Here's a commercial for Twinkles, "the only cereal in the storybook package." Twinkles was an elephant and when you bought his cereal, which was kind of like sugary Cheerios in star shapes, there was a little storybook affixed to the back of the box. The idea was that you could read the Twinkles story while you ate the cereal. I recall neither being very nourishing. A batch of Twinkles adventures were also produced for television on the lowest-possible budgets…spots that split the difference between being cartoons and being commercials. This is one of them.
The narrator of the Twinkles spot is George S. Irving, an actor who was in most of the later Total Television cartoon shows, like Underdog. At last report, Mr. Irving was still actively performing in musical theater in and around the New York area. There's also a commercial in there with a fireman who sounds to me like either Arnold Stang with a cold, or someone doing an okay impression of Arnold Stang. I'm thinking the latter. (And speaking of Arnold Stang, check out this weblog post for a nice profile of that fine comic actor. In the next week or so, I'll try to get time to write up my one Arnold Stang anecdote and post it here.) Anyway, here's Twinkles…
And if you liked that, here's another one. This one's in color…