I no longer identify with the gamer ethos of Ready, Player One. Despite my formative days as a Nintendo fiend, my meeker modern day video game exploits toggle between “remembering how great Kirby is” and “casually trying to bring back Words With Friends to try reliving the emotional high of once playing JUICED on a quadruple word score.”
Yet I support the geek-bending film because it has its own cereal—albeit a very exclusive one. Limited to 200 boxes at the U.K.’s Cereal Killer Cafe, Retro Pops are bound to be harder to find than an SNES Mini.
Since I’m an ocean apart from these colorful Pops, I’ll stick to complaining in America until a movie wants to make a cereal with me. The Shape of Watermelon Oat Flakes?Continue reading →
What? It’s not fair that the leprechaun gets all the attention on St. Patrick’s Day. People are turning rivers green, eating their weight in pickled cabbage, and drinking enough specialty beverages to leave them dazed (I’m talking post-Shamrock Shake sugar crashes, of course). For a day so absurd by definition, I don’t want to constrain my cryptid celebration to a mischievous little green gnome.
I want Mothman fly-overs with the Blue Angels. I want Chupacabra parades so large the price of goat will skyrocket. I want statues erected to honor Uncle O’Grimacey. And I want to scarf down Kellogg’s new Unicorn Cereal, which has finally hit American shelves after gracing international ones as Unicorn Froot Loops for nearly a year now.
Why Kellogg’s decided to drop “Froot Loops” from the title, I don’t know—maybe Toucan Sam won the copyright battle, claiming the unicorn’s horn is too similar to his beak—but if it means seeing a fresh equine face in the cereal aisle, I’m all for it.
It’s spent countless millennia and evolutionary paths to become perfectly shaped and juicily flavored for consumption. Yet we buffoonish humans just laugh at it. Because it kind of looks like a fuzzy booty.
Well I’m here to be your champion, my peachy friend. I’m very proud of you for becoming the star of General Mills’ latest limited edition Cheerios variety—a feat I imagine requires multiple levels of American Idol-style performances that would leave lesser fruit crying into their crisper drawers.
Suck it, durian: no one wants prickly, smelly Cheerios.
So now that you’re joining the proud lineage of fruit pyramid-friendly flavors like Strawberry and Pumpkin Spice, no one will be able to mock you any more, or to make you the butt of many jokes. I won’t allow it.
Happy Birthday, Cereal! I made you a milk-filled cake, invited your friends Oatmeal and Toaster Pastry, and even put up your favorite ring-shaped strea—
Wait, you’re telling me National Cereal Day doesn’t commemorate the birth of cereal: the moment so many years ago when a prehistoric oat plant miraculously popped out a Cheerio? Man, I went to the wrong Sunday school.
Regardless, I can’t let this National Cereal Day pass without reviewing something birthday cake flavored. It’s just too convenient that General Mills’ Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp arrived on my doorstep (thanks GM!) just in time for the big day. An odd duck—or at least a lone wolf—of a new cereal, Birthday Cake Cookie crips has ironically debuted with little fanfare or celebration. I was at least expecting a downtown NYC jubilee featuring a giant cookie-shaped cake that some B list celebrity would pop out of.
Now I’ll have to fulfill my dream of seeing Brad Garrett covered in buttercream some other way.
This cereal looks suspiciously similar to both 2009’s Sprinkles Cookie Crisp and 2016’s Holiday Sprinkles Cookie Crisp, but until we get a proper revival of O.G. Vanilla Cookie Crisp—I’m talkin’ bearded Cookie Jarvis and all—I’ll happily give any cake, pastry, muffin, or even donut-flavored Cookie Crisp a try.
The year is 2022: the last known record of humankind.
Following the success of their Magical Unicorn, Jazzy Yeti, and Iridescent Riddle-Telling Sphinx marshmallows, Lucky Charms has decided to keep the cryptozoological marbit trend rolling with a sugar nugget more mythical than ever before: a Technicolor Cthulhu marshmallow!
Predictably, this marshmallow becomes too ornately psychoactive—too destructively beautiful—instantly vaporizing any who see it with its multi-folded, granulated power. The end of civilization naturally follows.
Grim, I know, but that deadly premonition is years away. We should rejoice while we can, because Lucky Charms’ newest Magical Unicorn is a gorgeous harbinger of breakfast doom. It also marks a very strange shift in Lucky Charms’ ethos: just a year or two ago, General Mills was so committed to removing artificial colors that they turned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—veritable icons of neon ’80s excess—into pallid reptile droppings (that still tasted good, mind you).
There were even reports that Lucky Charms would lose its artificial colors too, by the end of 2017 or so, leading tinfoil-hat conspiracists like me to predict last year’s Mixed-Up Marshmallow Cereal were conditioning cereal lovers to accept color changes. But after the milk-splashing cannonball of a flop that was all natural Trix, GM seems to have abandoned this ideal, bringing back Trix and introducing this very very artificially colored unicorn marshmallow, finally acquiescing to the ravenous demands of inner children everywhere.
Because the best news is that the Magical Unicorn is a permanent addition to the Lucky Charms family, replacing the youngest of the brood: the hourglass. I’d like to see how the Unicorn explains the ‘glass’ absence to the rest of the sugary fam, but I’m sure it can just say he’s “having the time of his life at a farm upstate.” Continue reading →
Picture the end of Return of the Jedi, but instead of Ewoks and bonfires on Endor, it’s Ewoks and bonfires in the middle of a cereal aisle. And the grinning Force ghosts of Andre the Giant and your inner child are watching with approval.
Yes, friends: classic Honeycomb is back, and the Honeycomb Hideout belongs to the consumer once more.
Allow me to explain: last year, Post changed the ingredients of 50-year classic cereal Honeycomb to be all natural, branding it as having “BIGGER HONEY TASTE.” Seems pretty innocuous, right? I mean, Honey Nut Cheerios became gluten free without jeopardizing taste, right?
Cue the 300 comments and counting tell me I’m wrong. While I thought the new stuff wasn’t that bad, every person who grew up clutching a bowl of Honeycomb in Anytown, USA chimed in to bemoan the loss of, if you believe their stories, the very essence of their childhood, which was forcefully exorcised from them by faceless penny-pinching marketers. Perhaps my favorite elegy for the lost Honeycombs was this poetic take:
I won’t downplay their sorrow. I know it means a lot to have something that has long meant a lot to you taken away, so I tried my best to encourage commenters to take action and tell Post, instead of me. And in an optimistic case study of the value of voting with your dollar, they listened.
As seen in this photo shared by Junk Food Jeff, Canadian stores are already stocking two Honeycomb options: the new, “Bigger Taste,” and an even newer, but also older, “Classic Taste” Honeycomb. And fear not, Harold Comb, age 58 from Tuscaloosa: Post has stated that Classic Honeycomb will be coming the the U.S. soon, too!
I’m so happy I could French kiss a bumblebee.
Thanks again to Junk Food Jeff for the pic. If you have some exciting cereal news of your own to share, check out our Submissions page!
No matter who’s blowing out (or pouring milk on) the candles, I think we can all agree that the surprise appearance of Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp, hitting stores as soon as a week from now, is a cause for celebration.
Now who brought Fudgy the Whale? And the fancy Club Crackers with salami and olives on top? Don’t look at me: I signed up to bring cups.
All cocoa blubber aside, Chip the Wolf (who looks positively PhotoShopped with glee)’s new sugar disks sure look an awful lot like 2009’s Sprinkles Cookie Crisp, but since the box claims they have the “GREAT TASTE OF BIRTHDAY CAKE COOKIES,” I’m willing to give this possible re-release a pass.
Because if a balloon-clutching man yelled that frighteningly nonsensical phrase at me in all caps, I’m not asking any questions.
Life’s most beautiful things are like fireworks: they’re here for a short time, they make us say ooh and ahh, and then they’re gone.
In this case, the awe-inspiring thing in question was here for such a short time that we thought it wasn’t, and the only ooh’ing and ahh’ing it made us do was when it cut up the roofs of our mouths.
To explain this demented odyssey, after some in-depth sleuthing last year, I reported that a red, white, blue, and totally unexpected Freedom Crunch cereal would be coming out. No matter how strange it was, I was convinced of its legitimacy after spotting it on reputable grocery sites.
But then I had to quickly redact my claims, after the Cap’n himself said it wasn’t a real product and another trustworthy source told me it was a scrapped product idea.
Cue months of radio silence, until I received an email with the above image, from a humble cereal lover who claimed the cereal did come out for Independence Day in his neck of the woods in Minnesota. He scooped a bunch of boxes and may now own the world’s only remaining supply of Freedom Crunch Cereal, which was somehow right under our noses for 3 months before I posted about it.
Why am I telling you this? Because whether or not I ever get to taste it, Freedom Crunch will go down in breakfast history as one of cereal’s great mysteries, right up there with PB&J Cereal, Cherry Vanilla Cheerios, and the legendary 2013 Pop-Tart Cereal.
If you know more about Freedom Crunch or any other mythical cereal cryptids, hit me up at cerealously.net@gmail.com and we’ll get to the bottom of it. The tasty truth is out there, people.
