You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal
The Promotion:
The Pitch:
Sugar gives you energy. You need energy to exercise. Therefore, eating our sugar drenched cereal will make you an ultra-fit athlete. The science checks out.
It’s been a good long while since I Ad Spaced a commercial for no other reason than it being so fantastically well animated, I just had to share it with you all.
What makes the animation here doubly amazing is … it’s for Tony the frickin’ Tiger!
Tony the Tiger is one of oldest cartoon pitchmen still up and kicking, but the guy has never been known for stellar animation. You go back to the early days, and Tony’s cartoons were all sub-Jay Ward affairs like this one:
And in the modern era, Tony strictly does the cartoon-character-in-a-live-action-world thing. Tony may or may not be well-animated in these ads (it varies), but with having to work around the live-action footage, there’s not much room to show off with it.
So it was a revelation to me when I came across this ad, which not only has movie quality animation, but goes all-out with the cartoon slapstick, too.
It made a little more sense when I saw that it came out in the year 2000. That’s at the tail end of the Animation Renaissance that started in the late 80’s. After decades of cartoons being relegated to cheap, often shoddy productions, there came a push to reclaim the high-quality of animation’s past, with many cartoons deliberately harkening back to the Golden Age of Animation.
This was the era when Disney revitalized itself by producing lavish fairy tale musicals like it once had with Snow White and Cinderella. When Batman: The Animated Series revolutionized superhero cartoons with a style mimicking what Fleischer Studios had done with Superman in the 40’s. When Warner Bros. began releasing new Looney Tunes shorts to theaters after a decade long absence, and did their level best to recreate the madcap energy and high quality of their classic shorts in TV productions like Animaniacs and The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries.
It’s those Warner Bros. cartoons that this Tony the Tiger ad is taking inspiration from, with all the over-the-top slapstick, exaggerated reactions, and Toon Physics gags. Kellogg’s commercials had no animation Golden Age of their own to look back to – TV animation had always been a pretty chintzy affair in the past. But I’m delighted that the rising tide of cartoon quality, for a brief time, lifted up even Tony the Tiger, in this cartoon and a few others from the same era.