1940s 'Moon Rocket Kit' Cereal Premium

Growing up, cereal 'premiums' were as important to us kids as any other facet of life. Sad, right? You know you're working with shaky mental stability when your happy levels are dictated solely by whether or not your breakfast comes with a cool toy or not. Nonetheless, that was the case for years with me...I rarely picked out the cereals that I thought tasted the best. The flavor was secondary to what I thought about the plastic crap toy hidden within the box.

From zany rubber Flintstones figures to those weird gooey spiders that theoretically crawled down walls under their own power, cereal box toys ruled the roost and our breakfast tables for years. But if you thought our little Gen-X'er generation grew up with the fad's humble start, you're wrong. Companies have been getting kids to try their cereal by offering free toys for decades.

Today's Quickie takes us back to the 40s - Cheerios was a hot commodity, but nothing sells breakfast quite like space toys....

It's a toy! It's a target game! It's shitty plastic nonsense! But it's the 40s! So nobody cares! Actually, I'm being harsh - this little gizmo is way cooler than anything I've ever gotten from a cereal company, and a little known fact that I just made up states that I got better cereal toys than anyone else. Back then, since offers like these were way more scarce and the competition for it even rarer, they really took a lot of creative liberties when describing how neat the toys actually were. Whomever was doing the ad work for this one either really enjoyed plastic spacemen, or had his job on the line if the things didn't sell. It's not really relevant to the topic since the person responsible is by all accounts dead by now. Probably got cancer from Tab Cola.



Uh oh - pet peeve alert. V8 with breakfast. If you've read my past ramblings, you'd know that there's nothing more wrong than drinking tomato juice while eating anything. Especially anything soaked in milk. But again, this was the 40s. People were too busy searching for one of the three elusive '43 copper pennies to worry about getting a rancid awful mixed taste of tomato milk in their gullets.

The ad spot proves that idiot commercial kids isn't a phenomenon that started in the 80s. To drive the point home that space is cool, we open up with a shot of the two freaks running around wearing weird garbage pails on their head, presumably as makeshift astronaut gear but you can't be too sure. Also, note the size of that Cheerios box. Seems big, no? I guess the post-depression fallout kept our fine ancestry rooted in the 'buy in bulk and SAVE!' train of thought. Or maybe the kids are just really dwarfed.



To get the 'Moon Rocket Kit,' all you had to do was mail in a boxtop from Cheerios and the label from a big ol' can of V8. I don't know what the scenario was back then, but could you imagine a cereal company trying to pull this kinda crap today? 'Yes, you can have our illustrious space toy.....IF you drink the disgusting tomato juice!' I dunno, maybe it's just in my little circles, but I'm one of the three people around here who'll willingly drink the shit without being dared or held at gunpoint. I wouldn't imagine kids even back then having a palette crying for salty tomato paste juice, but the stakes were high: drinking that stuff is a small price to pay to get such an amazing little toy.

The kit consisted of a few plastic spacemen, a rocket on a string, and a little poster of the moon with different point markers on it. The goal was to shoot the little space guys on the highest point markers. See, this is why people who grew up back then don't walk around looking for excitement today. It has nothing to do with growing older and having far more brittle bones than the rest of us. If I grew up playing these kinda games, I wouldn't expect much from my adult life either.



Excellent camera work back then.



Ugh, those dirty bastids. They're pulling one of the oldest, most annoying tricks in the book. Even if it's technically free, it's still annoying to have to go through the whole process of mailing in UPC symbols and waiting 6-8 decades for the toy to arrive. I like my cereal toys like I like my vintage Star Wars mini-rigs....in the box! Though I gotta admit, as a child, there was just nothing more fun than getting a package in the mail. It gave you something to look forward to, and if the box was big enough, you always had the option of painting it red and getting a Gumby Blockhead costume out of it.

'Did it come yet, Mom?'

'Where is it, Mom?'

'Are you sure it didn't come yet, Mom?'

'I'm going to knife the mailman's throat, Mom.'

Parents must've really enjoyed sharing the wait with their mail-expecting kids. Speaking of which, the children shill as best they can by holding up the cereal and tomato slop to the camera. This is a pretty famous premium on the collector's market, so I'm guessing a lotta kiddies went for it back then. It might not be a free Cap'n Crunch eraser, but all things considered, I'd give this one a 9 outta 10 on the cheap & shitty but free-o-meter.


- Matt