Sunny Jim - Sunny Jim and Force Cereal

Sunny Jim and Force Cereal

The character on boxes of Force cereal was created in the United States in 1902 by writer Minnie Maud Hanff and artist Dorothy Ficken, initially for an advertising campaign. Rather than selling the benefits of eating wheat, which Hanff assumed customers already knew, her copy for the original advertisements told stories in verse, such as this one:

Jim Dumps was a most unfriendly man,

Who lived his life on the hermit plan;

In his gloomy way he'd gone through life,

And made the most of woe and strife;

Till Force one day was served to him

Since then they've called him "Sunny Jim."

The advertisements featured slogans such as "Better than a Vacation” and “A Different Food for Indifferent Appetites.” Other verses included:

Whatever you say, wherever you've been,

You can't beat the cereal, that raised Sunny Jim!

and

High o'er the fence leaps Sunny Jim,

Force is the food that raises him

This last rhyme became a familiar catchphrase.

The campaign was wildly successful at promoting the character of Sunny Jim. Printer's Ink stated that “No current novel or play is so universally popular. He is as well-known as President Roosevelt or J. Pierpont Morgan.” However, the cereal company turned its advertising account over to a different firm, which did not approve of humor in advertising and more or less abandoned the campaign.

In the United States, Force followed a convoluted path involving many corporate mergers. The last owner stopped producing the cereal in 1983. Both the cereal and Sunny Jim had greater success in the United Kingdom, where Force cereal is still available and the box still features a picture of Sunny Jim.