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Bric-a-Brac: S is for...

Sugar Puffs Honey Monster, The

I'm *not* his mummy...While adults stuck with their dull muesli and bran-based cereals in the morning, kids wanted something more interesting. For parents, the only way to stop them demanding chocolate bars at seven o’clock was to buy a sugar-based cereal. Sugar Puffs emphasised their child appeal by an ad campaign starring the Honey Monster, a sucrose-addicted, hyperactive behemoth who seemed to be in a flat share with Benny Hill stooge and Puffs ‘mummy’ Henry McGee. Numerous slapstick antics prevailed, with collapsing shelves and the like leaving a gurning McGee permanently ruffled. In time the Monster was joined by mate Oggi, a lime-green extrusion of fun fur with a hippyish flower in his gob and an uncanny resemblance to the assorted furries who would later be plugging Monster Munch. In 1988 HMr was paired with punk poet John Cooper Clarke to front a series of TISWAS-inspired adverts featuring plenty of gunging and shouting, and Clarke’s specially composed Snappy Badges Song, a paean to the rubbish free gift then floating around in boxes of the cereal; something of a change from the nice kids who previously colonised these sorts of ads.

5 Comments

5 Comments

  1. Chris O

    September 19, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    …and even Benny Hill managed to slip the slogan “Tell ’em about the honey, Mummy” into one of his shows during the 70’s. Nice little nod in the direction of McGee, I thought…

  2. brickbat246

    September 19, 2009 at 9:32 pm

    Those ads with John Cooper-Clarke were just brilliant weren’t they?

    “I said GROOVY, not GRAVY!”

  3. Lee James Turnock

    May 20, 2010 at 5:16 pm

    Brand since debased forever by the Mighty Boosh ‘crimp’ nonsense.

  4. David Pascoe

    May 21, 2010 at 1:05 pm

    “This man’s from Nationwide and he’s had all the honey, Mummy!”

  5. Richard Davies

    December 14, 2012 at 9:11 pm

    I remember Honey Monster turning up in a 2 Ronnies sketch where R Corbett dressed up as Rupert Bear & talked in the same rhyming couplets as the Daily Express strips.

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