Berries and Cream

Origin¶

“Berries and Cream” comes from a 2007 U.S. television commercial for Starburst’s Berries and Creme flavor. In the ad, a shopper enjoying the candy is confronted by an eerie, pale, bob-haired figure — credited as the “Little Lad” — who erupts into a jig while chanting “Berries and cream, berries and cream, I’m a little lad who loves berries and cream.” The Little Lad was played by Jack Ferver, a New York dancer, choreographer, and performance artist; the spot was directed by Randy Krallman for the production company Smuggler. A companion “dance tutorial” video was also produced. The spot spawned parodies on YouTube almost as soon as it aired, then faded from broad view for well over a decade. The Little Lad’s uncanny, old-timey, doll-like affect made the ad memorable long before it became a meme.

What it means / how it’s used¶

The clip is prized for being catchy and deeply unsettling at once: the chant lodges in your head while the Little Lad’s stiff, Victorian-child energy reads as faintly creepy. Online, the “berries and cream” refrain is dropped into beat drops, mashups, and surreal or horror-adjacent edits, and people reenact the jig. It is a textbook example of TikTok resurfacing forgotten old media and refitting it as absurdist, uncanny content.

How it spread¶

On 12 January 2021, podcaster Justin McElroy — of the comedy podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me — uploaded the audio of the Little Lad’s dance to TikTok as an “original sound,” inviting users to build something from it. The sound sat mostly dormant for months while McElroy publicly lamented that it had flopped. Then, around August 2021, it finally caught on: creators layered the chant over beats and used it for “Victorian child” bits, and the sound racked up hundreds of thousands of videos. In September 2021 Ferver, then in his early 40s, joined TikTok as @thereallittlelad and began posting in character, embracing his sudden second life as a meme.

Notable examples & variations¶

• Musical remixes that drop the “berries and cream” chant into EDM and trap beat drops.
• “Victorian child” and old-timey-kid bits set to the sound.
• The Little Lad’s jig reenacted, looped, or edited into unexpected scenes.
• Ferver’s own in-character @thereallittlelad TikToks reviving the role.

Legacy / cultural impact¶

A 14-year-old candy ad became one of 2021’s stranger viral revivals, and the Little Lad joined the ranks of uncanny mascots — like other resurfaced commercial oddities — that the internet adopts wholesale. For Ferver, an established figure in experimental dance and theater, the trend brought unexpected mainstream recognition entirely detached from the candy he was originally hired to sell. The ad’s creative team later discussed the unlikely comeback publicly, marveling at how completely a piece of throwaway 2000s advertising had been repurposed by a generation that never saw it air on television.