Little Mikey is a fictional boy played by John Gilchrist (born February 2, 1968) in an

American television Television is one of the major mass media outlets in the United States. , household ownership of television sets in the country is 96.7%, with approximately 114,200,000 American households owning at least one television set as of August 2013. ...

commercial promoting

Quaker Oats The Quaker Oats Company, known as Quaker, is an American food conglomerate based in Chicago. It has been owned by PepsiCo since 2001. History Precursor miller companies In the 1850s, Ferdinand Schumacher and Robert Stuart founded oat mills. S ...

' breakfast cereal Life. The ad was created by art director Bob Gage, who also directed the commercial. It first aired in

1971 * The year 1971 had three partial solar eclipses ( February 25, July 22 and August 20) and two total lunar eclipses (February 10, and August 6). The world population increased by 2.1% this year, the highest increase in history. Events Ja ...

. The popular ad campaign featuring Mikey remained in regular rotation for more than 12 years and was one of the longest continuously running commercial campaigns.

Original commercial

The commercial centers on three young brothers eating

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. Before them sits a heaping bowl of Life

breakfast cereal Cereal, formally termed breakfast cereal (and further categorized as cold cereal or warm cereal), is a traditional breakfast food made from processed cereal grains. It is traditionally eaten as part of breakfast, or a snack food, primarily in ...

. Two of the brothers question each other about the cereal, prodding each other to try it, and noting that it is supposed to be healthy. Neither boy has any desire to taste it ("I'm not gonna try it—''you'' try it!"), so they get their younger brother Mikey to do so ("Let's get Mikey"), noting that "he hates everything". Mikey briefly contemplates the bowl, then after tasting the cereal begins to eat it vigorously as the brothers exclaim, "He likes it! Hey Mikey!" Mikey's brothers were played by Gilchrist's actual brothers, Michael (on the left in the spot) and Tommy. John is the middle child of seven children born to Tom and Pat Gilchrist of the Bronx..

Reception

The commercial was very popular and won a Clio Award in 1974. It has often been included in retrospectives of classic television ads. In 1999, '' TV Guide'' ranked it the No. 10 commercial of all time. Despite its age, a 1999 survey found that 70% of adults could identify the spot based on just a "brief generic description."

Sequels

A series of "Today's Mikey" ads aired in the 1980s, with Gilchrist bemusedly reprising the character as a college student. In 1996, Quaker Oats commissioned director Rick Schulze, of Industrial Light & Magic Commercial Productions, to digitally composite a bottle of

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, then a subsidiary of Quaker Oats, into the original Life ad, via longtime

ad agency Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, New York. This time, however, in an ironic twist, Mikey likes some of the product's flavors while disliking the others. Life's ad agency, Foote, Cone & Belding, in Chicago, revived the Mikey character for two campaigns in the late 1990s. In 1997, Quaker Oats initiated a nationwide search for the "next Mikey", settling on 4-year-old Marli Hughes out of more than 35,000 applicants. She also appeared in a TV commercial, "Better Life" directed by Howard Rose, where she is seen telling her classmates how she won the contest and traveled to New York to do some TV shows. She adds that as the new Mikey she gets to eat as much Life cereal as she wants. In 1999, Quaker Oats remade the commercial word for word with an all-adult cast acting like kids. Mikey is portrayed by New York-based actor Jimmy Starace.

Afterward

In 2021, Gilchrist, at age 53, become director of media sales for MSG Network. He has said that he has no clear memories of filming the original commercial as he was only three and a half years old.

References

External links