After two weeks of toing and froing, I was finally put in touch with Dennis Ready, the company's director of brand development. Ready, a very serious and soft-spoken man of about 40, assured me that Pillsbury "made absolutely the right decision" in pulling the Doughboy from the milk spot.

"For some other character, taking the milk might be fine," Ready said pensively. "It might be a real funny thing for him to do. But not the Doughboy. He doesn't trick people. He doesn't take advantage. It's not in his character to do that."

I asked Ready if he wasn't concerned that the Doughboy's act might be growing a little stale; if Jeff Manning's focus group transcripts didn't show that consumers were hungering for a darker, more defiant Doughboy.

Ready sighed deeply. "With an icon like the Doughboy, you have to take the long view," he said. "In the course of running a spot, consumers might really like it. But then, the question is, where does this work take us 10 years from now? If we keep putting him in situations like that, it could start to change how people perceive his character."

But we're not talking about a long-term shift in direction, I persisted. The Doughboy could still dance on counters and promote his line of buttery baked treats. This would be a one-time lark, a spoof, a temporary detour from his contribution to the betterment of humanity.

Ready grew exasperated. "Look," he said. "If you asked the Doughboy if he wanted to do that commercial, he'd say no. He'd say, 'I just want to talk about my cookies.'"

A few weeks ago, I might have surmised that Ready was crazy, that too many days and nights spent in the constant company of his jolly, jaunty baby-man had thoroughly toasted his strudel. But there are many, many other people who are just as tenderly devoted to the cats, bears, ducks, giants, insects, legumes, mythical beings and crustaceans who incarnate their brand in the popular imagination. Call up the marketing directors at Kellogg's, General Mills, Nabisco or any other giant packaged-goods conglomerate, and you'll get the same rapt paean.

"He's really more of a person than a bug," explains Anh Nguyen of General Mills. Nguyen is speaking of the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee. "He's not just this insect buzzing around," she says eagerly. "He wears fresh, normal everyday clothes ... If you look at him, you see that his face is friendly."

"He's very classy and upscale," raves Planters Vice President David Yale of his brand's icon, Mr. Peanut. "He's someone you might meet at a celebrity party, or at a new club, or lounge or bar. And -- to your surprise -- he talks to you! He engages you in conversation! So yes, he's got his top hat and monocle. But paradoxically, he's also quite approachable and down to earth."

Is there a Mrs. Peanut?

"I don't know," Yale says. "John, is he single?"

"He is single," confirms John Barrows, senior manager of marketing communications. "There is no Mrs. Peanut. There will never be a Mrs. Peanut."

Why not?

"He's a cosmopolitan guy," Barrows says. "He's busy."

"He's a man about town, representing Planters and nuts wherever he goes," Yale says cheerfully. "He's not the settling-down kind."

The Jolly Green Giant, however, is in a different league. "I would compare him to some kind of harvest god," says Gerry Miller, executive vice president of the Leo Burnett Agency. "He signifies something that we can't even express. Something that goes way back in the history of the species."

Miller confesses he doesn't yet understand the Green Giant in all of his mysterious, contradictory complexities. "The best characters are the ones who are flawed or internally conflicted," he says. "As far as I can tell, the Green Giant is pretty perfect. And so, maybe as we think about how to drive him into the future, there will turn out to be some issue or conflict that he could have. Now, that doesn't mean that we dress him up and put him in a mosh pit ... But it does mean that we've got to keep working him, pushing him in new directions." Miller reflects a moment. "I mean, we haven't scratched the surface of this guy," he says.

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