How many of you remember this Peter Pan Peanut Butter commercial? This one really seems to have stuck with people, and watching it again I can understand why. Instead of giving us a normal family making peanut butter sandwiches, they filled the commercial with recognizable characters and images including Peter Pan and Captain Hook, Beethoven, the Mona Lisa and even a hockey-masked horror character, all brought together by Peter Pan Peanut Butter
The biggest surprise for me is the music. That catchy “peanut, peanut butter” jingle wasn’t originally written for the commercial at all. The melody goes back to “(Baby) Hully Gully,” written by Fred Sledge Smith and Cliff Goldsmith in 1959. H.B. Barnum and Marty Cooper then adapted it into “Peanut Butter,” recorded by The Marathons in 1961, and that song eventually found another life in Peter Pan’s advertising more than twenty years later.
Peter Pan needed memorable advertising at the time, too. In early 1984, Skippy controlled about 40 percent of the national peanut-butter market and Jif had 17 percent, while Peter Pan was down around seven percent. So this wonderfully strange commercial was coming from a famous old brand trying very hard to get our attention, and I’d say they succeeded.
The brand itself goes all the way back to 1928 and was once the dominant national peanut butter. By the time this commercial appeared, Peter Pan was also changing corporate hands as Beatrice acquired Esmark, which explains that very familiar 1980s “We’re Beatrice” identification some of us remember seeing at the end of commercials.
Peter Pan advertising had also featured some familiar faces over the years, including Sterling Holloway, Alan Sues, Art James and later Perfect Strangers star Mark Linn-Baker. I tried to track down the performers in this particular commercial, but I couldn’t find a reliable cast list, so rather than guess at their identities or what became of them, I’m leaving that part as one of the mysteries behind the commercial.
Do you remember this one, and did that “peanut, peanut butter” jingle immediately come back to you?
