Andy Fantuz acquires a bottle of “Fantuz Flakes” as a great CFL joke comes full circle

The original Fantuz Flakes cereal remains one of the Saskatchewan Roughriders' most famous marketing moments, and the subsequent Hamilton Tiger-Cats' dandruff commercial parody of it is still one of the cleverest interteam jokes the CFL's seen. Now that Fantuz is a Tiger-Cat, though, he's completed the circle, obtaining a bottle of the old shampoo made at his expense. From CFL.ca's Kate McKenna, who did the original parody and is now travelling around doing training camp videos for the league, here's the inside story of how Fantuz got a bottle of the shampoo named in his honour.

"I actually ended up meeting Fantuz for the first time on one of my very first Transat adventures, while at a resort in the Caribbean," McKenna said. "What are the odds—of all the weeks, of all the resorts? I was there working. He was there for a wedding. I saw him earlier this year at a Ticats event and we started talking about the whole Fantuz Flakes video and he asked if I still had a bottle—which I did. It was sitting, unused, under my sink. Needless to say, when I went to Ticats' practice as part of my training camp tour, he asked if I'd remembered and was pleasantly surprised to find out I had."

In case you missed the initial commercial, here it is:

It says a lot about the CFL that a star like Fantuz not only would remember a moment like that, but that he's up for laughing at himself a bit over the whole Fantuz Flakes saga. In plenty of leagues, big-name players like Fantuz probably would be ticked off about that kind of parody; here, he gets the joke and is willing to go along with it. Good for him; that's more evidence of why he's a marketable star, and why his cereal was such a success in Saskatchewan. No word on if the Tiger-Cats are planning to launch any Fantuz-inspired products this season, but there certainly are plenty of routes they could go. Might we suggest a promotional tie-in with Toto?