Tag cereal mascots

Retroville: Chexmates

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Howdy, y’all.

Before we start with the usual merriment, a little house cleaning: I know we haven’t posted anything new in the past 13 days, but there’s no cause for alarm; we haven’t quit or gotten sick or joined a biker gang without telling you, and we certainly haven’t been smuggling unicorn manes across the Canadian border. No, we just haven’t been inspired to do anything new lately, plus things have kind of busy in real life lately, so we’ve just been taking a little break until the next big ideas come along. We’ve got new entries coming down the pike, we promise. Now, onto the article.

Today’s Retroville scans the cereal aisle once more, this time uncovering a forgotten set of breakfast mascot heroes. Before there was Alfie the Alpha-Bits Cereal Wonder Dog, before there was Officer Crumb the Cookie Cop, before there was Apple and Cinna-Man, there were The Chexmates.

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Saving the day…one bowl at a time.

For the uninformed, the Chexmates were the ID characters for Ralston-Purina’s Chex family of cereals circa 1968. They were a trio of high-spirited kids who would avert disasters and perform heroic feats after fueling up on their namesake product. Think a late 60’s Teamo Supremo that shilled cereal.

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The Chexmates’ roster consisted of:

Chexter, a tall, barrel-chested bohunk with large shoulders possessing colossal strength…

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Mayhaps Chexter was the unmentioned son of Strong Man from the Mighty Heroes.

…Jessie Jane, the only girl in the gang, who wore rodeo gear and did amazing things with her lasso (more Teamo Supremo similarities, with the team’s only female member being a cowgirl who does rope tricks)…

…And finally, a little Asian boy in a white karate gi and bare feet (must be a fan of Ryu from Street Fighter) who talked in Charlie Chan-speak and was a karate master named Chop Luey.

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Yes, the name is groan-inducing, and Luey’s fortune cookie mode of speech was more than a tad stereotypical (contrary to what you might think I’d say, a character like Chop Luey could easily fly in today’s media; he’d just have be rendered more fluent in English and drop the “Ah so”‘s and “Honorable”s from his dialogue), but the kid did have chops, not to mention serious Kung-Fu Grip, so that’s saying something. Here are the Chexmates in action.

By the way, if the animation and character designs resemble those of early Hanna-Barbera, that’s no accident: apparently, HB did the animation for the Chexmates’ spots.

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“I should probably mention that gorillas belong to the ape family and aren’t monkeys at all, but that’s a common mistake you so-called higher primates often make!”

Some more ads:

It’s probably best to stop here, since if we went any further you’d begin to wonder how 3 kids with no government ties, apparent technological or engineering skills or visible income managed to build a sophisticated working space rocket.

Nowadays, most of Ralston’s cereal properties are owned by General Mills, and cereal mascots aren’t quite the staples of kid-vid that they once were, but maybe one day someone will try to revive the Chexmates, as a heroic team united by breakfast.

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“Perhaps protecting the environment, or whatever.”

Ad Nausea: General Mills Breakfast Cereal Makeover

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If you’ve been watching kid-vid networks like Nickelodeon lately, you’ve undoubtedly noticed some new commercials for General Mills cereals such as Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Lucky Charms, Reese’s Puffs and Cookie Crisp. Apparently after nearly a century of these mascots acting out their own individual shticks in their own respective commercials, lately General Mills has opted to place their various mascot characters together (except for Lucky the Leprechaun, who still appears in his own spots) in a new series of ads promising to “make it Saturday morning everyday”. Cartoon Network should be receiving a royalty for these spots, since they owe more than a little inspiration from their shows’ respective titles and visual aesthetics. Peep out this spot, which call to mind CN’s Uncle Grandpa and The Amazing World of Gumball, right down to the use of the 04b30 font and the voice of Kevin Michael Richardson as a talking orange.

 

-OK, I just figured out that the big blob is supposed to be a Reese’s Puff; at first I thought he was distant cousin to Gloop and Gleep from The Herculoids.

There’s also these new Lucky Charms spots, which are more than a tad reminiscent of CN’s Adventure Time.

 

 

-Now of course, whenever a company or studio does something new with an existing set of characters or a franchise, especially when said characters are ones people 21 and older grew up with, there comes the usual rallying cries of “CHILDHOOD RUINED!!” and “They’ve destroyed my memories!!”. Now as an adult who grew up watching the General Mills commercials, I suppose I’m now supposed to be all butt-raged and insane with anger at this new campaign. Am I? Let me see….

 

 

Yeah, this isn’t a big deal for me. Yeah, the company is bandwagon jumping onto the Adventure Time/Gumball/Uncle Grandpa visual aesthetic like so many of CN’s shows are employing right now, but that’s apparently what’s selling with kids these days, and lest we forget, the goal of every commercial product is to SELL as much as possible. Few things are simultaneously sadder and more hilarious to me then reading comments from people crying about how some new cartoon or movie or TV show or something or other has raped their innocence or whatever. That ain’t the case, for 2 reasons: First, your childhood memories haven’t been ruined by these new spots, because that’s not how memories work. You can still remember the old spots and they’re archived in many places, these newer ads haven’t wiped the older commercials from existence. Second, and this is the big one, these spots are aimed at KIDS, not at you. This is no different than Cartoon Network hiring different voice actresses to play the Powerpuff Girls in their upcoming reboot…

PPG Reboot

 

…Or Disney giving the Seven Dwarfs new designs for The 7D.

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In the case of each, while I’m not 100% certain why these changes were made (though I have my theories), the fact that they were made isn’t sending my world crashing down around me. The children whom these spots are aimed at aren’t whining about the changes, since they barely remember the older spots; it’s doubtful they’ve even seen them all unless they regularly visit them on YouTube or Retro Junk. Nostalgia doesn’t work on a generation that doesn’t know of its’ existence. Keep in mind that General Mills has been doing many of these shticks for years now, in some cases, decades; they probably just figured it was time to try something different. they might have just felt like they’ve done all they can do with the “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!” or “Catch Lucky!” premises.

And I know that we’ve made a couple of these points before in other entries, to that I’ll say this: I’ll make you a deal…

Larry Wilmore

We’ll stop commenting on this crap when you stop saying it.

 

Retroville: Cereal Killers

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Today Retroville takes a walk down the murky depths of the breakfast cereal aisle, chronicling breakfast’s Hall of Lame; some of the most infamous and shortest-lived kid-vid breakfast cereals and their mascots.

First up, we have OJs, no, not an O.J. Simpson themed cereal (“use the map on the back of the box to find the real killers!”), but rather an orange juice flavored cereal circa 1985, whose mascot was an orange-wrangling cowboy named OJ Joe.

Not hard to see why this one didn’t last; it was 2 great tastes that taste weird together. Generally speaking, folks like cereal, milk and orange juice for their breakfasts, but not all in the same dang food! Though I hear that mixing orange juice with milk is something of a trend in California.

“Californians are weird, brah!”

Next up is Punch Crunch, one of the lesser-known and quickly forgotten cereals from the Quaker Cap’n Crunch family. It was a fruit punch flavored cereal. Its’ mascot was Harry S. Hippo, an enormous (so what else?) pink hippo who liked to dance.

“Hmm, that guy sounds kinda familiar.”

Yes, that was Bill Scott, the original voice of Bullwinkle J. Moose, as Harry.

-Funny story: for a while there was an internet rumor saying that the reason why Punch Crunch was taken off the shelves was because people found the character of Harry S., a dandy pink hippo who loved to hoof it, to be an offensive homosexual stereotype (’cause we all know guys who like pink and enjoy dancing are automatically gay, right?), but that’s not even close to the truth. The reason that Punch Crunch was discontinued was because it was one of THE single nastiest concoctions ever wrought by man! As a kid I begged my parents to buy this after seeing that commercial, that Saturday morning I poured myself a bowl, and on that day I learned what a gag reflex was. I quickly poured that crap right down the garbage disposal–before it committed suicide.

Next, we have Ice Cream Cones cereal, which was (no prizes for guessing), an ice cream cones flavored cereal. Another gem from the 80’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9eyDj1zmZc

I can’t put it any better than Mr. David Letterman, who had this to say about Ice Cream Cones cereal:

“All you need is a couple of candy bars, and you’ve got a real nutritious breakfast here.”

Finally, we have Sugar Rice Krinkles (yes, it was actually spelled with a ‘K’; yay, literacy!) from Post, which boasted numerous mascots over its’ brief lifetime. When the cereal debuted in 1951, its’ mascot was Krinkles the Clown. For those too young to remember, try to imagine if John Wayne Gacy did a cereal ad:

For years, this guy plugged Sugar Rice Kuh-Rinkles, all the while giving kids at home childhood Tuh-Rama.

“EVERYTHING FLOATS IN MILK!!”

There's a reason why clowns perform at children's hospitals: the kids can't run away from them there.

There’s a reason why clowns perform at children’s hospitals: the kids can’t run away from them there.

Later, Post replaced Krinkles with an animated character named So-Hi, who, like all of Post’s cereal mascots at the time, appeared on Linus the Lionhearted, a 30-minute animated plug for General Mills Post cereals which ran from 1964 to 1969. So-Hi was a Chinese boy–and that was his entire character shtick. He fell very firmly in the fortune-cookie phrase spouting “no tickee, no shirtee!” shtick, but keep in mind when this was. The character was named So-Hi because he was “just so-high”. Don’t shoot the messenger, I didn’t come up with that.

“Not cool, man. Geez, I’m an ancient martial arts master from a fighting video game, and I found that horribly racist!”

Sugar Rice Krinkles’ final mascot before getting discontinued altogether was a rather chipper milkman named Manfred, whose ‘nemesis’ was a sourpussed old coot named Gloom McDoom who wanted everybody else to be as miserable as he was (obviously an anhedonic, or a typical sullen teenager).

I don’t know, ‘the krinkles’ don’t sound like something I’d want my stomach to have.

“Say, that ‘smile a happy smile today’ line sounds kinda similar to our Hey Girls’ motto ‘Share a Smile’. Think we have a lawsuit? Mama could use a new gingham hat!”

Rumor has it that Gloom McDoom went on to pursue a career in political punditry:

Glenn Beck

As an added bonus, here’s something else Manfred the Milkman plugged during his short career:

*Give yourself a bonus gold geek star if you noticed the Honeycomb Hideout in the background there.

Well, there’s only one word for that trippy trip down Memory Lane: