If I'd put this up on April Fool's Day, none of you would have bothered clicking on the link…but it's legit. Here's what The New York Times has to say about it…
For the last few months, youtube.com has had available for streaming an advertisement for Rice Krispies, recorded by the Rolling Stones in early 1964. It's completely smoking. You don't see the band; you just see a parody of the British television show "Jukebox Jury," with screaming girls, disapproving grown-ups and exploding cereal boxes. "Pour on the milk-a-licious to the crackle of that rice," Mick Jagger sings. This is when the Stones had only begun to compose; they had just graduated from clubs to theaters, and were still known as a nasty rhythm-and-blues cover band. The question is, how can a Rice Krispies jingle be so hot?
That's as much as I know about it but it's our video link for this morning. If you can eat breakfast while watching it, so much the better…
While we're in a Krispie mood, here's a non-embedded link to another Rice Krispies commercial. This one features the great comic actor Lou Jacobi and the voice work of Frank Welker and Don Messick. I don't know about Frank but to do these, Don (who lived in Santa Barbara) used to get up very early in the A.M., drive down to LAX, catch a plane to Chicago and he'd actually record a couple of Kellogg's spots there the same day, then be driven to O'Hare to catch a plane home. This was before they had ISDN lines that made it possible for someone to record from anywhere in the world but it was possible then to do a phone-patch.
(Quick explanation of phone-patches: The actor is, for example, in a recording studio in L.A. but there's a telephone connection to the studio in Chicago so he can hear the other actors and the director and can take direction from that director. The L.A. actor is recorded in the L.A. facility and then that tape is FedExed or otherwise sent to Chicago to be edited into the mix. Nowadays, an ISDN set-up enables people in different corners of the world to be linked via digital connections and they can all be recorded at once. Or one guy can be in Rangoon and you can hear him and record him just fine in a studio in Tampa.)
Apparently, the folks making the Rice Krispies commercials didn't want to put Messick on a phone-patch. Since Don made an awful lot of money remaining here in Southern California, I can only imagine how much they had to pay him to go through that ordeal. But he'd fly there and fly back and then the next day, he and Frank would go into the Hanna-Barbera studios in Hollywood and record an episode of Scooby Doo.
YouTube also has two versions of my favorite musical Rice Krispies commercial online but on this one, the sound is way outta sync and on this one, the sound is a little out of sync and the picture is worse. I downloaded 'em figuring that when I get the time (HA!), I'd try to slip-and-slide and create one in-sync good copy but it may be a while. If someone else wants to tackle this, be my guest.