If you grew up in the early 1970s, you remember how fast the Jackson 5 took over. Five singing brothers from Gary, Indiana, with a skinny little kid named Michael Jackson out front. He was barely ten years old and already stopping people cold. Their songs were on the radio, on TV, and humming through every school hallway in the country.
A lot of kids had their very own copy at home too. The funny thing is, plenty of them never once set foot in a record store to get it.
Back then a brand new 45 cost real money, and money was tight in a lot of houses. So when a Jackson 5 song turned up somewhere for free, kids pounced. All it took was a pair of scissors and a steady hand.
So where did these free records come from?
The answer was the back of the cereal box.
In the early 1970s, Post printed thin cardboard records right onto the backs of its cereal boxes. You’d finish your Alpha-Bits, flip the empty box over, and there it was. A record you could cut out with scissors and drop onto the record player in the living room.
The Jackson 5 were a big part of it. Their hits showed up on boxes of Alpha-Bits, Super Sugar Crisp and Frosted Rice Krinkles. As the nostalgia site MeTV put it, “It just makes sense that ‘ABC’ could be found on the flip side of your Alpha-Bits.” The brothers weren’t the only song on those boxes, but they were a favorite. MeTV says “‘I Want You Back,’ ‘I’ll Be There’ and ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ were also pressed into Post brands.”
A number one hit, free, on a box of cereal. For a ten-year-old in 1971, that was about as good as life got.
The cardboard records were thin, so what they really did was send kids running to the TV and the radio to hear the brothers for real. Here are the Jacksons doing the two songs that ended up on those boxes, back when Michael was still a little boy up front.
The Jackson 5 sing “I Want You Back” and “ABC” on The Ed Sullivan Show
The group showed up on cereal in another way too. They starred in TV commercials for Alpha-Bits, singing a quick jingle for the cereal in between their real hits.
Hardly anybody saved those cardboard records, which is a bit of a shame. They got cut out, spun a few dozen times, and tossed in the trash with the empty box. But for the folks who had one, the memory stuck hard.
If any of this rings a bell, the clip above is the Jackson 5 doing both of those songs for real, no scissors required.