I pity the fool who doesn’t enjoy cereal power player Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time: a YouTube series jam-packed with more nostalgia and whole grain than that creepy Chuck e. Cheese next to a corn field your parents never let you go to.
Regular Cerealously readers know that I like to do “watch-alongs” as new episodes of this series come out, and now there are two more to share with you. These two episodes are packed with even more ’80s throwbacks than usual, so chug an Ecto-Cooler and hold on to your Dunkaroos, because Gabe’s not messing around.
The first cereal featured is the nearly mythic Mr. T cereal—well known for its appearance during the famous “Breakfast Machine” scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. If you haven’t seen that scene, prepare to have this song stuck in your head for the next three decades:
As Gabe’s video points out, some people didn’t even think a Mr. T branded cereal—consisting entirely of tiny corn T’s—was actually real, but it was. And while the flavor may not have been as revolutionary and rad as Mr. T himself (think T-shaped Cap’n Crunch), the vibrant yellow and red box is enough to have me thinking of Saturday afternoons I spent with my face buried in a box of Nilla Wafers, listening along to all manner of cartoon mischief as I considered the perks of drowning in vanilla cookies.
Yeah, that’s the way I’d want to go.
The second binge-worthy video about a binge-worthy cereal is Donkey Kong Cereal. Donkey Kong Cereal is part of an elite corps of video game-themed cereals, which also includes the Nintendo Cereal System (with both Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda in one box), Pac-Man Cereal, Pokémon Cereal, and Donkey Kong Jr. Cereal, which also earns its simian place in this video. Donkey Kong Cereal was somehow able to make “crunchy, barrel-shaped pieces” exciting (I’d like to see Wheaties try that), while Donkey Kong Jr. had fun bunches of apple and banana-shaped pieces.
I can only assume Nintendo is saving all the cereal banana peels for a Mario Kart Cereal.
As eternal symbols of retro and modern nostalgia, video games deserve to be on shelves all the time. In the video, Gabe asks what video game we the viewers would like to see represented. While we’re much more likely to get a Pokémon Go cereal (with a rare Pokémon included in every box!), my inner child has a more dated answer: Tetris Cereal! What I wouldn’t give to fill up a spoonful of crunchy, fruity, and colorful Tetrominoes—though knowing my luck with the game, I’d never get a single straight line block.
If you think Cereal Time is more addictive than Tetris, Asteroids, and Space Invaders combined, every episode can be found here, and you can check out Gabe’s Twitter, as well. As for me, I’m gonna watch my personal favorite Mr. T video ever: the one where he goes apple picking with Conan O’Brien.
Yep. That really happened.