Food companies have been using mascots to promote breakfast cereal for more than a century. Ever since Quaker Oats introduced its rather boring Quaker man with his old-fashioned hat and puffy collar in 1877, you’d be hard pressed to find a cereal that didn’t have a mascot attached. The 1950s and ’60s saw a dramatic increase in this with brands introducing Tony the Tiger, Lucky the Leprechaun, and Toucan Sam, among others. The year 1950 also saw C.W. Post introduce a new cereal, originally called Sugar Coated Rice Krinkles. And with it came a mascot that still haunts our dreams.
His name was Krinkles the Clown and he could give Steven King’s Pennywise the heebie-jeebies. In an early TV commercial, he extols the virtues of this sugary puffed rice cereal, calling it “a circus of fun to eat.” As far as a food-related mascot goes, Krinkles is neck-and-neck with the one for San Francisco’s defunct fast food chain called the Doggie Diner, which featured a disembodied, jowly dachshund head. Krinkles the Clown must have seeped into the psyches of a few folks. In the short-lived 2017 Netflix sitcom “Disjointed,” Brian Baumgartner of “The Office” fame, played Krinkles in a parody of the 1950s commercial.
One creepy clown just wasn’t enough for Post
As if Krinkles the Clown wasn’t bad enough, in 1953, Post changed the cereal’s name to Sugar Krinkles, apparently so the company could bill the cereal as “new” and began running advertisements featuring not just one clown but two. They were equally disturbing, with one on skates and the other riding a unicycle. The clowns were named Jack and Snack, and we’re betting it wasn’t sugary rice cereal, but rather children’s souls they were hoping to feast on.
At some point, Post (thankfully) dropped clowns all together and by the 1960s, they’d introduced a racially insensitive Asian character called So-Hi. When that was no longer working, the company completely revamped the cereal in 1971 as the Flintstones-themed Pebbles cereal. Coincidentally, this was also the first cereal to feature licensed TV characters. Today, despite Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles remaining a popular cereal choice, Krinkles the clown lives only in the nightmares of anyone who’s ever watched the original TV commercial.
