Product history
Grandma would like to make this concoction with rice and the sauce that she had; it was a combination of brown sugar and butter. It tasted good, obviously. They'd put it over the rice and eat it as a kind of a treat on Sundays ...
—William Low, Pamela Low's brother [3] Pamela Low, a flavorist at Arthur D. Little, [4] developed the original Cap'n Crunch flavor in 1963—recalling a recipe of a mixture of brown sugar and butter her grandmother Luella Low served over rice [5] [6] at her home in Derry, New Hampshire. [4]
Low created the flavor coating for Cap'n Crunch, describing it as giving the cereal a quality she called "want-more-ishness". [7] After her death in 2007, The Boston Globe called Low "the mother of Cap'n Crunch". [5] At Arthur D. Little, Low had also worked on the flavors for Heath, [7] Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars. [8]
In 1965, the Quaker Oats Company awarded the Fredus N. Peters Award to Robert Rountree Reinhart Sr. for his leadership in directing the development team of Cap'n Crunch. [2] Reinhart developed a technique in the manufacture of Cap'n Crunch, using oil in its recipe as a flavor delivery mechanism—which initially made the cereal difficult to bake properly. [2]
Marketing
Quaker Oats had a marketing plan for Cap'n Crunch, before it had developed the cereal. [7] The product line is heralded by a cartoon mascot named Cap'n Crunch. [9]
The character was created by Allan Burns, who became known for co-creating The Munsters and The Mary Tyler Moore Show . [10] The commercials themselves were originally produced by Jay Ward Productions.
Cap'n Crunch is depicted as a late 18th-century naval captain, an elderly gentleman with white eyebrows and a white moustache, who wears a Revolutionary-style naval uniform: a bicorne hat emblazoned with a "C" and a gold-epauletted blue coat with gold bars on the sleeves. While typically an American naval captain wears four bars on his sleeves, the mascot has been variously depicted over the years wearing only one bar (ensign), two bars (lieutenant), or three bars (commander). As of May 26, 2024, he is now depicted on cereal boxes with the four bars of a naval captain. Voice actor Daws Butler created Cap'n Crunch's voice, basing it on that of Hollywood and radio character actor Charles Butterworth. [11]
Animated television commercials featured the adventures of Cap'n Crunch commanding the "good ship" Guppy on its sea voyages accompanied by his canine first mate Seadog and loyal crew of sailor children named Alfie, Dave, Brunhilde, and Carlyle. Jean LaFoote, "The Barefoot Pirate", often attacked the Guppy in order to steal its cargo of Cap'n Crunch cereal.
According to The Wall Street Journal (2013), the character, Horatio Magellan Crunch, captains a ship called the Guppy, and was born on Crunch Island, a magical island in the Sea of Milk—with talking trees, crazy creatures and a mountain (Mt. Crunchmore) made out of Cap'n Crunch cereal." [9] The article refers to the Captain's bicorne as a "Napoleon-style" hat, [9] and claims that this has led to speculation that he may be French. [9]
Cap'n Crunch's original animated television commercials used the slogan, "It's got corn for crunch, oats for punch, and it stays crunchy, even in milk." [12]
In 2013, sources including The Wall Street Journal [9] and Washington Times [13] noted that the three stripes on the mascot's uniform indicate a rank of Commander rather than the four that denote the rank of Captain. In jest, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Navy had no record of Crunch and that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) was investigating him for impersonating a naval officer. [9]
Daws Butler provided the original voice of the Cap'n until his death in 1988. [14] [15] [16] [17] From 1991 to 2007, George J. Adams voiced him, [18] followed by John Gegenhuber in The Cap'n Crunch Show in 2013, [19] and Mike Stoudt from 2021 to 2023. [20] [21]
In the 1960s Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes came with whistles which coincidentally had the specific frequency (2600 hertz) required to exploit a vulnerability of in-band signaling enabling a phone to make free calls by entering an 'operator mode'. This was discovered by John Draper.
Author Philip Wylie wrote a series of short stories, Crunch and Des, beginning in the 1940s, which featured a similarly named but otherwise unrelated character, Captain Crunch Adams. [22] Vinton Studios produced a claymation ad during the 1980s. [23]
Brand characters
Jean LaFoote is a fictional pirate character from the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal's character set. The character's name is wordplay on that of the historical pirate, Jean Lafitte. [24] In the mid-1970s, he was the primary mascot for Jean LaFoote's Cinnamon Crunch cereal. [24] LaFoote was originally voiced by Bill Scott, followed by Adam Shapiro from 2006 to 2007, and Joe Nipote in The Cap'n Crunch Show in 2013. [26]
In the 1980s, the Captain's main adversaries were the Soggies, strange alien creatures resembling blobs of milk, whose goal was to make everything on Earth soggy. The only thing that was immune was Cap'n Crunch cereal, and many ads revolved around their attempts to "soggify" the cereal and everything else, to no avail. Their leader, Squish the Sogmaster (voiced by Dick Gautier), was a large mechanical creature (with a pair of eyes peeking out from an opening in the head, implying it was a suit of armor for a smaller figure) who was mostly seen ordering the Soggies to carry out his plans to "ruin breakfast"; several commercials that tied in with contests had story arcs involving the Sogmaster attempting to capture Cap'n Crunch.
