Friends, it never ceases to amaze me that as much as we research and write about all manner of pop culture related topics on this site – there is always another amazing discovery to be found. Case in point, the fact that Post Cereal back in 1968 was entertaining the idea of producing Beep Beep – a Road Runner cereal. While obviously it never reached the stage where it was being produced and placed on store shelves – at the very least this animatic was created and gives us a glimpse of what the television commercial might have looked liked.
For some reason I find that storyboard showing Wile E. Coyote’s reaction to the oncoming train to be really, really terrifying.
By the time Beep Beep cereal was in development, the popular Saturday morning series The Bugs Bunny Show had switched from ABC to CBS – becoming The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. The Bugs Bunny Show by the way debuted on ABC back on October 11th of 1960, originally not on Saturday mornings at all but on Tuesday evenings, until the middle of August of ’62. As General Foods which included Post Cereals was the sponsor for the prime time series, it stands to reason they saw how popular the character of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote were with kids of the day. And while it is true that the Looney Tunes animated shorts introduced a slew of memorable characters over the years – can you really say that Pepe Le Pew, Yosemite Sam, or even Sylvester and Tweety would have made better mascots for a new cereal?
I’ve not been able to find out why the Road Runner cereal never saw the light of day – perhaps they tested it with children and it didn’t do so well? From the animatic however it definitely sounds like the cereal would have tasted the same as Super Sugar Crisp aka Golden Crisp.
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