The series of Cracker Jack 60's and 70's commercials featured a man, played by Gilford, who loved Cracker Jack. Whether lying on the beach, riding in an elevator, teaching a class, or lounging at home in his favorite easy chair, this Cracker Jack fan was always eager for one more handful, or even just one more morsel, of his favorite treat. According to one source, there are at least 18 different commercials in the series, some in black and white, some in color. An Entertainment Weekly article says that "Gilford did 26 Cracker Jack ads in all."
One of the commercials from this series, though it did not include the jingle, was selected by Advertising Age as one of the all-time 50 Best Commercials, one of only eight commercials from the 1960's honored by the magazine. This commercial, referred to as "Train," was listed as #9 in the March 1997 Entertainment Weekly article, "The Pauses That Refreshed," in the magazine's special section on "The 50 Best Commercials."
In the 1965 commercial, which takes place in a passenger train's sleeping car, someone in a top berth sticks out an arm to share a Pass Around Pack of Cracker Jack with the person in the berth across the aisle. The Gilford character, dressed in pajamas and robe, happens along the aisle at just the right time. Because the berth passengers' curtains are drawn, they do not realize that Gilford is intercepting the box and helping himself to a snack before pouring Cracker Jack into the outstretched hand of the intended recipient. The humorous deception continues until the imposter is discovered when one of the passengers reaches out for Cracker Jack and feels Gilford's head instead.
According to the EW article, "Train" was originally 60 seconds, but Borden requested a 30-second version. The ad editor, David Dee, says that "there was nothing [he] could pull without destroying Gilford's exquiste timing," so they solved the problem by speeding up the action 50% and ran it that way, making it even funnier.
Jack Gilford, whose facial expressions communicated as much as his words, was a star of stage, screen, and television. He played Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on Broadway in 1962 and later in the 1966 film version. He was nominated for a Tony in 1967 for his role in Cabaret, and he was also nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 1973's Save the Tiger. But Jack Gilford is perhaps best remembered today as the reluctant Bernie Lefkowitz in Cocoon (1985) and Cocoon: The Return (1988).
In Advertising Age's 1999 special issue, The American Century, William Bernbach of the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, New York, is listed as No.1 in its "20th century honor roll of advertising's most influential people." Bernbach is credited with creating a new genre of TV commercials, insisting "on first learning how his client's products related to their users, what human qualities and emotions came into play. Then the challenge turned to deciding how best to communicate those elements, in TV and print, and capture the consumer's understanding and support." Two of his agency's Cracker Jack/Jack Gilford commercials, "Card Game" and "Sharing," are cited as examples of this approach.
Art director Bob Gage, who along with Bernbach and Phyllis Robinson launched DDB, is also included as one of the "Top 100 Advertising People" (#33), and the Cracker Jack/Jack Gilford commercials are mentioned as examples of "his warm TV storytelling."
According to Larry Dobrow's When Advertising Tried Harder - The Sixties: The Golden Age of American Advertising, the copywriter for the Cracker Jack TV campaign was Judy Protas, and the commercials were the first time that an adult actor was cast to "act and react in the manner of a child." And, as Dobrow says, "that was the very point of the entire series."
Reportedly, there was another Cracker Jack jingle on TV commercials, and possibly on the radio, in the mid- to late sixites: "Crack a pack of Cracker Jack, You're bound to crack a smile!" Please contact The Cracker Jack Box if you remember this one or have more information about it.
