John K Stuff: Tony the Tiger Was Cool

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Tony the Tiger Was Cool

Hey check out this fun commercial that I got from Leo Burnett. My friend Ryan Karell is an ad exec there and he likes the same kinds of stuff we all do, so he hunted down this for me (and some other classic spots too).

http://cartoonthrills.org/blog/commercialsClassic/TonyTigerBand.mov

Why did they ever change this design? It's so kid-friendly!

Boy, he could really chew up a lot of kids with those teeth.

This is what my pet turtle's eyes looked like when he died.

Compare this box to the modern style cereal packaging! So bold! You could see this across the supermarket.

Mmmm, sparkling sugar goodness.

I like when kids acted like Mr. Horse. This one is really thinking about the pleasurable taste sensation happening in his head.

Here's my favorite theory about sugar...that it's good for you and makes you athletic!

Just like cigarettes!

This must be one of the commercial characters Greg Duffel said Phil Monroe developed for Kellogg's.

I don't know who animated it though.

Here's the modern airbrushed, human-proportioned Tony. Fairly well drawn, but I think the old cartoony one is more fun for kids...plus he has sugar in the title and you can't say sugar anymore, because it's pleasurable and pleasure is bad for you.

They should give away free morals in cereal today too.

What people did who grew up in the Golden Age Of Kid's Life:

Here's an observation I've had for awhile, and I should know, because I watched it all happen.

The best time and place in all of history for kids to grow up was the 50s and 60s in North America.

Science and technology created a whole generation of pretty easy lives. A huge secure and healthy middle class. Major diseases gone. Lots of food for everyone. Kids didn't have to help their parents work the farm. We had no wars on our shores.

Whole industries filled with hugely talented and creative professionals whose mission in life was to bring fun to kids, more fun than they ever had growing up.

http://theimaginaryworld.com/kellogg.html

We had great inventive and beautifully designed toys-tons of them!
All packaging was done by extremely talented and creative designers.
We had beautifully designed cereal boxes that came with well animated fun cartoon character commercials. The cereals had killer prizes inside them and activities on the backs of the boxes.
We had tons of classic cartoons on TV. Short cartoons in the movie theatres-really well done and funny ones.

The Three Stooges reruns on TV. Get Smart. The Beverly Hillbillies. Local puppet shows on every TV station.

Weird-0h models, Mad Magazine, bubble gum cards, Rat Fink, Barbie, millions of comic books in tons of styles, CHEAP comic books that you could buy in any corner store! Sugar on everything.

It truly was a Golden Age for kids.

So what did the kids who grew up in this blissful atmosphere do when they grew up? How did they repay their good fortune?

They became hippies and ruined everything for the following generations of kids.
The hippies took the prizes out of cereal, hired amateurs to design bland mushy toys, put morals in cartoons-made them realistic, bland and ugly, painted eyes flesh color, got rid of kids' music.

The hippies got older and became corporate executives who used their hippie mysticism to create crazy corporate religious practices-focus testing, market research and on and on. They no longer trusted in natural talent and people who were born to create fun for others. They hired psychologists to help them ruin cartoons.

They came up with the theory of creative democracy, that everyone is equally talented, thus shoving actually talented people to the back of the bus. Skill and professionalism died as amateurs and charlatans invaded fields that just a few short years earlier were peopled by gifted talents and experts in fun.

The people who had the most childhood fun in history saw to it that their descendants would never have that much fun again.

Here's proof that the 70s ruined fun forever.