I may be dating myself a bit, but the Life Cereal commercials featuring “Little Mikey” are iconic enough to warrant the excursion in time.
Not simply for nostalgia, but for the misunderstanding often made by viewers.
Where do I begin? How about the commercial?
It’s for Life Cereal, a sweetened oat-based cold cereal consisting of small “biscuits” of processed oats (and whatever else is in them – like sugar).
The camera opens to two young brothers sitting at the breakfast table with bowls and spoons and milk and a box of Life cereal, trying to decide if they are willing to try it.
They mention that “Mom says it’s good for us…,” which is enough to raise the suspicion of the boys.
Then one boy gets an idea,
“Let’s get Mikey to try it!”
The camera shifts to a younger brother, who is…
But wait. Before I tell you the rest, I need to cover how people seem to often misunderstand the actual words of the commercial.
Since those commercials of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, I’ve heard people make reference to it, but they get the line wrong, and get Mikey’s attitude backwards.
The last time I heard this was about a dozen years ago when I worked at a big-box everything-but-grocery store. At a morning huddle, the facilities manager was explaining something about the trash compactor, and he said,
“We call it Mikey, because, you know, Mikey eats everything.”
He’d been working there for eighteen years, and I’m sure he’s been calling the compactor Mikey all that time, and snickering to himself at the same lame joke.
But he’d got it wrong, and if you listen to the story in the commercial, his interpretation doesn’t make sense.
Now back to the commercial.
“Hey!, let’s get Mikey to try it. Yeah, he won’t eat it, he hates everything.”
Mikey tastes the cereal, then starts digging in.
“Hey Mikey! He likes it!”
Mikey is scarfing it down, and the brothers start pouring bowls and eating the cereal themselves, while the voiceover tells us how many vitamins Life cereal has.
Mikey “hates” everything. He doesn’t “eat” everything.
This is the whole reason his older brothers wanted to use him to test this new cereal. If Mikey “eats” everything, then how would that inform the brothers about the desirability of the product? It is because Mikey is a finicky eater that the brothers are so surprised and encouraged by Mikey’s eager chowing down on the stuff.
But earlier references I heard got the line wrong too, even when they understood that Mikey’s enjoyment encouraged his brothers to try it.
Shipmates of mine back in my navy days said it all the time, usually regarding some unidentifiable food we were served in the chowline that they were definitely not interested in trying.
“I’m not Mikey, I won’t eat anything.”
“What the heck is that? Where’s Mikey? I need him to try this.”
“Look at Jones over there, never misses a meal. He’s like Mikey, he’ll eat anything.”
That would have been late 1970’s, and all those guys would have grown up with the same commercial.
What puzzles me the most is that the mishearing doesn’t make sense. It seems like anyone could reckon the point of the ad, and check that against what they thought they heard.
This happens in song lyrics constantly. Misheard lyrics is a whole genre of discussion, with countless, often hysterical, examples. But for commercials, the Life ad with the three brothers was fairly unique.
When it comes to misheard song lyrics, I’ll include a couple of my favorites for fun.
A sister of mine misheard the lyrics to the Kenny Rogers song, Lucille.
In the song, the narrator is picking up a woman in a bar, when a man (assumedly her husband) walks up to the table and confronts her with the line,
“You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille,
with four hungry children, and a crop in the field…”
My dear sister misheard that as, “with four-hundred children copping a feel…”
Her decision to accept these lyrics, even though it didn’t make any sense to her, makes this a hysterical treasure.
The other one is my own, and I feel a bit idiotic for the absurdity of my mistake.
The song is Dust in the Wind, by Kansas.
One stanza goes:
“Now don’t hang on,
nothin’ lasts forever but the earth and sky.
It slips away,
And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
I must have heard that song hundreds of times thinking that the last line of that stanza was,
“with all your money you want another minibike.”
Thanks for listening. Probably more closely than do I.
Life cereal is tasty, though I’m not much of a cold cereal person as an adult. I would definitely call that an ultra-processed food, which probably should not be part of a regular diet.