Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with neither Mother Goose nor any of her animals in it:
(#1)
To understand this strip, you have to know about the varieties of Pebbles breakfast cereals — one of which is Fruity Pebbles. (And then, of course, you have to recognize fruit as an anti-gay slur and recognize the abbreviation LGBT.)
(Your appreciation of the cartoon might gain some if you recognize that the Pebbles cereals are named after the character Pebbles in the Flintstones tv cartoons; that’s Fred Fintstone on the cover of the cereal box.)
Earlier on this blog, on 11/19/13, in “Cross-comic allusions”, some discussion of the Flintstones. And then, from Wikipedia:
Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles are brands of breakfast cereal introduced by Post Foods in 1971 featuring characters from the animated series The Flintstones as spokestoons. Cocoa Pebbles contains chocolate-flavored crisp rice cereal bits, while Fruity Pebbles contains crisp rice cereal bits that come in a variety of fruit flavors with a sugar content of 9 grams per serving for Fruity Pebbles and 10 grams per serving for Cocoa Pebbles. It is the oldest cereal brand based on characters from a TV series or movie.
(#2)
(Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone)
The Wikipedia piece notes the sugat content of Pebbles cereals. Sugary cereals are the topic of my 3/12/16 posting “Sweet nothings: candy, cereal, advertising”, about (Kellogg’s) Froot Loops, which led me to do a follow-up posting on the same day about Froot Loops, with a section on fruit as an anti-gay slur.
So in the MGG cartoon, the folks in Post’s legal department want the company to alter the word fruity to something less potentially offensive (though Kellogg’s has persisted with Froot). But, of course, LGBT is just going to offend a different set of customers, the large number who “don’t approve of homosexuality”.
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