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| Frosties and Sugar Puffs ads,
Advertising |
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| Media,
Jerry Carpenter,
15 January 2001 |
Rating: F1
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A short controlled burst of bum-outness this. The past few months have seen a lot of 70’s and 80’s nostalgia programs aimed at a hollow twenty-something audience. Some pop videos, some clips of old TV shows, a few laughs at the expense of the fashions of the time. Loads of punditry from mealy mouthed twats like Stuart Maconie, and lots of ahhh-ing over TV advertisements of days gone by. These still do it for me, as I’m a sucker for the jollities of product pushing from days gone by, and the characters that inhabit them. I still love the Honey Monster, and I miss his big green mate. I even liked old Tony Tiger, less for the personality, but more for the whole Tiger thing, which I was into at the time.
Good god, what the hell has happened to those poor bastards ?!. I just turned the TV off, because Tony Tiger made me angry – and I’m twenty nine, and I should have better things to get frustrated about. But seeing the old lunk farting about on a BMX with his pals, and catching crooks heated my collar. It’s the ‘cool’ style X-sports shite look of the thing. And those stupid kids. Tony has lost his single-minded fixation with enthusing about the excellence of his sugary corn flakes, and become a hairy Normski. An even newer set of Tony’s adventures sees him trading blows Matrix-style with an evil feline Nemesis. And I don’t want to get into that.
And my man Honey ?, what have they done to him ?. Before he just smashed stuff up and laughed a lot. Now he’s turned into a mock-superstar figure, hanging out with supermodels, playing soccer, doing kung-fu. It’s all a bit desperate. And he’s got a vocabulary of more than five words now, and it’s turned him into a boring moron. When he used to be a loveable moron. I never really liked sugar puffs anyway, because they made the milk taste like sick, but I used like holding the box in my hands, getting eye to eye with the big fella. Now I can’t even walk down the aisle.
This re-packaging of classic characters is par-for-the-course now, and so I shouldn’t be that fazed. But I’m really suspicious of the success that adding the proactive factor to the Tonys and Honeys of the ad world has had. If it’s a choice between vacuous pop-culture stylings and mindless cartoon fun, I think kids will always respond better to the latter. If the marketing boys don’t bring back the dim-witted slapstick soon, we’re going to see our next generation become a bunch of muesli munchers. And that stuff rots your guts for real.
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