“Riboflavin,” “niacin”—the words on the cereal box side panels are as far-out as the cereal names themselves. Quake and Quisp, Trix and Kix, plus all the titled titans—King Vitamin, Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch—in the Burke’s Peerage that is our breakfast table.
Froot Loops. Cheez Whiz. Rold Gold. TV is a smorgasbord of deliberate misspellings, a froot-and-cheez platter that’s more appealing by far than the natural foods they approximate. As much as these words have a different way of looking, Minnesotans have a different way of talking. They pronounce “roof” more like “rough.” They go for “woks” instead of “walks.” If someone says “Can I have a buck?” they’re asking for a ride on your bike, not a dollar. And the way the kids in Bloomington pronounce “milk” makes me wonder if it isn’t a slightly altered food-like substance along the lines of froot and cheez. Everyone but my family calls it “melk.”
In 1970, the Federal Trade Commission opens an investigation into what it calls the breakfast-cereal oligopoly. Ninety percent of America’s cereals are produced by Kellogg’s, Post, or Minnesota’s very own General Mills. I was born among the Keebler elves in Elmhurst, in the shadow of the great city that gave us Hostess Twinkies and Oscar Mayer hot dogs, and Kraft mac and cheese and those magical bricks of Velveeta. And now I’m being raised in the backyard of the Lucky Charms leprechaun, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, and Betty Crocker.
Every one of these mascots and their products are aimed at me. And they can’t possibly miss, given my sitting-duck status three feet from the television screen. When I am four, an Arizona pediatrician concludes that a child spends more hours watching TV before he goes to kindergarten than a college student spends in the classroom over four years. Preschoolers in 1971 spend 64 percent of their waking hours watching TV, says Dr. Gerald Looney, whose Bugs Bunny–evoking surname is unintentionally synonymous with the kind of children’s television that I find so hypnotic.
There is a short-lived cartoon on ABC called Fantastic Voyage, based on a movie starring Raquel Welch, in which a miniaturized crew of explorers journeys through a human body in an infinitesimal submarine named Voyager. This is what fascinates me most about commercials—their fantastic voyages through the human body. As Pepto-Bismol “coats and soothes,” I see the inside of a man in profile, his innards slowly being painted pink. I love the Anacin and Bufferin tablets racing straight to the throbbing, jagged, red-hot source of a housewife’s elbow pain. Every adult on TV is in desperate need of pain relief, all the time, theatrically rubbing his or her shoulders or neck or back. And it’s not just people: a Cascade commercial pulls back the door on the churning dishwasher, revealing its interior at work—the detergent gently cleaning the clear glass dinner plates, every wineglass gleaming with a sparkling sunburst.
More than anything, it’s the musical language of advertising that is so captivating to me. The brand names that are wonders of alternative spelling—Endust, Renuzit, Liv-a-Snaps—are just part of the allure. I haven’t the slightest notion what any of them means, but certain phrases are repeated over and over until I’ve committed them to memory: Steel-belted radials. Rack-and-pinion steering. Substantial penalty for early withdrawal. Use only as directed. Your mileage may vary. In specially marked boxes.
In commercials, as on The Electric Company, words are Play-Doh and the rhymes designed to embed in my brain—Shake ’n Bake, flick your BIC, Frito Bandito—succeed in their mission. “Dotsa lotsa mozza-rella,” I tell Mom whenever she is making anything. The tongue twisters are even more effective. Libby’s Fruit Float is a fruit-infused canned syrup to which you add cold milk, then stir, to get a creamy, pudding-like wonder substance that Mom obstinately refuses to buy us for dessert. Still, at the end of the commercial, the kid always says to his father, “Bet you can’t say ‘Fruit Float’ three times.” As a result, I walk around doing just that, uttering the name of the product out loud, a walking advertisement. But I have also committed to my very short memory the company’s diabolical corporate jingle: “When it says Libby’s, Libby’s, Libby’s on the label, label, label, you will like it, like it, like it on the table, table, table.”
And: “Have another Nutter Butter peanut-butter sandwich cookie.”
And: “Renuzit do’s it.”
By 1971, a commercial airs every 2.8 minutes on Saturday morning, when TV—and the household that surrounds the TV—is given over almost entirely to kids. In the glorious hours before noon, 23 percent of all airtime is devoted to commercials, according to a survey by Action for Children’s Television, which wants to ban commercials outright during children’s programming. For educators, there is a silver lining in all those ads: they take time away from the exceedingly violent shows. As Evelyn Sarson, the president of ACT, puts it, “So many of the shows [have] chases and people hitting each other over the head.” The violence is what my brothers and I love about them—the cartoon lump rising like a vertical baguette whenever a man is beaten over the head with a sledgehammer. By ACT’s estimate, 30 percent of dramatic children’s shows are “saturated” with violence, and 71 percent have at least one instance of it per segment. These shows, which my brothers and I watch for hours on end on Saturday mornings, are, in the words of the ACT study, “predominantly concerned with either crime, the supernatural, or interpersonal rivalry between characters.” Exactly! And so are we, my brothers and I, especially violence born of interpersonal rivalry.