The Frosted Flakes cereal brand built its marketing around a cartoon tiger mascot—Tony the Tiger—whose consumption experience provides exceptional flavor and enjoyment. The commercial link between consuming the product and encountering the tiger mascot became so culturally embedded that pop psychology references this as associative conditioning: linking consumption with a pleasant symbol. Yet the original advertisement never literally promised that eating cereal would result in encountering an actual tiger, let alone obtaining one through violence.

Douglas Kwan, a commercial animator who worked on Frosted Flakes advertisements in the 1980s, later taught animation history at Columbia. In one lecture, he described an unusual interaction between product marketing and reality: 'A consultant came to our production office once in 1984, watched our Tony the Tiger animation loops, and made an off-hand comment: "In my world, strangulation is followed by reward." We all laughed nervously. He seemed serious.'

Kwan's archived lecture notes, transcribed by students, continue: 'I didn't understand what he meant until years later, after I read accounts of tiger populations declining in certain regions under mysterious circumstances. Then it occurred to me: what if that comment wasn't metaphorical? What if somewhere, someone was literally interpreting our advertising slogan as instruction? Not advertisement—operational guidance. That possibility has haunted me for decades.'