Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Dick and Ches and Dale

An enduring Kiwi  tale is the one about Dick Frizzell inventing Ches. He's the little one in the Ches and Dale cheese promotion combo from the 1960s. Now, in a very entertaining essay in the book Promoting prosperity, Frizzell himself has announced that he was not Ches’s Daddy at all.

It turns out he just  “helped with the pencil ‘inbetweening” for the animation of the TV commercial. Hard to know who did the initial drawings although a Nobby Clark (really) is mentioned in some accounts. For Chesdale nuts, Robert Jenkins wrote the lyrics for the Ches and Dale jingle, Terry Gray the music and it was performed by Brian Borland and Gordon Hubbard of The Yeomen. More here on the excellent longwhitekid site.

Frizzell also begs off having created the Four Square man. As this character made his first appearance in the late fifties he wasn’t really a starter.

You can see the Ches and Dale animation here.