The Inventor Of Cap'n Crunch Also Created This Classic Sitcom
Cap’n Crunch, full name Horatio Magellan Crunch, is an icon. But I think it’s safe to say that he’s known almost exclusively for his contributions to the cereal sphere. Whether that makes him a hero or villain is probably up to how intact the roof of your mouth was after a bowl of his eponymous crunch.
And yet, it turns out that Cap’n Crunch’s origins might have been a warm-up for one of the most lauded sitcoms of all time.
That would be The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a series co-created by a man named Allan Burns. It ran for seven seasons and won the positively gob-smacking total of 29 Emmys, accompanied by a litany of other high-profile praise, like holding the number one spot on Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.
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But before he was given the reins to his own network sitcom, he was working in animation with a man named Jay Ward, sharpening his writing skills on cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. It was during this time that Quaker Oats reached out to them for a cereal mascot, and Cap’n Crunch was the result.
He then moved into the world of real-life actors and together with Chris Hayward, created another TV sitcom you’re probably well familiar with: The Munsters. He’d work his way through a couple more writing jobs, all successful, which eventually caught the eye of TV producer extraordinaire James L. Brooks. When CBS needed a series built for budding star Mary Tyler Moore, they got handed the task, and succeeded by any metric you could imagine.
Such is the unlikely link between a cereal-loving naval officer and one of the best sitcoms of all time. The only real miss here? That there was never a Cap’n Crunch crossover episode.
