You Won't Believe the First Doughboys

The Pillsbury Doughboy ranks among the most beloved fictional characters to come from Minnesota, ahead of Rocky and Bullwinkle, right up there with Paul Bunyan, Mary Tyler Moore and Marge from Fargo. So, we expected to come across Poppin Fresh during production of our new history documentary on the milling industry in Minneapolis.

Flour Power explores the how the Doughboy’s creator, Pillsbury, and their rival General Mills came to be and how they made Minnesota grow like fast-rising yeast. But what we didn’t expect to discover is that Poppin' Fresh was not the first doughboy.

We asked researcher, author, former MHS library maven and cookbook aficionado Debbie Miller to pull some food industry items from the Historical Society’s archives. She offered an informative and entertaining show-and-tell. Debbie Miller pointed out how the Minneapolis millers promoted their products through colorful cookbooks. She presented delightful sheet music of flour and food ditties for families to sing along to at the family piano. Apparently in the pre-electronic media world you played the jingle yourself.

Then she brought out the original doughboys.

These forerunners to Poppin' Fresh were from Minnesota’s Royal Milling Company. They created booklets to promote their Ben-Hur brand of flour. They appear around the turn of the last century, predating the Pillsbury Doughboy by many decades.

The Ben-Hur Doughboys are more creepy than cute. If Poppin' Fresh bounced about in sunlit kitchens, these creatures dwell in the dark corners of basements. The Pillsbury Doughboy is so loveable and harmless, he inspired the Staypuff Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. The Ben-Hur Doughboys seem inspired by Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

To be fair, the booklets are well produced. The illustrations of the gooey Golems are artfully etched. The text features clever nursery rhymes that hold up well after more than a century. But like the gritty, dark original Hans Christian Anderson tales, these vignettes often don’t end well for the grim Doughboys.

Who knows, maybe these things sold more flour. Maybe they made for good kitchen table reading while waiting for fresh bread to come out of the oven. Maybe these doughboys worked at the dawn of modern advertising. But that was before Poppi Fresh came on the scene.

After our half century with the second doughboy -his gleeful smile, perfectly pudgy figure, button eyes, baker’s hat and kerchief- there’s no way these mummified specters can earn our adoration. Generations have waited for the end of the Pillsbury dough ads when Poppin Fresh giggles as his doting human companions give him a poke to the tummy. Based on these unsettling characters and their Grimm Fairy tale-like anecdotes, poking them in the stomach would probably end in grisly fashion.

This story is made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.