Things changed as we skipped into the '90s, not the least of which being a remarkable incline of totally whacked out kiddy food. We previously lived in a world where popcorn was just popcorn...and then along came Pop Qwiz to teach us that popcorn could be electric red and neon blue. Whereas I was once forced to exist never once ingesting a Hostess pudding pie because I hated Hostess pudding pies...in marched the Ninja Turtles with a decision-swaying wagon full of green food coloring and franchise branding. In today's world, such efforts are so commonplace that they're far less admired. A little over fifteen years ago, giving food wacky abilities and strange colors was enough to get us to celebrate even the most unremarkable offerings. Oatmeal, this includes you.
Now, I'm no regular oatmeal eater, not by a long shot, but I credit General Mills' Oatmeal Swirlers as the sole reason that I'm able to eat it at all. In practice, its gimmick was not terribly awesome, but just the idea of it was enough for me to force afterschool store runs on my parents, the likes of which were only formerly demanded on a day when a hot new video game was set to launch.
That I'd go batshit for oatmeal is a testament to Oatmeal Swirlers, and today, we pay our respects.
If you're wondering what Oatmeal Swirlers were, it's pretty simple. Each box contained packages of wholly normal oatmeal, but each box also included packages of what'd best be described as "liquefied Fruit Roll-ups." With clever placement of the tear piece, kids could -- in theory, at least -- draw silly shit all over their oatmeal in a variety of fruit flavors.
Of course, things like that always seemed to work better on television. Like, could anyone really spoon out a full sentence's worth of Alpha Bits cereal? Similarly, the things we'd see people do with Oatmeal Swirlers on the commercials never seemed to work out quite as well when we tried it ourselves, but fact is, even drawing imperfectly designed happy faces and playing imperfectly designed tic-tac-toe games was still incredible when oatmeal was our canvas. Oatmeal!
Maybe I protest too much. Yes, if you tried hard enough, you could actually make the shapes seen above. It just took the right sized cut in the swirly packet and the right amount of patience. There was also the issue of putting gooey yummy stuff over a bowl of steaming wet oatmeal; whatever pictures you were able to create were short-lived, because steaming wet oatmeal tended to absorb gooey yummy stuff fairly quick. It was the idea that counted. The idea that you were your own God; the idea that whatever you drew and were about to eat was the fruit of your own hand. Mom might've made the oatmeal, but she's not the one who spelled "SHIT" out on it with red fruit slime. In effect, we were young Picassos, our stories soon to be made into major motion pictures.
Even before Oatmeal Swirlers, oatmeal was no stranger to having shit added to it. It wasn't a stretch by any means, and indeed, your packet of goo increased the nigh-gruel's flavor by folds. Strawberry was my favorite of the six available flavors, but there was a slime for every kind: They even had a milk chocolate version, which all told provided a more color-correct justification in writing slang synonyms for "feces" in bowls of oatmeal.
I was always enamored with the tic-tac-toe game in the commercial, but since I never actually ate Oatmeal Swirlers in the presence of anyone willing to play tic-tac-toe in a bowl of oatmeal, I'm sad to say that I can't speak for the validity of the commercial's claim. However, I can attest to the relative simplicity one found when attempting to write their initials in the stuff. Sure, my "M" looked more like an "/-\\//-\," but truth be told, they looked that way on paper, too.
Like a baby-sized parallel of beer commercials, a lot of this era's kiddy food advertising suggested that we'd be a heck of a lot cooler if we ate certain things. It's kind of like how the Motts Trader made eating applesauce in school seem impossibly chic a few years before.
With Oatmeal Swirlers, we were treated to an ad starring a geeky, normal oatmeal-eating little girl, who invites a clan of stylin' hip hop beatbreakers into her life as soon as she touches a box off the stuff. And when she actually tastes it? Girl transforms into the hippest bitch ever, or at least, a stunning recreation of Six from Blossom.
I wouldn't say that showing a girl who obtained cooler better clothes by eating Oatmeal Swirlers was as effective as showing a bowl of Oatmeal Swirlers with a fucking tic-tac-toe game happening on top of it, but when it comes to starting a trend, I guess you just throw a lot of red gooey shit at the wall and see what sticks.
I talk about a lot of old junk food on this site, but there are very few that I actively miss. Oatmeal Swirlers is one of them. It was fun to make, fun to eat and I never once felt that I was putting up with an "ugly taste" just for the sake of goo-written oatmeal obscenities. I really did like the stuff, with or without the bells and whistles.
Since the exit of Oatmeal Swirlers, oatmeal has never been the same for me. Oh sure, I may be sucked in by the occasional newbie, like oatmeal with candy dinosaur eggs that hatch when they get wet, but for the most part, I've been living oatmeal free since the Swirlers went extinct. There are a few pointless online petitions to rectify this injustice, but I won't link you to them because a lot of the people who signed them spelled "oatmeal" incorrectly and I don't think you want to cast your voice with their lot. Instead, I will kneel before my Wiccan altar and beg of the god Mealoatnusa.
"Please, bring Oatmeal Swirlers back. For my colon, so mote it be."
I wanted to give this article a special ending, but I couldn't find my oatmeal costume and my knees are too far gone to do my big oatmeal dance video special. Instead, I spent a good seven dollars trying to recreate Oatmeal Swirlers using currently available products. First, the oatmeal. Then some Fruit Roll-Ups, which I melted down to make swirly goo by any means necessary. Let me first confirm that melting Fruit Roll-Ups is really, really hard.
Let me next confirm that until General Henry Mills himself rises from the grave to approve the resurgence of Oatmeal Swirlers, we won't have it exactly as we once did. Here, look...
It could've been worse. It could've gained sentience and eaten me in a massive turning of the tables.
Because of the fierce competition in the "draw shit on oatmeal" department, General Mills fought back by introducing dual color swirl packages, so you could DOUBLY PAINT your oatmeal! These special "chaser" package of Oatmeal Swirlers gooey gunk made the possibilities limitless, and shut up all the naysayers who previously complained about the lack of visual variety provided by one-color packages of gooey gunk.
That's how the DOUBLE COLOR Oatmeal Swirlers gooey gunk packet looked. Picture the business end of a Handi-Snack, only picture two of them mashed together, and then picture them with different colors of gooey gunk instead of alien cheese inside. Squeeze to your heart's desire, and then it's time for deliciousness!
I'm reminded of George's classic line from Gremlins 2, "My...cro...waf!"
