THE CEREAL PRIZE PROJECT: GROUP 011
(Sticky Fingers, Life Savers Fruit Juicers Candy, Sugar Bear Flipbook, Binoculars and "Guess Who's Mikey?" Poster)
#042 - Sticky Fingers (Kellogg's, `80s)
Additional Images:
Sealed premium. Instructions.
In terms of cool, slimy stuff found inside cereal boxes, Sticky Fingers are second only to
Wacky Wall Walkers, which despite being sold "outside the box" must be considered the best cereal premium of all time. By this logic, you might consider Sticky Fingers to be the second best. I don't, but they're high on the list -- just behind baking soda divers.
You're probably more familiar with Sticky Fingers from the countless versions sold in fifty-cent vending machines all across the world. Clasping the uninteresting end between your fingers, you're free to whip the gooey hand into anything your heart desires -- paper, walls, whatever. They lose their mighty sticky power after the sixth or seventh round, sadly, and don't give me that crap about washing 'em clean to restore their strength: That never works
and everybody knows it. Few cereal prizes provide more than a minute of entertainment, and Sticky Fingers toys are no different. Still, that's a pretty fun minute you're getting, sticking this and that. Love 'em. Can't decide if I'm more into the green or the red version, but I refuse to put more thought into it without knowing if they were ever made in blue.
#043 - Life Savers "Fruit Juicers" Candy: (Kellogg's, Date Unknown)
Additional Images:
Sealed premium. Candy, close-up.
Niiiiiice. This particular prize represents my dilemma throughout writing these entries -- do I judge the premiums based on how cool I'm finding them
now, or how cool I would've found them as a child? Surely a sample pack of Life Savers "Fruit Juicers" wouldn't have rocked my world as a kid, but being that the candies haven't been produced in a bazillion years and I'm very likely to have the last pack in existence, I can't stop staring at the violet roll and thinking it's going to make for a better today.
I can't shake the theory that "Fruit Juicers" came to be only because of Jolly Ranchers' sudden usurping of half the suck-on-dat market in the late `80s. Right or wrong, most people consider original Live Savers more like throat larynges than actual candy. The visions they brought starred old people and were usually staged on park benches near a picket fence. "Fruit Juicers" were hipper, hopper, more fruity and more like real candy. If there was an exclusively-grape pack available, it's likely that there were at least five other varieties available, mostly red.
Live Savers went to the cereal prize well more than once in the past, and you'll be seeing more from the suckers as we progress. Whenever I'm back in the mood to eat old candy.
#044 - Sugar Bear Flipbook: (Post, Super Golden Crisp, 1989)
Additional Images:
Sealed premium. Movie of flipbook in action
For someone who's been dedicating so much of his free time to things relating to cereal, you might be surprised to know that I rarely ate it in a bowl with milk. I did as a small child, but having gained a strong aversion to milk at a very early age, the milk was gone, the bowls were put away, and I spent breakfast eating nothing -- saving the cereal for out-of-box munching later in the day, as if they were potato chips or live anoles. There's just something about milk that disgusts me. I just always feel like it's gone bad. I could drain the cow's udder myself and prepare a glass two minutes later -- I'll still think it's gone sour. It's just one of the little quirks that make me me.
My point is, there was probably no cereal I more enjoyed eating dry than Super Golden Crisp. It had a lot going for it thematically, but for me, this one was all about taste. So good. So addictively good. I plowed through boxes in the days before carbs were considered Lucifer's sentries, happily drowsy as handful after handful made their way to my mouth during sixty-hour television sessions.
Mmmmm.
I was pretty indifferent towards Sugar Bear, truth be told, but by the time I was watching and
understanding cereal commercials, he'd already evolved into a plain old cool cat. If you go back a bit further, Super Golden Crisp commercials featured a whole different kind of Sugar Bear. At the threat of various, breakfast-stealing monsters (everything from mutant lobsters to talking sharks), Sugar Bear would eat some of his cereal, pump up like Popeye, grow giant muscles and kick the villains' asses. Had I been born just a year or two earlier, I would've grown up wanting to be just like Sugar Bear.
In lieu of actually talking about this stupid flipbook, I've made a
stupid movie of it in action. I'm going to do that whenever I don't really want to talk about something from now on. What a fix that is.
#045 - Low-Rent Binoculars: (Kellogg's, 1988)
Additional Images:
Sealed premium. Unassembled.
I don't know if these binoculars were connected to any kind of grand super-campaign, but even as a standalone, at least they're different. Arriving unassembled but very easily put together, they're pretty cheapo. The lenses are simply plastic magnifiers that work about as well as anything that'd slip out of a kid-skewed Swiss army knife thingy, meaning that they don't necessarily put anything into a closer view -- just
a view. I'm testing it as I write this. I'm looking at a cat with my eye. Looks like a cat. I'm looking at a cat through the binoculars. Looks like a cat. Same size. Same disgusting habits. Oh well -- the binoculars probably inspired a few hundred kids to head out to the woods and pretend to be someone incredible. That's pretty neat.
#046 - "Guess Who's Mikey?" Contest Poster: (Life, 1986)
Additional Images:
Image of the REAL Mikey. Large image of poster, front. Large image of poster, back. Bonus clues!
You simply must remember
this, the most brilliant marketing campaign in the history of breakfast. Life had completely branded itself with the image of young "Mikey," a kid who really loved his cereal. His commercial, played seemingly during every commercial break on every conceivable channel throughout the day, was the stuff of legend. People knew Mikey and loved Mikey, all around the world. He lacked the ultimate catch-phrase of that beef-loving lady from the old Wendy's ads, but according to most, Mikey was way cuter.
In 1986, years after the peak of the original campaign, Life devised the ultimate promotion: A contest for people to try to figure out who the "real Mikey" was, photographed as an adult amidst scores of same-aged gentlemen, all allegedly fans of Life cereal. Pushing the concept both on the box art and in the commercials, the finale was a sweepstakes where anyone who successfully picked the real Mikey off of an
in-box poster would be entered into a raffle for...I dunno, a lot of money, or a car, or something equally extravagant.
Contest junkies went wild, but the rest of the country was more interested in finding out who Mikey actually was. What would he look like after all these years? How would he sound?
The people behind the ads did an amazing job. By the end of all the shenanigans, half of America really believed that they gave a shit about some kid from an old cereal commercial. The success of Deal-A-Meal cards and smokeless ash trays can be similarly chalked up -- the people behind this crap really earn their salary.
Whatever the real Mikey looked like, the campaign was so successful that even just a few years ago, Life once again rebroadcast the original commercial, then over fifteen years old. Somewhere in-between, there was even a campaign for Life to find the "new" Mikey, who'd represent the current generation of kids. It didn't fly quite as well as I'm sure Life was hoping for. Even more surprising than our interest in Mikey was that, somehow, we'd become bona fide Mikey loyalists.
Vegas odds dictate that the original Mikey should be appearing on one of VH1's nostalgia specials any day now.
--
Matt (7/07/05)
