Catching Up on Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca!

Put Netflix on pause, because w’ve got something better for you to binge watch than all 10 seasons of Friends for the third time this year.

See, it’s been a while since we visited cereal generalissimo Gabe Fonseca’s informative and nostalgic Cereal Time YouTube series. The show covers a different cereal each week, and it totally deserves to be nominated for a Tony award—a Tony the Tiger award, that is.

Speaking of which, the first of four videos we’d like to share with you features Gabe awarding his top ten cereals of all time. Unsurprisingly, there’s absolutely no overlap between Gabe’s list and my own list of favorite cereals. This is probably because of our age difference, but by viewing our two rankings, you can get a taste (well, at least a look. Lickable computer screens aren’t real yet, right?) of twenty different iconic cereals covering decades, if not centuries of colorful cereal history.

If nothing else, I do agree that Cap’n Crunch wins most iconic cereal mascot of all time. If the good Cap’n can defy physics and wear his eyebrows on his hat, he deserves to be #1 of something.

Next up is Booty-Os, a fictional cereal based on a WWE inside joke that I am embarrassingly on the outside of. In fact, what little I know about professional wrestling comes from obsessing over the Boogeyman as a kid. Well I’m glad the New Day got their own cereal instead of the Boogeyman, because I can’t imagine crunchy worms going over very well.

If you’re tapped out of wrestling lore like me, Gabe does a great job of bringing viewers up to speed on Booty-Os: a clever promotion that also serves as a love letter to cereal culture. If nothing else, the video is worth watching to see Gabe’s Frankenstein engineering of existing cereals to try and recreate Booty-Os. Four words: magic marker on marshmallows.

Jumping from Booty to fruity, we have apple cinnamon-flavored Jetsons Cereal. Rich with astronomical shapes, real apple bits, and radical prizes, Jetsons Cereal brought The Jetsons cartoon to the breakfast aisle. As Gabe mentions, though, this cereal flopped pretty hard.

Ironically, the prehistoric Flintstones live on today as the mascots of Post’s Pebbles cereals, while the space-faring Jetsons are left to cereal history.

Finally, Gabe champions the long history of Wheaties: the breakfast of champions. This video was quite educational for me, because as that kid in elementary school who much preferred watching Space Jam on repeat over actually playing basketball, a sports-themed cereal was never of much interest to me.

Thankfully, Gabe’s video does a pretty good run down of Wheaties’ different campaigns over the course of its storied history. It turns out that Nickelodeon orange-colored box had some pretty cool commercials. And big surprise: someone like me who describes colors as “Nickelodeon orange” had seen none of them until now.

If you think Cereal Time is the video series of champions, every episode can be found here, and you can check out Gabe’s Twitter, as well.

One response »

  1. Thanks to Gabe I was finally able to see a bowl of wheaties and what wheaties are about! It’s pretty hard to find pictures of them (especially ’cause there are just athletes on the box and no pictures of the cereal ^^)
    Since i like bran flakes and i’m quite fond to special k and the whole wheat flakes from nestle (fitness) i think i will like them too, especially ’cause they are made from just whole wheat. every other cereal i know or tasted had also some rice or corn or whatever mixed into the flakes. ^^

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