How Many Fingers Do I Have Up?

What does it take to come up with a subject to write about? Inspiration can come from many things, even a walk down the cereal aisle at the grocery store. As I stood there in the multitude of bran, oat and puffed rice products, I had an epiphany.  Whats the deal with three fingers and a thumb? It may sound strange but what has three fingers and a thumb got to do with the cereal aisle? Before I jump off into the quagmire of sugary delight, I wanted to start my cereal venture in an earlier time, when cereal was known as a health food. If there were four kinds of cereal on the shelf, you covered the gambit of all sales and the cereal aisle was no more than a shelf or two for all the products.

Sullivan Market, Bigheart Oklahoma 1918

But in the last 100 years that cereal has been advertised there has been a drastic change. No more are the healthy benefits of a breakfast cereal advertised as something to help in all sorts of ailments.

                                      

 

Now the choices are an aisle of grains that can overwhelm the most seasoned shopper. Welcome to the fructose induced aisle of gain goodness. Where whatever the grain of choice is there is a cereal for your choosing.

The advertising has also changed over the years. In the late 1950's and early 60's breakfast cereal has taken on a cartoonish cover of feeding the masses of children on any given morning, Especially on Saturday mornings when cartoons and sugary cereal went hand in hand and the voices of children could be heard through the house asking mom to get some Frosted Flakes or Froot Loops on the next trip to the store. All this was just the beginning to what has become a lucrative business aimed at the youth of America. 

Now...back to the epiphany in the cereal aisle.

As I stood there looking over the multitude of choices, I had an interesting observation.  All of the cartoon characters that adorn the front of cereal boxes have one thing in common. They have three fingers and a thumb.  For example: 

Only a small fraction of the selection of four fingered characters that front the face of morning sweetness. It also had me thinking of a story I wrote years ago about these two guys.

       

  That's right. They too have only three fingers and a thumb. After some investigating about the missing digit of most all animated characters it was found that Walt Disney animators were behind the four digit hand. It's been noted that the animators could produce drawings faster and have the paint cels finished quicker if the subjects only had three fingers and a thumb. Thus reducing the time it took to produce a full length cartoon.  But all isn't bad if you only have three fingers and a thumb.

You could be like this guy. He only has a thumb and a little dough as a hand, no wonder everyone is poking him in the side. It's not because he's a soft lump of dough, it's because there poking fun at his lack of three fingers.