Friday, June 30, 2006

General Mills & Cartoons

In the 1960's and early 70's, General Mills sponsered a bunch of cartoons including King Leonardo, Tennessee Tuxedo & the Go Go Gophers, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Underdog, Hoppity Hooper and the Space Kidettes. While it would have been amazing to see a giant image of Bullwinkle on the front of Cheerios, he still made some great appearances on the backs of those boxes. So here is a gallery of some of those classic box back appearances.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool. One of the strangest crossovers is a television commercial with Lucky the Leprechan being pursued by Boris Badenov and Natashe Fatale. I have never seen this trio on a cereal box though.

Greg said...

So many of these boxes are familiar. We really have lost something by trying to "protect" children by putting huge demarcation lines between advertising and program content. If only "Linus the Lion-Hearted" was available on DVD legally.

Chris said...

Those are so beautiful.

bgrauman said...

NOW I know how much General Mills "controlled" the cartoon shows they sponsored...if Rocky & Bullwinkle, The King & Odie, Tennessee & Chumley, Hoppity Hooper & "friends", Underdog, AND those "Space Kidettes" weren't "pushing" Cheerios and the like in integrated commercials during their TV shows...they were plastered all over their cereal boxes, too! {By the way, you forgot "Twinkles", the magic elephant on "KING LEONARDO" who had his OWN General Mills cereal! Or DID you....?}

VERY IMPRESSIVE!!!!

Dan Goodsell said...

Yeah this posting was about the cartoon shows that GM sponsered. Twinkles was a cereal character and I don't think he ever had a show but did appear in commercials. For Twinkles boxes visit my site the Imaginary World - I have a gallery in the GM cereal box section of about 40 Twinkles boxes.

bgrauman said...

Dan, as I've mentioned, "Twinkles" DID appear on "KING LEONARDO AND HIS SHORT SUBJECTS" (1960-'63) in 60 and 90 second "adventures" [similar to those "COMMANDER McBRAGG" 'shorties' on "UNDERDOG"], but those were eventually dropped from the syndicated packages of "THE KING AND ODIE" in the '70s, for obvious reasons.

:)

Dan Goodsell said...

OK

Gavin Freitas said...

How cool is this! Did you just save these?

Luca Tieri said...

Thank you for sharing these little pearls of pop quintessencial.
-L

bgrauman said...

There's something else you should know, Dan...for a time in late 1960, "Twinkles" also appeared on ABC's "ROCKY AND HIS FRIENDS", over Jay Ward's objections. He was willing to go along with whatever General Mills usually wanted, but he did NOT approve of a segement that he had no direct control over (plus the fact that it was produced by GM's "sister studio", TTV-LEONARDO). Eventually, Jay won out, and "Twinkles" was seen exclusively on "KING LEONARDO".

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