Debbie Drake was the first woman to have a daily exercise show on TV. The show's intended audience was housewives, but as the Physical Culture Study blog notes, it was more popular with men:
Debbie Drake’s The Debbie Drake Show went national in 1961 and warned female viewers about the consequences of an unhappy marriage if they did not take care of their bodies. Drake’s media outreach included a newspaper column titled “Date with Debbie,” exercise albums and books, and a Barbie-like doll sold by Sears in the early 60s. Alluring and wearing a tight-fitting leotard that emphasized her incredible figure, Drake was reported as being more distracting than encouraging as a fitness instructor. No doubt this was aided by the fact that many stations broadcast her show at off hours, guaranteeing larger numbers of male viewers who appreciated her sexual appeal.
Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford offer some context in their book Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal:
[In 1964], Kellogg signed Jimmy Durante to launch Corn Flakes and Instant Bananas with an update of one of his standard songs. Seated at the piano, the old vaudevillian belted out, "Yes, we now have bananas…" Sales were brisk for a few months, then dropped like a rock, as store owners like I.J. Salkin complained that the product tasted like "cardboard discs in a box." Burnett commercial director Rudy Behlmer agreed. "Those little banana wafers looked like holy communion wafers. When you put milk on them, they started to look dark and mushy."
In 1966, Kellogg pulled the plug on Corn Flakes and Instant Bananas. "We tested the market carefully, we tried, we failed, and we're getting out of the market," Kellogg's Ken Englert told Consumer Advertising magazine. Without informing the star of their decision, Kellogg decided to move Durante over from Instant Bananas to Kellogg's main line, Corn Flakes. "Everything was kept quiet until Carl Hixon [a Burnett writer] and myself went to New York to shoot him in a couple of commercials for Kellogg's Corn Flakes," recalled commercial director Rudy Behlmer. "Suddenly he looks at the [story] boards and he says, 'Where are da bananas?' and we said, 'Well, Jimmy… this is without bananas,' and he said, 'No bananas, no Durante.'"
I agree with Hellmann's that this would look cool as a centerpiece at a party. But serving it with mayonnaise? Even as a mayonnaise lover, I'm not sure about that.
The Kream Krunch man definitely deserves a place in our ongoing series of strange corporate mascots.
Kellogg's introduced Kream Krunch cereal in 1965. The gimmick was that the cereal included chunks of freeze-dried ice cream. The chunks were supposed to stay crunchy in milk, but reportedly they quickly dissolved into a gooey mess, which made the cereal a commercial failure that was soon discontinued.
However, the cereal is most widely remembered today for the creepy, anthropomorphized ice cream cone that served as its official mascot. Wikipedia notes: "The character was never officially named, referred to by historians simply as the Kream Krunch Cone, although it has been called Mr. Scoop Head in popular culture."
The album How To Buy Meat was released by the US Department of Agriculture circa 1968. It consists of a series of short public service announcements about meat buying, narrated by Consumer Meat Specialist Sandra Brookover.
It's an extremely rare record because it was never sold to the public. Instead, it was sent to radio stations, in the hope that they would play the PSAs.
The PSAs, in addition to offering info about meat, were intended to encourage the public to send away to receive a series of pamphlets from the USDA. Several of these pamphlets are online, such as How to buy lamb.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.