La Choy and More!
And next we come to Jim’s ads for Royal Crown Cola, or RC Cola, which yet again feature a Muppet duo, one all for the product, one less so, but with the new twist of them being birds this time around, one called Nutty Bird, a large yellow canaryish bird squawking about how much he loves RC, and the other a shorter, squatter one called Sour Bird, who has no time for his nonsense. Nutty never hurts or criticizes Sour at all. He just remains in his own bubble, praising RC Cola to the heavens, while Sour Bird rolls his eyes at the indignity of it all. The coolest thing about the ads, though, is that Nutty Bird’s design is a very early version of a look that would later evolve into Big Bird!
Nutty Bird sings about RC Cola.
You can watch two of these ads here and here.
And then we have Kern’s Bread, for which Jim and his team used two characters, a mob-boss type named Tommy and a nervous, skinny guy named Fred. These characters act out set-ups that are more similar to Wilkins and Wontkins than many of the others–some even directly recycle their jokes–however the gangster angle gives them a slightly different feel (and probably makes the violence feel more justified!). You might also recognize both of the puppets from Tinkerdee. Tommy is just Taminella with the cloak and snaggle-tooth removed and dressed in a suit, and Fred is the same puppet who played the Prime Minister!
Tommy and Fred
You can watch the ads here, my favorite of which is the a very meta one in which Fred says he doesn’t eat Kern’s Bread because he disapproves of the violence in their commercials. Cue violence ensuing!
And here is another one of my favorite old Henson commercials–which I first saw at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Henson exhibit in Queens–for Linit Fabric Finish, starring the noble knight, Sir Linit, who is a brilliant combination of knight and Linit spray bottle, with an eye/nose design that foreshadows Ernie’s face, and with irons for feet. Speaking in faux-medieval style, with “forsooths” and “what ho!”s, and at one point ironing clothes with his feet by skating across them, he demonstrates how Linit “brings clothes to life” by literally bringing them to life and scaring the poor housewife who lives there:
Another surprising one amongst Jim’s increasingly vast portfolio was a series of ads he did for the Federal Housing Administration, teaching people how they could apply in order to refinance their homes. In numerous ones, a person’s home literally falls apart around them due to neglect or poor workmanship, things that could’ve been avoided had they only applied for the loan! In another, an old house tells his owner to apply, this house puppet foreshadowing the talking houses recurring sketch from Season 1 of The Muppet Show. You can see one of the ads, starring a direct ancestor to Sesame Street‘s resident game show host, Guy Smiley, right here:
…and a few more, one starring Kermit, here, here, and here!
A little earlier, we saw Big Bird’s ancestor, and now in the next ad, we meet yet another beloved Sesame Street character for the first time: COOKIE MONSTER!! His voice is completely different, and he has fangs, but other than that, he’s Cookie, head to toe, only here he goes after a crunchy General Mills snack called Wheels, along with two other monster friends, one of whom steals Flutes and the other Crowns, two more snack foods. They are, in order, the Wheel-Stealer, the Flute-Snatcher, and the Crown-Grabber, which sound like the names for a very specific set of super villains.
And the commercial’s most clever bit is when the people who surround you in your every day life–your family, your friends–are revealed to be the real Wheel stealers, Flute snatchers, and Crown grabbers! And although it never aired, “Cookie” and the other two monsters would end up in later Muppet productions. The Flute-Snatcher would later be known as Snake Frackle, appearing in The Great Santa Claus Switch and The Muppet Show, and the Crown-Grabber would later be given the unlikely name of Beautiful Day and would appear on Ed Sullivan, Sesame Street, and The Muppet Show: