TrouserToons - "Generic Cereal" CommercialE

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"The other day, I was cleaning out my attic. However, in there, I've soon stumbled across an old, dusty VHS tape. I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was something the previous owners of the house left behind. So I put the tape into my VHS player, and what was played was interesting... It was an old commercial for a cereal brand called "Generic Cereal", and starred what appeared to be super early versions of Johnnie, Janie, and Wolfin The Wolf from TrouserToons. Was this perhaps one of the earliest appearances of these characters? Did I just discover some lost media? Does the history of these characters really go this far back? Regardless, I've decided to rip the footage from the VHS and upload it online for all to see."

Nah, I'm just messing with you XD. However, there's still a story behind this one. A big inspiration for the characters of Johnnie and Janie (and by extension, TrouserToons as a whole) was actually those short animations that would play on TV back in the 50s-70s. Such as those short cartoons that used to be shown on Sesame Street, and even old animated commercials from that time! The old "Trix Rabbit" commercials especially!

In fact, I noticed that the earliest Trix Rabbit commercials had the rabbit go up against what appeared the exact same pair of kids, one boy and one girl. Sure, they'd sometimes look slightly different depending on the commercial, they still looked like variations of the same boy and girl designs. I assume by the late 60s, the creators of the commercials figured that it would've been more interesting to have different and unique designs for the kids in every commercial rather than it just be the same boy and girl every time lol. Those original boy and girl characters as well as the boy and girl characters from that old "Egg Chant" sketch from Sesame Street were actually THE inspirations for Johnnie and Janie by the way. No kidding, I designed them after I started imagining what a full series starring a pair of twins who looked like those older characters would be like (I have a weird imagination XD).

So, I decided to attempt to make an animation in a "1960s style", parodying the oldest Trix Cereal commercials, complete with redesigns of my characters. Since they were a big inspiration for TrouserToons as a whole, I wanted to see how the series would look like if I tried to fully "commit" to that style. Of course, this probably doesn't look super authentic, but it was still an interesting experiment! I decided to include Wolfin The Wolf as the "Rabbit" stand-in (except here, it isn't just the cereal that he wants to eat!). And I'm actually pretty proud of Wolfin's redesign in particular. So much so that I almost want to make it his permanent design now! Almost. Now that I've done all my rambling, enjoy! XD