Little Mikey Went From Acting in Ads to an Ad Executive
In 1972, Quaker Oats aired a TV commercial promoting its Life breakfast cereal, which featured Little Mikey (real name John Gilchrist), a fictional boy who “hates everything”, only to fall in love with the cereal after his older brothers use him as their food taster to try it out. The commercial was a hit, and won a Clio Award in 1974 for excellence and innovation in advertising. It gave rise to an ad campaign revolving around Mikey’s reactions to Life cereal, that ran for the next twelve years.
John Gilchrist, the son of an NYPD cop, was raised in the Bronx, the middle child in a family that would ultimately have seven kids. His parents owned a bungalow in nearby Long Beach, and there they ran into some children who had done modeling. They took a good look at those kids, then took a good look at their own, and concluded that the Gilchrist children’s freckly and “All American” look might be marketable. It turned out they were right.
As Gilchrist would later describe it, it was not long before his oldest brother Tommy was working regular gigs, making more money in a single day than their father earned in a week as a police officer. His mother became her children’s agent, and within a short time, her younger kids were also modeling and appearing in ads. Eventually, all seven of the Gilchrist children were doing advertising work, which enabled the family to move from the Bronx to Yonkers, and pay for the kids’ college educations.
Unlike many child actors, John Gilchrist actually has fond memories of his working youth. Perhaps that is because the acting gigs never became an all-consuming aspect of his or his siblings’ lives, and so never came to define them. They would do the gigs, then pursue the every lives of a normal family – just one whose children frequently appeared on TV ads.
The Life cereal ad campaign, which started with Mikey not liking anything, evolved into Mikey becoming a masticating machine who would anything placed before him. That gave rise in later years to an urban legend that the real-life actor, Gilchrist, had died after swallowing a fatal combination of hard rock candy and soda, which exploded his stomach. It never happened, and Gilchrist is alive and well as of 2018. He is now on the other end of the advertising game, working as an ad executive and the director of sales at New York’s MSG Network.
The iconic commercial is now only part of the background of his life, but he recognizes and appreciates the cultural fascination surrounding. “I just never looked at it like some huge, big deal. Maybe that comes off to some people like I don’t want to talk about it. Totally not the case. I love talking about it. It’s a part of me“. A middle-aged man now with children of his own, he still likes the cereal that brought him fame. As he told an interviewer in 2012: “My kids like Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes, but I still sure do like Life!”
