Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Silly Rabbit...

In 1959, Joe Harris created the Trix Rabbit...one of the most enduring and poignant emblems of humanity's struggle for the sublime. For those who have never seen a television, the plight of the Trix Rabbit is something like this: He wants the cereal. He dresses in various disguises to try and get the cereal from the mean spirited children. They catch him, taunt him, and deny him cereal.

As a child, I was always deeply disturbed by these commercials, as, I suspect, were many others. Some burgeoning sense of...well, decency...made me feel that if a rabbit was capable of walking around and expressing his cereal preferences, you should damned well give him a bowl of Trix.

Certainly, in the few contests wherein children were permitted to vote on whether the rabbit should get cereal, the answer was always an overwhelming "Yes." We may have been mean-spirited little bastards, but I think we saw, in that plucky rabbit, ourselves, denied just one more bite of that sugary breakfast confection.

2 comments:

  1. This post made me giggle. A lot. If HP forces me to do a Top 5 Scariest Children's Food Icons, may I please quote you?

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  2. Of course! The Trix Rabbit needs more awareness!

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