Just Like The Beatles, The Rice Krispies Elves Have A Forgotten Member

Whether you're buying a box of their cereal for your breakfast or a box of their marshmallowy Rice Krispies Treats for a snack (which you can make at home, by the way), you've seen those three elves before. Snap, Crackle, and Pop, so named for the noises Rice Krispies make when mixed with milk, are a trio of ageless sprites who have, in some form or another, hawked their cereal for close to a hundred years. But did you know there was once a fourth elf? That's right! Much like Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, two guys who played with the Beatles before they were famous, the Rice Krispies elves had an oft-forgotten fourth member for a couple of ads — and, for some reason, he was from space.

The fourth elf was named Pow. You might think that's an awfully aggressive name for what is essentially cereal ASMR, but he was actually intended to symbolize the "power" of whole grain rice, which was what Rice Krispies were made from at the time. Apparently, the best way to express this power was through a small, taciturn elf in a space suit who whizzes around on a hovercraft feeding people spoonfuls of cereal. The character appeared only twice, in spots that aired during "The Howdy Doody Show" (which Rice Krispies sponsored) in 1950 before disappearing back into the cosmos.

So why did Rice Krispies decide, however briefly, that an elf on a hovercraft was the best way to sell their breakfast cereal? We watched "Mad Men," and we were given to understand that advertising executives didn't get into psychedelics until the 1960s. Well, the thing about mid-century America is that it was really, really into space. Although Pow debuted in the early 1950s, a few years before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and kicked off the Space Race, there was already something in the air. Spacefaring pulp heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon had been around for some time, and the aesthetics of space (or a very science-fiction-y interpretation of space) were starting to seep into architecture, design, and music.

With that in mind, why wouldn't it seep into kids' advertising, too? Heck, America was about to start designing playgrounds to look like rocket ships — Pow just got in on the ground floor. But alas, he wasn't the right fit for the Rice Krispies elves, and after those two ads, he never appeared again. But whenever you eat rocket-shaped Bomb Pops or nibble on astronaut ice cream (which astronauts don't really eat all that often), doesn't the spirit of Pow live on? (Well, we guess not, since they don't involve whole grain rice. But still, we're trying to make a point.)