On Strips: BC for Dr Pepper

A few years ago, I detailed a bit of the history of Johnny Hart's B.C. in animated form. I cited the 1973 Thanksgiving special as the first time the characters had been animated. Apparently, that wasn't quite true. I just found this 1966 television ad for Dr Pepper that includes a short animated sequence in the middle featuring Hart's characters...
A little more research finds that these aren't actually from B.C. itself, but were a separate group of caveman characters Hart had created specifically for a Dr Pepper ad campaign that ran for a few years in the mid-'6os. The print ads frequently featured a very Hart-style comic strip called Harmon, created exclusively for the campaign. Here's a few examples...
Clearly, an ad executive was superbly impressed with B.C. (which had debuted in 1958) and hired Hart over to work on this ad campaign. How/why they thought cartoon cavemen selling Dr Pepper made sense, I don't know. But if nothing else, it did lead to additional development on Hart's primary strip; in a later interview, Hart apparently noted that the B.C. character Grog came pretty directly from Harmon.

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