The Jimmy Olsen Fan Club is a story for another day.
So anyway, there’s Jimmy Olsen with two members of the Jimmy Olsen Fan Club at their campsite out in the woods, about to sit down and have breakfast, when suddenly Brainiac strikes! One thing leads to another, with Brainiac wreaking havoc with his Enlarging Ray, and ultimately Brainiac is defeated, and Jimmy’s got hold of said Enlarging Ray. Meanwhile, Superman is at the bottom of a steep hill, his life endangered by a giant piece of Kryptonite! (Which used to be a small piece of Kryptonite, until Brainiac enlarged it, and, well, there you go.)
Jimmy is stuck about how to help Superman, because he and his pals can’t climb down the hill due to being bitten on the legs by giant fireants (the Enlarging Ray, again), until inspiration strikes!
After the guys rescue Superman (by enlarging a giant lead tackle between Superman and the Kryptonite, thus depleting the Enlarging Gun of all its juice, so too bad, Bottle City of Kandor), Supes asks “what the hell were those giant tire-things you rode down in?” if I may paraphrase slightly. Jimmy thus ends the story with a blatant bit of product placement that beats out Superman: The Movie by about a decade:
I did a little Googling research, and all I can turn up was that Superman was licensed to Kellogg’s in the 1950s for Frosted Flakes, and that DC didn’t team up to produce comics with General Mills (makers of Cheerios) ’til 2011. Granted, “licensed characters on cereal boxes in the 1960s” is not my particular field of expertise, so I could very well be missing something, but it looks like Cheerios was just used as the punchline for this particular story, no deals attached…unless there’s some kind of backroom deal we didn’t know about, or DC Editorial was fishing for some free boxes of cereal. “Thanks for featuring our product…have this truckload of Cheerios on us!”
If someone has any additional background on just what was going on here, or if it simply was “we’ve got a funny gag involving Cheerios,” let me in on it please!
This is exactly why the comixweblogosphere was called into creation.
Half naked men rolling around in cereal. Yup, that’s someone’s fetish!
General Mills’ connection: Many National/DC comics in the mid to late ’70s carried full page ads for Cheerios, featuring Moose and Squirrel, like this: http://www.comicvine.com/profile/cbishop/lists/rocky-and-bullwinkle-cheerios-comic-ads-31/48437/
Later they carried ads featuring the Cheerios Kid, as seen here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-1968-COMIC-ADVERTISEMENT-FOR-CHEERIOS-WITH-THE-CHEERIOS-KID-/311300723143
Gah! I meant to type “mid to late 60s…” not “70s”. Sorry about that!