Pow appears alongside Snap, Crackle and Pop in this early ad.

Pow, the long forgotten but some say most talented of the anthropomorphic breakfast cereal characters is suing his former partners for 25 percent of all their earnings.

“I deserve it.  It’s mine” said the bitter Pow.

Those three would be nothing without me.  I came up with the idea for our characters.  It was my idea to call ourselves Snap, Crackle, Pop and Pow. I did all the booking.  I was the one with the business sense.  But they threw me under the bus.  I wasn’t able to get a job in show biz after that.  I had producers tell me privately that if they hired me Snap, Crackle and Pop would stop doing business with them.  It’s not fair.

Pow was fired in the late 1950s during the height of the cold war.

“It was felt that Pow was too belligerent, too warlike.  We were trying to break in to the Soviet market, remember” said a former executive at Kelloggs.

Recently released archives from the Soviet Union show that Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist party loved Rice Krispies and would have the cereal smuggled into the Soviet Union and eat it every morning for Breakfast.  During the famous “Kitchen Debate” of 1958, Khrushchev pulled Nixon aside and told him that he would allow Rice Krispies into the communist country if they got rid of Pow.

“Nixon thought this was a good opportunity for America so he talked to Kelloggs” according to a Cold War historian.

Kellogg executives, excited about the opportunity to break into the Russian market decided that Pow would be fired.

“I was called into the CEOs office” Pow remembers about the day he was let go.

I thought I was going to get a raise or a thank you or something.  The executives loved dealing with me because the other three were heavy into the breakfast cereal mascot lifestyle:  Sex, drugs and milk.  Instead they told me that I must go. “Nothing personal” they said.  Nothing personal?  They destroyed my life!

In shock, Pow drove home and tried to get the other three on the line.

“They wouldn’t even pick up the phone.  It was like I was nothing.”

Cast off from Kelloggs and adrift, Pow changed his name to “Power” and attempted a comeback as one of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  But the comeback was cut short when he was let go by Japanese television executives who were trying to crack the American TV market and felt that the name “Power” would be threatening to Americans.

“A brother can’t win for losing” remembers Pow.

Depressed and with a new family to support Pow left the business and moved to Pleasant Valley, New York where he currently teaches drivers ed at a local high school.

“It’s an honest living and I’m able to support my family” said Pow.  “But it’s not the same. My first love will always be breakfast cereals.”

As for Snap, Crackle and Pop, while they have expressed sympathy for their erstwhile colleague they say that they don’t have any money to give him.

“Times have changed” said Snap.  “Breakfast cereals are all being banned by the Feds as being unhealthy.  Work is hard to get.”

In a last ditch attempt to jump start their failing careers, the trio are hoping to reinvent themselves with a different, “edgy” persona and have announced that they will be starring in a new TV show called “Breaking Snap, Crackle and Pop” in which they get cancer and become meth dealers.

Pow has no plans to watch the show.

“F*ck ’em.  Now if they give me some money I might watch it but not until then.”

(4025)