TVSquad

Like most people, I spend my days trying to figure out how to be more like Keith Partridge. I've tried growing my hair out, learning how to sing, and have even tried unsuccessfully to get adopted by Shirley Jones. As it turns out, I've been going about this the wrong way. All one needs to be just like Keith is to enjoy a bowl of Kellogg's Rice Krispies in the morning. At least, that's what the commercial I placed below seems to indicate.

Those of us who grew up in the '80s tend to look at cartoons from that era in two different ways: we remember them fondly because they were a part of our childhood, but at the same time the '80s signified a significant decline in the quality of animation. While toys and games based on cartoon characters were certainly not an '80s invention, many of the cartoons from that era were essentially half-hour toy commercials weighed down by bad animation and stilted dialogue. Some may argue that televised animation never fully recovered from the rote quality that ruled most of the animation from that decade.

I mentioned these old commercials created by Jay Ward Productions (Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle) over on our sexy sister site Ad Jab, but I thought you folks would enjoy them as well. It wasn't unusual for cartoon characters from television to appear in ads for cereal back in the day: General Mills used Rocky and Bullwinkle in their ads (I know for certain they were in ads for Cheerios, I'm sure there were others), and Kellogg's and Hanna-Barbera had a partnership as well (here's some examples, also from Ad Jab).