days. Aside from Tony the Tiger (who's mainly milking the sports theme presently) and the Trix Rabbit, they only pop up on the Tube sporadically.
I barely remember the original Cheerios Kid ads. I know them mostly by my father telling me about them. I did experience the mid to late 80s revival commercials. Not surprisingly in the new ads, they started having Sue eat the cereal and take on the bad guys/menaces herself. The image of a young girl being shown as a helpless damsel who needs a big strong man (or boy in this case) to save her would never fly in this post Woman's Lib era of political correctness.
Goldstar: Oh, that is SO, so true. I've seen a couple of those 80's spots, and will put them up down the road.
Silverstar: Come to think of it, I think General Mills has even phased down Sonny (Cocoa Puffs), which I find amazing. The Monster Cereals now only come out on a limited basis for Halloween. Kellogg's still has Snap, Crackle, & Pop and the other mascots, but they're not shown on TV as much as they used to, and Post did away with theirs eons ago. All Post has left, of course, is the Flintstones (Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles), and the celebrities they can recruit for that still-running ad campaign that gets no TV time (Team Fruity/Team Cocoa). Like, Shaquille O'Neal is now on a cereal box, in addition to those Gold Bond ads that get played to death.
A very sad state of affairs, really. Some of the older, classic cereal commercials are available in ad compilation DVDs, but I'd love to see a comprehensive DVD series of restored, classic cereal ads with all the major companies represented, but I suppose that's not likely to ever happen. Maybe we could at least get a Monsters Cereal set, since GM has put a lot of effort into those cereals for the past 3 years or so, even going so far as to hire apparently big-name artists to create new box art for the series.
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