A few days ago, I showed some YouTube clips of vintage Cap’n Crunch commercials. And as I was searching through the YouTube clips, I discovered something that was both unique and disturbing. All those cartoon characters we grew up watching on Saturday morning cartoons – Yogi Bear, Woody Woodpecker, Bullwinkle – were intertwined with commercials for breakfast cereals. Now over time, the FCC and children’s television advocacy groups worked with the television networks to reduce the amount of commercials that directly tied into each cartoon episode – i.e., Yogi Bear could sell Kellogg’s cereals, but not on the Yogi Bear show.
With that in mind, how about we take a look back in time and see how our favorite cartoon characters did as cereal spokespeople. Shall we?
| WOODY WOODPECKER Kellogg’s Sugar Pops Yep, you can eat a bowl of Sugar Pops, and afterward you can convert two trees into railroad tracks to save a train from falling into a chasm. |
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| YOGI BEAR Kellogg’s OK’s I don’t know if there was an implied partnership between Kellogg’s and Hanna-Barbera, but it seemed like a lot of their cartoon characters doubled as breakfast cereal boosters. |
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| SNAGGLEPUSS Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies Snagglepuss has the chocolate version of the Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to chocolate. And as we all know, chocolate is a very important part of a good breakfast. |
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| BULLWINKLE Cheerios how’s this for a cereal commercial – not only do you get Bullwinkle touting the benefits of Cheerios, you also get a cameo appearance by another cereal character promoting his then-brand-new cereal on the market. |
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| BUGS BUNNY AND YOSEMITE SAM Post Sugar Crisp Not only did the Warner Bros. characters shill for Sugar Crisp, there are other commercials where they tout Alpha Bits, Post Toasties and several other Post cereals. |
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| POPEYE THE SAILOR Start Orange Drink Yeah, it doesn’t sound like Jack Mercer, the definitive voice of the squint-eyed sailor, but even so, what the heck is Popeye doing selling a foodstuff that isn’t green and leafy? |
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| TENNESSEE TUXEDO Frosty O’s Yeah, you can tell that Don Adams wasn’t interested in providing the voice for this putrid commercial. Probably a good reason why you can’t find Frosty O’s on the store shelves today. |
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| THE PINK PANTHER Pink Panther Flakes Come on… even the cool Pink Panther has to sell cereal? What is this world coming to? What’s next, should we see pink milk in the bowl? |
And this is of course not even counting all the Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles that Fred Flintstone used to sell – oh wait, he still sells them on TV today. Ah, cartoon characters and cereal commercials. Part of a good nutritious high-sugar energy breakfast. Hee.
Chuck The Writer 
for some reason this doesn’t bother me, but product placement in tv shows does….
wasn’t Popeye created to sell spinach?
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You mean that my namesake had a sideline hawking pebbles from Bedrock.
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