I pared these down. No, really. There were about fifteen of them originally. I just couldn't stop.
This creepy little ad for Sugar Crisp (now called, I think, Golden Crisp) predates Sugar Bear and his cool, Dean Martinesque "can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" ditty.
There are three bears, of course. And you don't want to know these bears. They come swarming into your living room and cover your TV screen. They look like Ewoks, or, worse, something from the TV-movie version of Communion (remember Christopher Walken's dance?) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
My gifs have been slow and jerky lately. These are shorter ones, so I hope they do better. For some reason the animation in this just begged to be giffed. It's the creepiness of those bears with their jerky puppetry and cold, sociopathic eyes.
The reactions of little Janie and Johnny are almost as squick-inducing as the jerky ministrations of the Sugar Crisp Bears. Note the segue here: girl eats cereal; bear figure with pitcher appears for a nanosection in the right side of the frame, looking - if you pay attention - incredibly artificial; then the bear and the pitcher and Little Janie's bowl are shown in a different shot, so that they never all have to appear together. This saves having to combine live action with animation. The continuity here sucks. It took me a long time to figure out that this is supposed to be the same bowl/bear.
Bear talking. Creepy. Its fur seems to creep and crawl, indicating that it has fleas, or perhaps has been moved around by somebody's greasy fingers as they take each picture and string them together.
It's that jittering, that nervous, diddery thing that makes them so unsettling. They almost seem to be on the wrong speed. That, and the big staring eyes.
"Faster, kids. . . eat FASTER!" That weird sparkly thing is a big chunk of sugar with paranormal powers which bends these children to the bear's evil will. These ads often bragged about how you could (and should) eat Sugar Crisp "like candy". This seems horrible until you realize that Sugar Crisp probably had a fraction of the sugar content of Lucky Charms or Obese-berry or whatever-the-hell they have today.
Like I said. I boiled these down. I could have gone on forever. This is the sort of animation where you can repeat one frame. I don't know if this was stop motion or what, but it's motion that I wish would stop.
