Seeing Mighty Mouse selling vitamins takes me right back to an era when our Saturday-morning cartoon heroes seemed capable of selling just about anything. In this commercial, Mighty Mouse gets clobbered by a cat, takes a Zestabs chewable vitamin and suddenly turns the tables — not exactly subtle advertising, but certainly memorable!
There’s actually much more history behind this little commercial than I expected. Zestabs came from Sauter Laboratories, a division of pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche. That strange “Mighty Mouse — Nutley, New Jersey” slate at the end makes sense once you learn that Roche’s longtime American headquarters and research complex was in Nutley.
The campaign also arrived just as people were beginning to question how products were marketed to children. Zestabs came in fruit flavors and later chocolate, and groups such as Action for Children’s Television objected to advertisements that made vitamin pills look and taste too much like candy. By 1972, Hoffmann-La Roche said it had stopped placing its vitamin commercials inside children’s programs, although Zestabs advertising continued elsewhere on television.
And here’s one connection I never expected: years before Pretty in Pink or Two and a Half Men, Jon Cryer says his first paying acting job at age four was a Zestabs commercial.