|
By Jonathan Gibbs
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
How does that cliché go? March comes in like a Devil frog and leaves like a Clown anemone fish. Or maybe it comes in like a Giant anteater and leaves like a Laughing kookaburra. Maybe it comes in like a Madagascar Hissing cockroach and leaves like a Warty newt. Whatever it is, I’ve seen 56 springs approach now and it always surprises me how my happy anticipation begets optimism which then has the juice squeezed out of it like a Naked mole rat in the clutches of a Green anaconda.
But I was still surprised this weekend when another hour of my life went to the same place where one sock always seems to go after a tour through the washing machine. The time change, which is always snuck past us when the shadows have teeth and infomercials reign the airwaves, sucked the breath out of an hour early Sunday, and it got me to thinking about spring, rebirth, sugar and the passing on of some of the lessons of life for my son (who is 20,494 days younger than me), in case I forget who I am by the time he knows who he is. My lesson this week is to trust half of what you see and question everything you hear. In this case, the Interconnectedness of Sugar, we need to question not so much the actual chemistry of things, but the manifestation of that chemistry as presented to us in the real world.
Every March in New England you start to see the maples get IVs in them. At least what they are probably led to believe. But as everyone from Buckwheat to Mrs. Butterworth knows, it’s actually the other way around. No wonder the oozing discharge is called sap. Now I don’t know why, or how (or even if, for that matter) it happened that my sighting of this spring tree-bondage ritual last week subconsciously resulted in my decision to buy and bring home a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, but I did. I took the bag with the glass eye blue box up to my three-year old’s room, where he was entertaining my wife and a friend. He saw the box inside the opaque bag, noted the tiger on the side and brightly asked, “What’s that?” It was a voice of expectation and the certitude he had discovered something like a new continent or the western passage to India. “It’s a tiger!” he added.
Well, yes son, but not just any tiger. This is Tony the Tiger, or El Tigre Tony to much of the developing world where he and his species helps corrupt fresh enamel. I was about to launch into a self-absorbed diatribe about how El Tigre Tony was paraded out to line up in the cereal aisles of what used to be called grocery stores just one year before I came into a world not yet leery of sucrose-laden breakfasts. Then we took a good, long unsentimental look at El Tigre Tony. He was garish looking, with a bandana tied jauntily around his neck, kind of like a feline Liberace, if that’s not a redundancy. His eyes were impossibly bright and wild looking (even for a Tigre), holding a hint of desperation deep in his pupils. The white of eyes were aged yellow, like bad teeth.
Then we noticed something else, a basic anatomical flaw, perhaps a Tigre’s ultimate enfeeblement: This Tigre had no teeth. Literally. His mouth was open but there was just gummy lip and black space where his choppers should have lain in wait. Was this an allegory for the perils of sugar-saturated flakes? Was it age? Or was it a conscious decision to make Tony more benign, more encouraging a cereal cheerleader for the young people in the nations of the world in possession of sugar status?
Aged, this Tigre most definitely is. He’s already outlived his original God-given voice, named Thurl Ravenscroft, who died in 2005. Ravenscroft gave the verbal breath of life to Tony right up to his death, at which point the role of the voice was assumed by former wrestling announcer Lee Marshall. Ravens-croft’s voice itself actually resmbled a mix between an actual raven, lying broken and dying in the snow, and a smarmy game show announcer. More Wink Martindale than El Tigre. Marshall’s is very close in tone, virtually indistinguishable from the original Tony..
Conspiracy theories and El Tigre Tony begin to look more convincing when one considers the fact that the Kellogg Company seemingly is indecisive about associating the El Tigre with sugar. The company did, after all, take the name “Sugar” off the front of the Frosted Flakes brand name in the ’80s. No one is suggesting they replaced the sugar with crystallized methamphetamine instead and that resulted in the appearance of our now-derelict-looking tabby, but there are other corporate players involved in all of this.
In 1996, Kellogg sued Exxon Mobil, claiming the Exxon tiger appeared to walk and talk too closely to the way Tony walked and talked. The Exxon tiger had appeared in advertisements a full 20 years before Tony walked upright onto the cereal celebrity stage and the two tigers had coexisted in a peaceable kingdom through a Cold War, the uprooting of a colonialized Middle East and the nationalization of Cuba’s sugar cane fields by communists. But the appearance of a cartoonized tiger on the TigerMart chain of stores sprouting up attached to the gas station islands by an umbilical cord of opportunistic commerce was too much for the makers of El Tigre Tony. While the U.S. Supreme Court eventually heard the case after being tossed out like a bowl of soggy cereal by the Memphis, Tennessee court that first heard it, the highest court in the land could not take a stand, tossing it back to any local courts that still cared to hear it. So far, a Montana court has taken the first decisive action, dismissing it as, well, toothless. Conspiracy? You tell me.
The fact that maple syrup, sugared cereals and large mammals that sleep in trees are all inter-related should have been clear from the day El Tigre Tony first showed up on a box. The man who gave birth to Tony at the end of his pen was wielded by Martin Provensen. Martin and his wife, Alice, also penned the illustrated book “Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm.” Maple? Sugar? Animals? Commerce? Coincidence? I think not.
All this, and then I tried to hand Nathan the box to see what he would do, if he would somehow intuit the sugary, crunchy allure within. “He’s scary,” said my son, and he walked away to go play with his trains. They talk, too, but not with sugar on their breath.
|
