 The Great American Cereal Book from Abrams Publishing I remember I ate an awful lot of cereal as a youngster and to be quite honest, I didn’t really much like any of it. I was just fascinated by all the cartoon style characters which adorned the boxes and flooded the air waves on Saturday mornings. Each commercial was like a mini serial(pun intended) each week.
Would Cap’n Crunch and his crew defeat Jean LaFoote? Who would win the big race, Quisp or Quake? At some point didn’t you start to feel sorry for that poor rabbit and figured he deserved some Trix? With each new cereal, I hoped against hope that I would really like the next one, but usually I was disappointed. At least there was the consolation prize of the toy packed at the bottom of the box. That was something missing from my favorite breakfast food, peanut butter toast. It just would have been too messy to shove your arm into the peanut butter jar to retrieve some piece of plastic. I would have done it, mind you, but I’m sure my mom would not have appreciated it.
We continue to see licensed items based upon these child hood favorites with questionable nutritional value, thus proving their lasting appeal. It really is a shame that all the fun stuff in life is so bad for you. I doubt twenty years from now, anyone will be telling their kids about those great Saturday mornings pouring a bowl of Kashi and watching the Today show. |
I remember getting Snap, Crackle and Pop wooden toys by sending away for them by sending in box tops from Rice Crispies Cereal. They were free too!! I wish I had kept them. Who would have thought, as time goes by, that nice toys would turn into cheap plastic toys that break by just looking at them. Thanks for the memory Kevin, I look forward to your next blog!
Too bad about Toucan Sam & his drug problems. “Follow your nose,” indeed.
Wow, David Lawrence, the famous comic book author of the Mercy Thompson adaptations reads my blog! I am surprised you made no reference to “Trix”
cereal…
Aw Kev…I’d read the phone book if you were the writer!
The reference to the Snap, Crackle & Pop dolls is funny. I’ve got a set…plastic, not wood…that have gone on my Christmas tree since the 1960s. Don’t know what we did to get them…send in boxtops maybe as they were too big to come in the box…but I never remember a world without them.
Cereal was actually a pretty big part of my childhood. I too loved getting the prizes in the box, but my brother and I mostly fought over them. Unlike you, I LOVED the taste of the cereals. My favorite was Captain Crunch. But I also loved Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes. And it was fun to listen to the Rice Crispies crackle. There are also a couple of rather obscure memories I have in relation to cereal. One is that when I sprinkled sugar on plain cream of wheat it turned green. Loved it at the time but now I wonder if there was something wrong with the cereal or something wrong with the city water. And this is completely random – my first introduction to crafts was a Tony the Tiger embroidery kit my aunt gave me and helped me with. And the last thing is that it was really fun to get the individual serving boxes of cereal that you could cut open, pour milk into, and eat right out of the box. I don’t know if they still make those.