From the pages of BLONDIE #32 (Harvey Comics, Cover Date (July, 1951), we find this interesting promotion for Wheaties breakfast cereal...
Now I wasn't an athlete by any stretch of the imagination, but even *I* would "eat my Wheaties" to get my hands on these!
...Alas, not being alive in 1951, I had to do it the hard way!
BTW, that's Paul Murry doing the cover for "Mickey Mouse and the Magic Mountain", as well as the interior art for "Donald Duck and the Inca Idol" the latter of which I wrote of an amazing fact about my particular copy HERE!
Harvey Eisenberg also did the interior for "Mickey Mouse and the Stagecoach Bandits", so there are lots of unexpected pleasures to be found among these little gems.
And there were FOUR SETS of these (with eight mini-comics per set) released between 1950 and 1951. A worthy pursuit for any Disney comics completist!
EXTRA ADDED ILLUSTRATION:
In my response to our great friend Sergio's comments, I added the following illustration! ...To see why, go to the Comments Section and and soak-up some '60's cereal pop (...with no "snap" or "crackle") culture!
Just for the record: I hung all of those Pooh toys on the rim of my cereal bowl, as pictured on the box front! I did not, however, attach them to my pencils, as pictured on the box side! ...That just seemed too painful a thing to do to a beloved Bear of Little Brain!
3 comments:
These look like interesting titles indeed. A shame they've never been reprinted in other formats. Maybe Fantagraphics could reprint them all in one book someday?
On another note, this post makes me feel nostalgic for cereal box giveaways. I still saw the tail end of that practice. Somewhere in my basement are a Peter Pan toy and a Daisy Duck toy that came in cereal boxes.
As far as I can tell, though, this practice seems to have disappeared. I guess it's not profitable anymore. It's a shame...
Including mini-comics like these in cereal boxes couldn't be all that expensive. And it'd encourage kids to read.
Sergio:
They WERE INDEED “interesting titles” and lots of fun too!
I have all of them, and collected them the hard way… paying for them, rather than merely eating cereal. Though some might view the “eating method” as being the hard way. Not ever having developed much of a taste for Wheaties, I might even consider shifting to that position myself (…again, if I’d been alive in 1951)!
While expense is unquestionably a factor of “in-box cereal premiums” being another pleasant memory lost, I’d also list “health concerns” as an additional cause. Would today’s moms condone an inorganic foreign substance – or, even worse, an inorganic foreign object – being secreted into their child’s packaged cereal? Even a plastic-packed mini-comic? I’d think not.
Indeed, I wouldn’t want that for Averi, Cici, or Logan! Yet, finding a toy such as a plastic Winnie-the-Pooh figure in my Nabisco Wheat Honeys was such a joy! No concern from *my* parents either… they wouldn’t much care if the box contained a balanced helping of rusty screws!
But, to end on a (slightly) better note, I’ve indexed ALL of the series pictured in this post at GCD HERE! It’s nowhere near as good as having your own copies, but it’s better than eating a breakfast cereal laced with rusty screws!
And since I can't paste an image on a Blog comment, I'll add a picture of such a Nabisco box to the post itself. Would you believe this box (as-is in the photo) is listed at 679.00 on ebay? ...Yes, really!
Also, to Sergio:
Oh, and of course, these should be collected and reprinted somewhere! But, who would do it… and why?
The format works seriously against them. However, that *can* be overcome, as I suggested for those “uneven vertically paneled” Paul Murry Super Goof stories from the early issues of WALT DISNEY COMICS DIGEST, as will be seen when reprinted for the FIRST TIME (…at least in the USA, can’t speak for anywhere else) in the upcoming Paul Murry Super Goof Disney Masters book!
The overall lack of bigger name talent would also be a factor. The only two names with *any* “draw” (pardon the pun) among comic book fans from the particular set seen here are Murry and Harvey Eisenberg, and their contributions are minimal at best.
And there were MANY different sets of these, from both Wheaties and Cheerios – and even some for Bugs Bunny! All produced by Western Publishing in the early 1950s!
I have logged a total of 48 Disney books and an additional 15 Bugs Bunny! Even excluding Bugs Bunny, which would come under a different license anyway, that would be quite the effort for any publisher to take on! …Sad to say.
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