Hasta La Creative!

As the world remembers David Cassidy, who died at 67 on Tuesday, it’s impossible to overstate the level and intensity of his fame in the early 1970sand the peculiar manufactured nature of it. Cassidy was part of the cast of the ABC sitcom “The Partridge Family,” which was created as a vehicle for Shirley Jones, who was then already famous as a star of stage and screenbut the show made a global superstar out of Jones’ real-life stepson Cassidy.

Jones played Shirley Partridge, the widowed mother of five kids who, with their mom, formed a touring musical group called The Partridge Family. Cassidy played her eldest son and the band’s lead singer, Keith Partridge. Studio musicians were originally intended to entirely fake The Partridge Family sound, but Jones and Cassidy had enough talent to actually sing for show’s songs (other “Partridge Family” actors lip-synced).

Cassidy was, simply, adorable, and became an overnight obsession for millions of teen and pre-teen girls. Were they in love with Keith Partridge or David Cassidy? In the pre-internet era, when star personas could be carefully controlled, it didn’t really matter. And ABC actively encouraged the conflation of the TV character and the actor behind him, as seen in the Rice Krispies ad above, which starred not David Cassidy, but Keith Partridge. The song underpinning the ad is a corny marvel:

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