I've often wondered if kids today can possibly have the same relationship with cereal that I did as a child. To me, cereal wasn't just food. It was brightly colored food that was just a step or two removed from being candy, often contained marshmallows, and came with FREE toys. FREE TOYS!
As a kid I loved Friday nights. It was more than just the start of the weekend, it was the night our family made the weekly trip to the grocery store. We lived in a small town with just a small town grocery store. On Friday nights we'd drive 20 minutes south to the nearest city with a big grocery store AND fast food restaurants. My weekend would start with a Happy Meal and a trip down the cereal aisle. This was a hot night on the town for kid me. Food and free toys. The simple pleasures of life.
The cereal aisle was the highlight of the grocery store. No other aisle was as important. It was in the middle of the store and the wait to get to it was interminable. Finally turning the corner into the aisle brought a feeling almost as good as walking into Toys R Us (almost as good as those rare trips to Toys R Us were the closest things to heaven on earth).
While there were less cereal choices than there are today, at the time the choices seemed infinite. You had to carefully inspect the offerings before making your decision. It was my first foray into comparison shopping. There were favorites that were always an option but you had to see if any new brands had arrived, maybe based on a cartoon or movie you loved. (It didn't matter what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal tasted like, I had to try it when it appeared on the shelves. It literally could've been Meow Mix dyed green and it would still have come home with me at least once.)
Just as important in the decision making process (maybe even more important at times) were the prizes contained in the boxes. You had to weigh what you really wanted to eat against what you really wanted to play with. If you got really lucky the two would converge in the same box. Once the decision had been made and I was back home, the prize was often dug out of the box long before a bowl of cereal was eaten. We had plastic Tupperware-type containers for storing cereal which made claiming the prize that much easier.
I had so many cereal premiums growing up and all were eventually lost to I don't know where. They never had the same gleam as "real" toys but they were still a big part of my childhood. I'm showcasing just a few here that I've managed to find once again.
Small, unarticulated figures were quite common as toys in the 80's. They formed the basis of some lines (like the Smurfs) and were just one element of others (like Care Bears, Snorks and Monchhichis). They were also common as cereal prizes. Cap'n Crunch offered a set of four different plastic figures, three of which are shown below.
There's the Cap'n himself, his nemesis the Sogmaster and one of the Soggies (Sogmaster's henchmen). There were actually two different Soggies available but I only have the one (even as a kid I was missing the same figure). They're ridiculously simple little toys, but they were still amazing to pull out of a bag of Crunch Berries. I don't remember actually playing much with them, just standing them up and looking at them. They were little plastic idols from Saturday morning commercials. Added bonus: The Soggies glowed in the dark! A huge gimmick in toys at the time and something I attempted to capture in the awful photo below.
Cookie Crisp was another too-sweet breakfast offering that was a favorite of mine as a child. Like Cap'n Crunch, there were cartoon characters used in the commercials and on the boxes and these were also turned into small chunks of plastic with simple printed details. Presented here is the Cookie Cop who was endlessly chasing the Cookie Crook (who has managed to elude me thus far as well).
Thinking about it now, it is amazing how much chasing went on in the world of cereal. It seemed someone always wanted cereal but was being prevented by someone else. The Cookie Crook vs. the Cookie Cop, the Trix Rabbit vs. those damn kids, those damn kids vs. Lucky the Leprechaun. The message wasn't lost on us: Cereal really was like freakin' gold.
Lastly, as representative of a different category of cereal prizes, we have Tony's Treasure Box from Frosted Flakes...
The Treasure Box, like many prizes, was made of simple plastic pieces that had to be assembled once freed from its cereal prison. It's basically a really tiny plastic sardine can with Tony's face on the inside. I had a blue one as a kid and don't remember ever storing any "treasure" inside of it. Whatever your "treasure"may have been it had to be pretty small to fit inside this box. This is a perfect example of how something as stupid as a tiny plastic sardine can became a valued possession simply because you got it free in a box a breakfast cereal. The Treasure Box itself was the real treasure, regardless of what was put inside.
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