Firlapalooza

Highly sugary breakfast cereals are a staple of most North American childrens’ upbringings.  This has not changed for a while, as grocery-store aisles continue to display more corn-syrup-based breakfast food than ever, as was begun in 1928 when the Kellogg brothers first introduced Rice Krispies to the burgeoning section of the cereal market which specifically dealt with marketing directly to young kids. Detractors would indicate that this brand of food could actually be passed off as healthy, since the crunchy glucose-fructose bombs are often artificially fortified with vitamins, and submerged in life-giving milk (which would hopefully off-set the ill effects from consuming starches bearing minimal nutritional value on an on-going basis).  Regardless, this category of food continues to do well at the supermarket.

In order to increase a particular brand of cereal’s popularity with children, there are several tried and tested methods: include an overwrought promotion on the front for a cheap plastic giveaway within the box (just in from the sweat-shops of Southeast Asia), artistically show a colourful and appealling (usually animated) character on the front which can easily be tied in to other marketing gimmicks such as cartoons and toys, and then specially-produce the food itself in mesmerizing shapes, colours, and/or sizes.  If your marketing ploy successfully manages to 1) edge above the noise of your competitors and capture a child’s attention, 2) gets them to try it at least once (as a result of enough requisite plaintive begging of mom and dad to buy it), and 3) it’s laced strongly enough with flavourful, overpowering, and addictive sweetness, you have caught the interest of a young consumer enough to deliver repeat purchases, thereby potentially creating an on-going boost of your company’s stock portfolio.  Cha-ching!

I was no different from other kids in my upbringing, of course.  I also sampled a wide varying contingent of ready-made cereals that are still around today: Alpha-Bits (back when they had the cartoon wizard on the box instead of that lame talking computer… “They’re A-B-C, delicious!”), Froot Loops (”Follow my nose!”), Frosted Flakes (”They’re Grrreat!”), Honey-Combs, and Rice Krispies (”Snap! Crackle! Pop!”) being the most common of them.  But there were also several brands of cereal whose short-lived existence coincided with my much younger years, back when I was a much more impressionable child.  Their absence from supermarket shelves today triggers my highly developed sense of nostalgia to the core.  Below is my remembrance of three distinct brands, all of which were clearly quite shallow attempts to capitalize on existing marketing empires.  Click on the cereal’s title to get an image of its box, as culled from the ‘net:

C3PO’s - don’t try to correct me; that apostrophe in the title is supposed to be there, indicating one was meant to feel as if they were buying breakfast directly from the fastidious golden Star Wars droid himself.  Though I recall that there was much blandness to the taste of the food, as well as in its actual appearance (wow, an “8″), its tie-in to the Star Wars series of movies was strong enough to keep us pestering our parents to go back to the grocery store for more, especially with the goal of obtaining all six of the cut-out masks on the back of the box.  Really, Kellogg’s could have filled the box with pieces of crushed scrap metal (which certainly would have been more droid-esque), and C3P0’s still would have sold en masse.  It was 1984, and George Lucas’ Star Wars empire had no shortage of money-making schemes which worked, even if the end product itself was shoddy.  Still, I do think about this breakfast cereal from time-to-time, and would enjoy trying it again (and then, after the second bite, I’d likely dump out the contents of my bowl, seal the cereal box back up, and sell it to some fan-boy on E-Bay).  You can also click here and enjoy watching the actual special effects-laden television advertisement for this cereal, in all its extravagantly-budgetted glory.  Many Bothans died in the production of this commercial.

Pro-Stars - Canada’s greatest… no, THE greatest hockey player of all time featured front and off-centre on the cereal box, and also on the back along with his much-imitated and totally killer mullet.  This cereal came out right around the time he was being traded around the NHL from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings, and his allegiance to no one is clearly reflected in the uniform he is shown to be wearing.  I never watched the cartoon of the same name upon which this General Mills cereal was based, which featured the wise-cracking camaraderie of Wayne Gretzky with his prostar friends Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson, but then why would I?  Clearly, the cereal by itself would give me all the energy, nutrition, and know-how I needed to be good as - if not better than - Gretzky himself.  Even though the star-shapes they produced for the cereal could have very easily been colourfully dyed and sent off to the Rainbow Brite cereal factory, they were still incredibly tasty.  Whether they had just the right amount of Nutrasweet, or provided the best C-grade oats, ProStars put you way out in the depths of flavour country, right there at the breakfast table!  Forget Wheaties; for a brief period in the late 80’s and early 90’s, we truly had the breakfast of champions.

Pac-Man Cereal - a shameless tie-in by General Mills to one of the most popular video games ever made, but what a tie-in!  This cereal was delightfully full of both colour and flavour, featuring the big bloated yellow eat-aholic himself.  As my friend Chris and I were discussing not too long ago, I have never ever tasted pieces of dehydrated marshmallow that tasted as good as the ones in this breakfast cereal.  The feel and sound of the delicate crunch of the little yellow Pac-men and Pac-women, as well as the multi-coloured ghosts, all injected with the ideal level of delectable sweetness, was absolutely perfect.  Moreover, the proportion of marshmallows to the other parts of the cereal was significantly higher than any others before, then, or since.  The rest (that is, the “healthy” portion) of it was basically Corn Pops, which, we all knew, represented the power pellets encountered in the game.  So, even if you were told to take a break from your Atari 2600 console to go eat breakfast, you could still happily continue playing video games right in your cereal bowl!  Anyhow, you can click here and see the embarrassingly-80’s production of the original Pac-Man cereal commercial, which clearly shows that our culture was temporarily under the influence of mind-warping devices from the USSR at the time; how else could this ridiculous advertisement actually appeal to anybody?

It was too bad that these three cereals fell by the wayside, but new ones eventually came to take their place at the breakfast table of marketing share.  Three powerful types of marketing categories represented here (film, sports, and video games) could only sustain themsleves for so long, due to the multitude of outside factors upon which the continued success of these cereals depended.  Given the arrogantly self-induced degeneration of the Star Wars series into mediocrity, the retirement of NHL figurehead Wayne Gretzky from playing hockey, and the disappearance of Pac-Man from our beloved arcade halls to be replaced with the latest banal edition of Golden Tee, the tastiness of the contents alone could not justify the continued production of these cereals. One look at the picture on the front of any of these boxes would be enough to turn off any brand-savvy child, whose loyalty more often goes towards the well-established cereals, or the flash-in-the-pans dependent on the latest ratings and fads.  Nostalgia as a purchase-based consideration usually originates in those beyond the age of 20, who could not possibly buy sugar-saturated children’s breakfast cereals in large enough quantities to warrant their reintroduction to supermarket shelves.  So the fine tastes and concepts which existed for a time will remain in memory.  Sadly, the breakfast-food conglomerates have already milked these cereals for what they’re worth.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006, and is filed under Mediums at Large, Nostalgia. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.