Quaker Oats aired a TV commercial in 1972 to promote its Life breakfast cereal, which featured Little Mikey. Real name John Gilchrist, Little Mikey was a fictional boy who “hates everything”, only to fall in love with the cereal after his older brothers use him as their guinea pig 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 kicked off an ad campaign that revolved around Mikey’s reactions to Life cereal, and which ran for the next twelve years – one of the longest continuously running ad campaigns. Below are some interesting facts about Gilchrist, the real kid behind the fictional Mikey.
The Real Life Little Mikey Was One of Seven Child Actor Siblings
The real life Little Mikey, John Gilchrist, is the son of an NYPD cop. He was raised in the Bronx, the middle child in a family that would ultimate 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.
As things turned out, they were right. As Gilchrist later described it, it was not long before his oldest brother Tommy was working regular gigs in which he made more money in a single day than their father earned in a week as a police officer. Gilchrist’s mother became the children’s agent, and she soon had her younger kids also modeling and appearing in ads.
Little Mikey
Eventually, all seven Gilchrist children did advertising work in print media or television. The success of the children enabled the family to move from the Bronx to Yonkers, and pay for the kids’ college educations. Unlike many child actors, Gilchrist 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 everyday lives of a normal family – just one whose children frequently appeared on TV ads. The Life cereal commercials, which started with Mikey not liking anything, evolved into Mikey becoming a masticating machine who would eat anything placed before him. That gave rise in later year 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.
From Ad Star to Real Life Ad Executive
It never happened, and Gilchrist is alive and well as of 2025. He is now on the other end of the advertising game. Gilchrest has worked for years as an ad executive and the director of sales at New York’s MSG Network. The iconic commercials are now only part of the background of his life. However, he recognizes and appreciates the cultural fascination surrounding them.
As Gilchrist put it: “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, Gilchrist 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!”
_________________
Some Sources & Further Reading
Newsday – John Gilchrist, Who Played ‘Mikey’ in TV Ad, Still Likes it After All These Years
Snopes – Did Pop Rocks and Soda Kill ‘Little Mikey’?
