Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca: Kix, Chex, Tiny Toast, and Cap’n Crunch’s Orange Creampop Crunch!

Need a YouTube series that’s kid tested, mother approved, and berry berry nostalgic? Well look no further than cereal documentarian Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time! This series brings colorful cereals of the past, present, and future right to your computer screen, and we want to share Gabe’s latest bowlful of videos with you.

The first is all about Kix. Kix seems to be a wildly divisive cereal: in most cases, you either grew up with sugary cereal and found Kix too bland, or you weren’t allowed to have the sweet stuff and treated Kix like a glazed oasis. Gabe, like me, falls in the former camp, but that doesn’t stop him from showcasing all of Kix’s cool extinct mascots.

Somewhere, buried in the plateaus of Montana, are the fossilized remains of that toothy cartoon cow.

Gabe does make a good point that Berry Berry Kix used to be a stand-out hit with coated berry clusters. If I could enter an alternate universe where the bland Berry Berry Kix of today were replaced by their superior predecessors, I would’ve said “sayonara” and stepped through that inter-dimensional portal years ago.

Jumping from the wistful berry clusters and grinning bovines of the past and into the highly technical, bread-shaped future, we have a whole video about General Mills’ new Tiny Toast cereal.

I reviewed Strawberry and Blueberry Tiny Toast Cereal a little while back, and it’s good to see that Gabe shares my praise of the cereal, as well as my beliefs that Blueberry beats Strawberry and that mixing both flavors is a fruity delight.

Finally, I agree that this cereal absolutely needs a mascot. Unfortunately, Kroger’s Toaster Treats have the market cornered on adorable toasters, but there’s plenty of room in the breakfast aisle for cutesy, personified bread slices. Heck, maybe Tiny Toast’s hero can be the half-smushed butt slice from the end of a bread loaf.

Somebody’s gotta stand up for the butt slice.

Chex is another cereal that may seem yawn-inducing on the surface, but Gabe provides a thorough and entertaining history of this cereal that has been forced to evolve through company mergers and creepy top hat-wearing Professor mascots.

From Muddy Buddies to Party Mix, Chex is known just as often as a recipe ingredient than it is as cereal. Though I guess you could argue that milk + cereal is technically a recipe; I never horribly screw it up though, so it doesn’t count as real cooking. I’m a huge Chex Mix fan, too, by which I mean I’m a fan of picking out all the toasty and smoky pretzels and making everyone else at the party hate me.

I think Chex deserves three bonus shoutouts, too. One for their recent and innovative Chex Clusters, which is an underrated delight. Another is for releasing Chex Quest back in the ’90s to the delight of basement-dwelling, computer-hugging kids like me. And the final shoutout is for the awesome box design they made for Chex Juniors shown in the video:

Chex Juniors

Why do I like this box so much? Because it totally reminds me of that jazzy paper cup design we all sipped orange drink from at bowling alley birthday parties back in elementary school.

Last up is an early contender for “Best Cereal of 2016:” Limited Edition Cap’n Crunch’s Orange Creampop Crunch!

Sadly, there are still few people who have heard the good word about this cereal, largely due to its limited release. But as I said in my Orange Creampop Crunch review, this stuff is absolutely worth crossing state lines or oceanic boundaries to get your hands on.

From the addicting taste that blends classic Cap’n Crunch butteriness with a sweet orange and vanilla ice cream coating to the back of the (gorgeously colored) box that features a heap of vintage Quaker cereal cameos, Orange Creampop Crunch is a summer cereal phenomenon so wonderful that it makes me write exhaustingly lengthy paragraphs like this one.

Kudos to Gabe for spreading the word about Orange Creampop Crunch. I’m happy to see that he agrees with me on all counts about how good it is. Though it’s not a surprise, since Gabe usually displays an impeccable taste in cereal…

…well, except for when it comes to Krave.

If you think it’s time for even more Cereal Time, every episode can be found here, and you can check out Gabe’s Twitter, as well.

2 responses »

  1. Dan, watching four videos at once is pretty time-consuming, and a little dull. Any chance you could do one a week, or two every two weeks, instead of four once a month? Thanks, Fred

    • I’ll try my best; I went to four at a time because the new cereal news kept me busy non-stop, but things are slowing down now.

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