Part of a Complete Breakfast: Cereal Characters of the Baby Boom Era TimHollis. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012.

Abstract

Part of a Complete Breakfast: Cereal Characters of the Baby Boom Era Tim Hollis. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012.The colorful dust jacket of Tim Hollis's Part of a Complete says it all: in the upper-left corner tilts Toucan Sam with his bright yellow and orange beak, and the bottom features a 1960s-style console television with the fronts of boxes of Cap'n Crunch, Pink Panther Flakes, Alpha-Bits, Fruity Pebbles, Freakies, King Vitamin, Froot Loops, and Apple Jacks lined up in two vivid rows. On each box appears a cereal character familiar to any member of the baby-boom generation who ate cereal or watched television in its first decades. Hollis, a baby boomer himself, pays tribute to the era in which he grew up in a 4,200-squarefoot addition to his house near Birmingham, Alabama, which he has turned into a museum of 1960s childhood memorabilia. Included in the museum are numerous displays of vivid cereal character memorabilia, including boxes, premiums, toys, and advertisements. Almost all of the images in Hollis's highly visual book come from artifacts in his museum of nostalgia.Hollis likes nostalgia. He is an avid collector and author of twenty-one books that chronicle popular culture and history topics such as Walt Disney records, local children's television shows, Florida tourism advertising, and knee-slapping rural comedies. His book on cereal characters fits nicely into the mix and addresses an area of advertising, television and animation history, and children's culture that has gone relatively undocumented. Hollis is not an academic, and his book includes no citations, although it does have a bibliography of about two dozen sources, as well as YouTube sites that carry classic cereal commercials. He also notes that Duke University now houses the archives of the Benton and Bowles advertising agency, which handled the General Foods/ Post account for decades, and has several of its cereal commercials on its Web site at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/.What Hollis offers is a decade-by-decade approach to mascot-driven cereal advertising geared to children. He begins with a chapter titled Breakfast Pals: The World before Television, which covers the birth of the cereal industry in America. In 1854, immigrant Ferdinand Schumacher started a small company that ground oats, which Americans regarded as food for horses, into oatmeal. Hot cereals pre-dated cold ones in America, and the first trademarked cereal character was the William Penn look-alike that appeared in the late 1870s on round containers of Quaker Oats, developed by Henry Crowell of Ravenna, Ohio. Cream of Wheat followed suit, with a smiling African-American chef in its early advertisements. It did not take long for more cereals to enter the market, including Kellogg's Corn Flakes, packaged around 1907 in boxes adorned with a lovely young woman dubbed the Sweetheart of the Corn, and Force, a wheat product heralded by a cartoon character named Sunny Jim. …