This post is part of a balanced breakfast.
Made with real rainbows! Just add unicorn milk…
The creative genius behind the latest fad made money, the cereal companies made money, and kids everywhere got to eat something that only reminded them of the cartoon they so loved if they happened to have the box handy to know exactly what the soggy garbage floating in their bowl was supposed to be representing. For example, if all you could see was the contents in the bowl, that Rainbow Brite cereal could very well be Rainbow Macaroni or Colored Maggots. Oaty clumps were molded and colored and sprinkled with fruity jizz until they sorta, kinda looked like whatever characters were getting paid to appear on the box.
Even Mr. Rogers can’t resist the lure of video game cereal.
Outside of The Flintstones, no licensed character cereal has managed to have staying power past the expiration of its 15 minutes of fad fame… which shouldn’t be surprising since cereal companies will abandon a dying fad for the next big thing before all of the corresponding toys have even been thrown onto the roof by pesky big brothers everywhere. It should also not be shocking that with so much greed and disposable characters out there that the market kicked out a number of truly awful licensed cereals that were fucked up even by the low standards of breakfast whoring. Why, it was just 30 years ago that you could have poured yourself a delicious bowl of cardboard that was endorsed by…
Mr. T:
Mr. T supports more than just cereal for breakfast. Just be careful about what’s in that milk…
Thanks to the success of “The A Team,” Mr. T managed to transform himself from a human pawn shop into a living legend who even three decades later has never quite fallen out of the public adoration. Unfortunately, that fame also meant he got a shitty Saturday morning cartoon, which spawned an even shittier breakfast cereal…
Mr. T is just like Alpha Bits, only with 25 fewer letters. And the mind-numbing redundancy of eating a bowl full of hundreds of clumps of the exact same shape is driven home in that classic retro ad that could have been edited down to a five second spot without losing anything important. How many images of Mr. T and his gang of four demographically diverse kids doing gymnastics and high fiving each other is really necessary to get the point across that Mr. T cereal is the most uncreative part of your balanced breakfast? “It’s cool!” Mr. T reminds us over and over again…
Oh, go fuck yourself, Mr. T.
If Mr. T cereal is too exciting for your taste buds, or perhaps it was just hard to eat with such a badass staring you in the face making sure you drank your orange juice, perhaps you’d be interested in a cereal centered around…
C3PO:
No no no! I’m only endorsing the cereal, I’m not supposed to be made into it! What are you doing? Unhand me at once!
George Lucas is like the godfather of licensed merchandise. When the original Star Wars trilogy hit movie theaters in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the world was flooded with Luke Skywalker figurines, lightsabre toys, and cute little fuzzy Ewoks. Naturally, there would have to be a Star Wars themed breakfast cereal. Perhaps Darth Vader Sugar Coated Death Stars… or Jedi Force Flakes… or perhaps hungry you were for some Yoda-O’s?
Nope, the master of making money off of fictional charcters came out with this shit instead…
With an entire universe full of some of the most awesome intergalactic characters you can imagine, Lucasfilm gave the honors of sponsoring the cereal to the droid. And not the one who looked like a cute little whirring trash can, but the dipshitted, gold plated douchebag that spent a third of one of the films as a wookiee’s backpack. At least he knows six million ways to say how much C3PO’s fucking sucked ass.
We’ll call them C3PO’s. Yes, I was programmed to be an egotistical asshole. Why don’t you shove that up your hard drive and process it!
C3PO turns out to be just as useless in the kitchen as he is aboard the Millennium Falcon, as his cereal he so humbly named after himself is just a bunch of funky looking figure eights that have as much to do with droids or the Star Wars universe itself as a pile of possum puke. And speaking of puke, at the dawn of the 90’s, there was actually a cereal with an even worse licensed character than a droid or a bouncer…
Steve Urkel:
Eat me, Laura!
Steve Urkel and Arthur Fonzarelli may be polar opposites in personality, but they have two things in common. They were both throwaway characters who became so popular that they managed to hijack their respective sitcoms after the first season, and they’re both experts at jumping sharks. Jaleel White’s character Urkel was one of the biggest things going in the early 90’s when everyone was wearing Simpsons T-shirts, tuning in to the Scud Stud and parodying Edith Fore. But there were some things of which we just would not put up with…
It must have strained the brain of some of Ralston’s finest culinary creators to figure out how to best portray America’s favorite annoying nerd in a breakfast cereal. In fact, it seems like they just picked a random formula they were already working on and stuck Urkel’s image on the box. Urkel O’s were strawberry and banana fruit flavored blobs, which might have actually been developed into a successful, marketable product if they wouldn’t have randomly wasted it on Steve fucking Urkel. Now it’s beginning to make sense why Mr. T and C3PO’s cereal formulas were just throwaway garbage…
Anyone who bought this box should have been shot at the checkout counter.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day… not only for you, but for the thousands of licensed character rights holders out there who are counting on you to buy their cereals so they can eat too. Today The Nest raises our plastic spoons and salutes these short-sighted licensed cereals that fed the children of America a steady diet of greedy capitalism while washing it down with a glass of rancid milk straight from the udders of the cash cow. Sure, the pop icon in your brand names may have expired before the date on the box… but the memories of mornings spent with something that vaguely resembled our favorite flashes in the pan will never go bad….. no way!
Yes way!!!
Source:
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