When Warner Bros. partnered with ABC in 1960 for the production of “The Bugs Bunny Show,” General Foods Corporation was signed as the sponsor of the show. It was the proverbial match made in Heaven, as the company offered a line of breakfast cereals and flavored drink mixes aimed at the kiddie consumer while the Warner Bros. cartoon characters were the ideal sales tools to entice the show’s juvenile viewers and their grocery shopping parents.
Robert McKimson’s animation unit was tasked with creating the commercials, which were interspersed with “The Bugs Bunny Show” contents. Some of the commercials retained the theater setting used for the show’s bridging segments, while others created new adventures for Bugs and his wacky antagonists.
The commercials were seen during the show’s initial broadcast years, but were later withdrawn from circulation and became unavailable for many years. Today, they are available for viewing on YouTube, albeit from grey market copies uploaded by film collectors.
Viewed today, it is astonishing that the commercials are so effective in peddling some of the most blatant malarky in advertising history. In pitching “sugar-soaked” cereals and flavored drink mixes, Bugs flexes his muscles for the impressionable viewers while claiming the products give him “pep.” The insistence that these products are part of a proper diet may explain why the generation raised on them, and the generations that followed, were considerably less healthy than their predecessors.
But from an animation viewpoint, the commercials are equally astonishing for their energy and imagination. After all, they were produced at a time when the Warner Bros. theatrical animated shorts were showing lethal signs of staleness. These commercials, in comparison, harken back to the wild spirit of the studio’s peak output.
Admittedly, the commercials are variations on two themes: Bugs is either mostly trying to hornswoggle the Post Alpha-Bits or Sugar Crisp cereals or the Tang instant drink mix (with “natural orange flavor”) from Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam, or he is trying to prevent Daffy Duck from pilfering those goodies from him. The commercials carry over the slapstick violence of the theatrical shorts, with non-lethal gunfire aimed at Bugs or slapstick violence such as having the rascally rabbit trick Elmer into cycling off a cliff.
Two commercials take advantage of the then-current space explorations with Bugs blasting off to the planet “Tangrila” – a lunar Shanghri-La where giant bottles of Tang are found. One of these cartoons includes an appearance of Marvin the Martian who battles Bugs for control of that unlikely planet.
Perhaps the strangest commercial from this era was the only time Bugs and Sylvester shared screen time. This was for a Golden Alpha-Bits spot that was used to introduce a non-Warner Bros. cartoon character of a postman who delivers the Post cereals. That character was based on and voiced by the bombastic comic Jack E. Leonard.
In the mid-1960s, Bugs and the other Warner Bros. icons were mostly replaced as the Post cereal pitchmen by the characters in the “Linus the Lionhearted” cartoons. However, General Foods retained Bugs for pitching its Kool-Aid powdered drink. These cartoons were outsourced to Cascade Studios and produced by, of all people, Tex Avery. Some of these cartoons mixed animation with live action (not very well, to be frank), and the effectiveness of these commercials was minimal. By 1969, Bugs passed the Kool-Aid pitcher to the brand’s next spokesmen, The Monkees (in their trio configuration after Peter Tork’s departure).
This video might be the most complete collection of these interesting and entertaining commercials. It may not encourage you to stir up a pitcher of Tang or pour a bowl of Alpha-Bits, but it offers a rare glimpse of how effective the Warner Bros. cartoon characters could be as advertising tools.