Snap, Crackle and Pop

"HAVE a Coke in the morning," the radio announcer sang to a snappy rock and roll tune.

Give your pajama-stagger a little pep. Redden your already blood-shot eyes. It's time for the Coca-Cola Company's latest marketing coup.

This year, Coke began promoting itself for the number one spot on your breakfast table, with radio commercials, posters in stores and 25 cents-a-glass restaurant deals. All Coca-Cola U.S.A. bottlers can use the ad campaign. Although the campaign is popular from Wisconsin to Louisiana, so far local bottlers haven't picked up on it.

Subway posters in Atlanta show a cup of Coke against a backdrop of a straw basket and a red checkered tablecloth. Usually something can be served on a checkered cloth only if Timmy and Lassie and Andy and Opie would eat it; but if the latest ad blitz is as successful as Santa was, the colorizing fanatics going after these shows will soon be dyeing breakfast beverages brown.

IT WAS a century ago that the company turned innocuous soda water into what Berke Breathed has aptly described as "malted battery acid." Then, in the 1930s, it invented Santa Claus to tout its product. (Until then, Saint Nick had been a gruff, thin man. It's thanks to Coke that he's now a jolly bowl of jello.)

Now the Company is attempting to turn your Rice Krispies into "Snap, Crackle, and Jump Up and Down Until You Pop."

Americans already drink more soft drinks than any other beverage (in most other countries, milk and coffee are favorites), and we drink more Coke than any other soft drink. Television ads already have us convinced Coke goes with life, rain, farming and smiling. Now they'd have us believe a complete breakfast is comprised of eggs over easy, corn flakes and Coke Classic.

THE CONSEQUENCES could be devastating.

Now cereal is made in the shapes of things that taste good with milk--cookies and ice cream cones, for example. Should Coke become the chief breakfast drink, General Mills would have to introduce Blood-Shot-Eye-Bits, with four flavors of marshmallow rotted teeth thrown in Mary Lou Retton might have to dribble Coke on her face for the commercials.

The calorie countdown on Cheerios wouldn't count down quite so far if you added Coke--it would jump from 160 with half a cup of milk to 224 with a can of Classic. But this would present no problem for the weight conscious--Diet Coke could stand in for skim milk.

One can only hope the Reagans don't find out about the Coke campaign. They'd have to fight back with a television spot of Nancy dumping a two-liter bottle down the toilet, pleading youths to "Just Say No."

Elementary school teachers' pleas for students to eat "a nutritious breakfast" may never be the same again. They'll have to change the four food groups to five, to accomodate syrupy, sugary beverages and foods. They'll recommend three daily portions from the Cola group, although they will allow for substitutions made of Nutra Sweet.

Breakfasts will soon degenerate from the wholesome goodness of fresh cooked oatmeal into instant shots of sugar. Now that vending machines hold a future breakfast staple, one can only expect candy for breakfast, synthetic fruit for artificially sweetened hot cereal, and microwaveable concoctions of bagels, pork, eggs and grease. Then again, given the alternatives, Coke may actually be a cylinder of hope rising out of the vast wasteland created by breakfast pollutants. Burp.