Musical perfection: Snap, Crackle, Pop

Music works its magic in many aspects of our lives and culture

This week perhaps you’d join me, dear reader, on a little journey into American popular culture. We all recall popular songs that, upon first hearing, were favorites we can still remember. Some of those songs mark stages in our lives, while others set moods, suggest joy or fear, or take us back in time. We can recall movie themes, the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, rock and roll hits, and hymns of faith.

Composing music for commercial purposes has long been a clever way of creating positive images for products. If you’re like me, you can recall music created for TV shows and ads like Sgt. Preston, Sominex, Benson and Hedges cigarettes, Alka-Seltzer, and Chevrolet. Then there are the ones that were created to grab us as kids and make us devotees of breakfast cereal. In my humble opinion, there is one of these that exceeds all others. It’s a particular version of the Rice Krispies jingle from the early 1960s. Like every other show and ad, it was in black and white on our TV. The cereal was and is so good that I’d have been a regular consumer even without the jingles, but hey, they made it fun.

Rice Krispies jingle and animation

It’s a remarkable composition in the form of a round, like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. It has exquisite timing, perfect lyrics, syncopated rhythm, and a bouncing, joyous tune. Like a Bach composition, I play it over and over to listen for the different parts and their relation to each other. Sometimes I play it and just watch the time lapse line to see the precision.

The research was much more complicated and inconclusive than I expected. There is speculation that Dick Marx composed it, but I cannot confirm that. The animator was Duane Crowther who had quite a career of his own. The singers who voiced the parts in the commercial are known. Theirs is a talent worth noting, too.

Whoever wrote it was a musical genius, plain and simple. It’s a happy jingle that never becomes an ear worm. It will start your toes tapping. The tune repeats four times, but the animated characters prevent looking away. Snap banging on the piano and Pop bouncing on his double bass are just plain fun. It’s so engaging that it’s hard to believe that the entire ad lasts only 1:00 flat. See it one time and you’ll never forget the product name. It’s brilliant. It’s marketplace genius.

There are many embedded reminders of those days of the late 1950s and early 1960s. My mother started me on the heaping spoon of sugar to be spread over cereal, and I remember her putting sugar over Rice Krispies and Special K before adding the banana slices if you had them. Sugar was great, but I eventually weaned myself from added sugar because it just wasn’t necessary, and probably because they put more sugar in the cereal itself.

Support Canada Free Press

Same with adding cream or half and half. We learned at home and at school that good health was only possible with plenty of dairy products in our diets. We started our days with milk, had milk for lunch, and often had it for supper as well. There’s a limit, though, to how rich your day ought to begin. Whole milk is plenty rich enough, and even 2% or, these days, 1% milk works fine, but nobody, and I mean nobody, can tolerate skim milk on cereal. If that’s all there is, just eat it dry out of the box with a spoon. It’s good that way, too.

In those days the cereal pouch was usually waxed paper, and some were a form of aluminum coated paper, with plastic eventually replacing it. The box was always cardboard, sometimes with puzzles or stories on the back, and perhaps even a prize inside. Some brands offered mail-in prizes for boxtops and change, and it was a thrill to get an actual package in the mail addressed to me personally. Interesting! And fun!

Of the three parts in this jingle, Crackle’s lyrics and his guitar part are the best to my way of thinking, and what I always sing. Which is your favorite, dear reader?

VIEW Comments