Hasta La Creative!

Consumers bowled over by the recent return of French Toast Crunch after a nine-year hiatus should enjoy “The Tiny & The Tasty,” a strange and silly soap-opera parody that casts dolls as actors to reintroduce the General Mills cereal. McCann, Picture Mill and Beacon Street collaborated on the campaign.

All the classic daytime-drama tropes—amnesia, family intrigue, murder mysteries, surprise pregnancies—are played out in overwrought fashion on finely detailed miniature sets by poseable Ken- and Barbie-style action figures whose mouths never move.

Bill Wright, global executive creative director at McCann, says the idea stemmed partly from “the 1990s origin of French Toast Crunch. That was the decade when daytime dramas were at their height of popularity. So when you take soap operas and cross them with tiny dolls, you get a strangely awesome mashup.”

Real soap opera actors do a fine job of hamming it up on the tongue-in-cheek, breakfast-themed scripts (which, by the way, were written by Lex Singer, the son of former Adweek critic Barbara Lippert). And director Matt Piedmont, a writer for Saturday Night Live, establishes just the right tone. The spots channel the vibe of early SNL films by Walter Williams or Tom Schiller, though they’re less manic and, of course, more on brand.

Served up in brief, tasty bites, this serial really satisfies.