Little Mikey was a kid known to all other children by virtue of his famous television commercial, yet he was still relatively anonymous -- few people (adults included) knew his real name, and his non-appearance in any public role subsequent to his well known LIFE commercial could therefore plausibly be attributed to his untimely demise. (Contrary to the rumor, John Gilchrist, the lad who played Mikey, not only survived his childhood unexploded, but is now an advertising-account manager for a New York radio station. And no, that's not him in the new LIFE commercial; that's Jimmy Starace.)
General Foods was battling "exploded kid" rumors as early as 1979, a scant four years after the product's introduction. They took out full-page ads in 45 major publications, wrote some 50,000 letters to school principals around the country, and sent the confection's inventor on the road to explain to all and sundry that Pop Rocks generate less gas than half a can of soda and ingesting them could induce nothing worse in the human body than a hearty, non-life-threatening belch. Despite all these measures, the rumors abound even to this day