Mr. Miller / the wheelbarrow
Sponsoring body:California Milk Processor Board
Collections:Beyond the Mustache
Type:Television commercial
Notes
Two children refuse milk, believing it is for babies, and cite their elderly neighbor Mr. Miller who never drinks it. They watch him reach for his wheelbarrow and his arms tear off, his bones having gone brittle. Then-Governor Gray Davis publicly disliked it and asked whether it could be taken off air. Already logged in the main archive as out of scope; it belongs here.
Image: still from an upload of the commercial, which uploaders title “Bones” (1999) (YouTube).
Got Milk? The Book (1999) titles this spot “Bones”, numbers it Commercial #41 and says it first ran in April 1999 (p. 107). Manning calls it the campaign’s “first and only foray into the calcium wars”; the arms stunt took eight hours to set up and used low-level explosives (p. 107). The book, finished in mid-1999, says nothing about the spot being withdrawn (pp. 107, 182). Release year set to 1999 on this evidence.
Watch the commercial
Copy kept on this site.
About this entry
Mr. Miller / the wheelbarrow is an entry dated 1999, filed in the collection “Beyond the Mustache” of the Milk Mustache Database, which lists 2,339 entries from the got milk? and Milk Mustache campaigns. Type: Television commercial.
Related entries: got milk? — the airline pilot commercial, Healthy Weight with Dairy — “Watching your weight? Look in the fridge.”, got milk? — the cookies-in-hell commercial, Aaron Burr — launch commercial, 1999 Milk Mustache Celebrity Calendar (got milk?), 1999 Milk Mustache Promo Kit (got milk?, July-December), 1999 Purity 'Spider-Man' got milk? Half-Gallon Carton (Marvel).