The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #31: Clusters Squirrels (General Mills/Nestle)

Turns out, Quaker weren't the only brand to base a campaign on the conceit that squirrels are wily and rapacious little devils who are out to make life difficult for consumers of nut-based products. Over in the US, General Mills had much the same idea with a campaign that first took flight in 1987. Once again, our sciurine antagonists are driven by a serious case of nut envy, but this time it's the contents of your breakfast bowl that have them so enraptured - these squirrels crave the taste of Honey Nut Clusters, and they're not above clawing into your larder in order to get to it. The squirrels kept up their pursuit of Clusters for well into the 1990s, and by the middle of the decade had expanded their targets to European breakfast tables (internationally, it was sold under the Nestle brand name), with the squirrels putting in appearances on UK and German television. I'm not sure exactly when the campaign petered out, but the product itself is now defunct, so we can only hope that those thieving squirrels found an alternative source of monounsaturated fat.

I'd call the Clusters campaign a more benign cousin of that for Quaker Harvest Bars, in that the squirrels here aren't quite so overtly menacing. The Quaker campaign, at least in its early stages, was blatantly taking its cues from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, the implication being that the rodents would unleash all manner of physical devastation upon any human reckless enough to come between them and a Harvest Crunch bar. Here, it's my impression that the squirrels would sooner avoid a direct confrontation wherever possible. Physically, they're not up for a scrap, and are reliant on their wits to deprive unwary humans of the coveted cereal. Making a big tonal and aesthetic difference is that the squirrels are predominantly portrayed by real specimens, as opposed to the googly-eyed glove puppets from the Quaker campaign, so there's more of an adorability factor. There's also a lot more chintz - cue cheesy visual effects, as the squirrels intermittently switch back and forth from their flesh and blood selves to stiff animatronic puppets for some of the more challenging pieces. Compared to the largely silent squirrels from the Quaker campaign, these squirrels don't appear to swear by stealth, and are instead prone to involuntarily advertising their whereabouts with non-stop cartoon chattering. To the nutaholic, they're a less intimidating adversary than what the Quaker crew came up with, but they are every bit as fiendishly relentless.

What the Clusters campaign does emphasise, more than the Harvest campaign, is the squirrels' inclination to invade their victims' personal territory to get their paws on whatever clustered goods they may be hoarding within. The majority of ads in the campaign revolve around the theme of house-breaking and what a fine art the squirrels have it down to. Most of them take place in a sunlit suburbia that's ostensibly very pleasant, pristine and golden, but naturally that's all a facade. It becomes apparent that the residents are under constant surveillance, from legions upon legions of envious eyes lingering in every hidden orifice, endlessly conspiring and combining their underhanded talents to make up one great unstoppable force of voraciousness, of which the unwary suburbanite is utterly at the mercy (particularly first thing in the morning, when the average suburbanite is not at their quickest, and those squirrels clearly know it),. No blind spot goes unexploited, no weakness escapes their notice. So insatiable is their appetite for Clusters that they never stop coming, and they're guaranteed to make short work of whatever obstacles stand in their way. They certainly aren't going to let a silly thing like a lack of opposable thumbs keep them from turning door handles or sawing their way through walls. They may be small and fluffy, but their tenacity is the stuff of nightmares.

The squirrels might represent the forces of nature striking back at man where he least suspects it, but they're also knowledgable enough about technology to know how to use it against him. Many ads involve them obtaining the desired cereal thanks to the manipulation of some kind of technological appliance, be it as benign as distracting a human with a television set, or as hostile as laying waste to the breakfast table with a vacuum cleaner. One of the most bizarre ads in the series involved the inexplicable appearance of a robotic-squirrel hyrbid who stormed his way into an unfortunate breakfast-eater's domain and, unusually, claimed his cereal through the kind of out-and-out physical intimidation more commonly favoured by the Quaker bunch. This was a particularly anomalous ad all-round, in fact, as it opened with a rare attempt at a truce between squirrel and suburbanite - the squirrel actually presented the man with a box of Clusters, and only when he refused to share the squirrel's peace offering did he incur the wrath of Robo-Squirrel. Moral of the story: squirrel rapacity is not to be underestimated, but human insatiability will always be its own worst enemy.

In the UK version of the campaign it was much the same deal, with squirrels targetting half-asleep consumers in the supposed comfort of their own kitchens. There was one particularly ambitious squirrel, however, who took on a woman eating Clusters in what looked like a big and swanky estate. Heartening to know that it's not just middle-class suburbia where tomorrow belongs to the squirrel.