You'll Never Guess The Pillsbury Doughboy's Real Name

Advertising mascots have surprising emotional heft. As Know Your Meme points out, the periodic rediscovery that Chuck E. Cheese's full name is "Charles Entertainment Cheese" is always good for a string of amusing social media posts, and who will ever forget the disbelief and, for some, horror when Planters killed off the 104-year-old Mr. Peanut in a car crash, leaving even CNN Business to report, "Mr. Peanut is dead for some reason." It's just part of modern life that brands, not content to simply let their mascots sell us their products, will announce that their characters don't just hawk snack, they have entire backstories, relationships, and yes, even "real names." (Mr. Peanut? Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe, according to Mental Floss.)

Take the Pillsbury Doughboy. Branding Times, a project of the Works Design Group, ranked him as one of the top five brand mascots of all time and notes, "nobody hates the Pillsbury Doughboy, for example, even if they are otherwise jaded when it comes to ads." It's true; the Pillsbury Doughboy's perpetual good mood, immediately recognizable giggle, and wholesome enthusiasm for baked goods has kept him in the public's good graces for over 55 years. As reported by the official Pillsbury website, the Doughboy came to be in 1965 when Rudy Perz, a copywriter working for Chicago's Leo Burnett advertising agency, imagined a character popping out of the Pillsbury can of refrigerated dough. The Doughboy's adorable design came via Milt Schaffer, an artist who had also worked for Disney and Cascade Studios in Los Angeles, who brought the character to "life" via stop-action clay animation.