THE CEREAL PRIZE PROJECT: GROUP 012
(Ninja Turtles Cereal with Hologram Box and T-Shirt Offer, Dinersaurs Cereal with Nintendo Magic-Motion Card, Kool-Aid Point Bank and Kool-Aid Packet)
#047 - Hologram Box / T-Shirt Offer: (Ralson, Various Cereals, 1989)
Additional Images:
Ninja Turtles box hologram -- close up.
I've already given you a whole article on
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cereal, one of the stranger, less tasty but still completely
needed chunks of my youth. Though I could never personally wrap my head and tongue around the idea of what amounted to Chex with marshmallows, the cereal survived on the box art and ad campaigns alone. The Ninja Turtles were
it; if they had a cereal forged entirely of bird eyes, we still would've eaten it.
Likewise, I've already spoken at length about the Ralston company in general. Known for more than just cereals, it's just as easy to see that cereal, perhaps, just wasn't their forte. They were able to snatch some of the better kid-related licenses, but were never truly able to capitalize upon them with great tasting cereals. In effect, many of their offerings had to be tried because of the characters on the box, but fewer and fewer kids could bring themselves to try 'em
twice. Still, they meant well and understood the basics, and pushing the theory that kids went for cereals based on everything besides taste to its utter limit, this hologram-drenched promotion worked wonders.
Each of their top guns got involved, from Real Ghostbusters Cereal to Nintendo Cereal System. During the campaign, each of the boxes became a premium within itself, featuring a framed-off portion of the front with a holographic image, reflecting the movie/show/video game each cereal was based on. In the Ninja Turtles' case, they simply used the art that'd typically be on the boxes in "normal" fashion -- hence why the Turtles carry giant spoons while licking their chops. As you would imagine, the holograms were scissor-cut off the boxes, taped onto notebooks and immortalized for at least one school semester. I'm sure Ralston could've left it at that and enjoyed modest success, but with breakfast becoming more frequently skipped, they learned how to fight with both hands and launched an extension of the hologram promotion...
Holographic T-shirts! Aww yeah. Using more intricate versions of the box holograms, kids could choose between the Ninja Turtles, Real Ghostbusters, Cookie Crisp characters, Nintendo heroes and...a friggin' triceratops. I've got nothing but love for ol' Three-Horn, but that feels kind of tacked on. If everyone involved segued their talents into a stage show, imagine how bad the dinosaur would feel if he had to come out last during the curtain call.
The shirts ran for 5.95 plus one proof-of-purchase a piece, which was admittedly reasonable. Recalling the time's great hologram craze, I can't imagine many kids (well, boys) that wouldn't have looked at the offer and drooled, an vision made more disgusting because they would've been eating cereal while drooling, thus mixing residual milk with saliva in a sight that'd make me want to skip breakfast altogether.
Sadly, there's always a caveat, which may not be the right word, but I can never resist using it even if it's only 50% correct: The T-Shirts were awesome and featured awesome characters that every kid in school
knew were awesome, but on the other hand, they came from the humble beginnings of a cereal box offer. Even by fourth grade, we're dealing with a lot of social pressure. Kids who openly wore these hologram T-shirts ran the risk of some other guy making the connection and outing it as a cereal thing. You could have the coolest motherfucker shining on your chest, but somebody in class will always find a way to make fun of it if it came from a box of Cookie Crisp.
That kind of awkwardness grows as a child ages, so I assume there were far more orders for size small shirts than size large shirts. Pretty cool otherwise, and unbelievably enough, they could be run through any standard washing machine without being destroyed.
By the way, I kind of lied about that triceratops being generic. He wasn't. Not exactly...
Dinersaurs Cereal:
Additional Images:
Nintendo offers on back of box. Side panel offer: Ninja Turtles poster.
And then came the Dinersaurs. Arriving in 1988, Ralston's ragtag bunch of apron-wearing dinosaurs were intended to kick off a large collection of junk foods. Dinersaurs Cereal was just one of the edibles -- there were Dinersaurs Cookies and Dinersaurs Crackers, and had we'd been more faithful to the franchise, they probably would've gotten around to Dinersaurs Tortilla Chips and canned Dinersaurs Pasta with tiny "dinosaur egg" meatballs. It was a brave, cute idea from the company that sadly proved unsuccessful, but for those of us fortunate enough to swear allegiance to Everything Dinersaurs from the start, we got a good year of prehistoric fun and a reason to doodle dinosaurs wearing chef's caps on construction paper forevermore.
The commercials for Dinersaurs food featured a mix of live action and animation -- the live action being the young children and food items, the animation being a family of brightly colored dinosaurs who ran a cafeteria and dressed accordingly. Like I said: Cute. I know the Nintendo offer on the box obscures your mucho desired view of the goods, so to sum it up, Dinersaurs Cereal consisted of several dinosaur-shaped bits of fruity corn crud in a variety of colors. More simply, Dinersaurs was dinosaur-shaped Trix Cereal. God exists.
Ralston was running a huge Nintendo promotion at the time, evidenced by the amount of real estate each
cereal box gave up to Mario and friends. Nintendo was already huge by this point; this was more a promotion that benefited Ralston than the video game bigwigs. Aside from a chance to win a mega super Nintendo Entertainment System set (Zapper and all), a bunch of cereals banded together and put forth what was destined to become #48 of X-Entertainment's Cereal Prize Project...
#048 - Nintendo Magic-Motion Card: (Ralston, Dinersaurs, 1988)
Additional Images:
Sealed premium. Alternate view of card. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! tip card. Arrived with Cookie Crisp doll offer coupon! Arrived with Ninja Turtles poster offer coupon!
There were only three Magic-Motion Nintendo cards available, and up against Mario and Link, Little Mac from
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! might seem like the least desirable of the lot. Not so.
Punch-Out!! relics are much harder to come by, and considering that I absolutely had to clock as much time on that game as I did with
Super Mario Bros. or
The Legend of Zelda, I have no trouble forgiving the fact that Little Mac's been about as active as Thomas from
Kung-Fu since. I'd name more Nintendo games, but all of these italicized words make my paragraphs look ugly.
I can't imagine that I expected to love
Punch-Out!! as much as I did and do, but it's easily in my top five for the system. I remember spending birthday money for it at Crazy Eddie's (a now defunct electronic store chain), taking it home and working my way up the ranks of offensive ethnic stereotypes before getting my ass handed to me in one Tyson punch a hundred thousand times for a hundred thousand weeks. When I finally took Kid Dynamite down, it seriously felt like the biggest achievement of my entire pathetic life. I left the game on the "congratulations screen" for about a day, and subsequent victories over the big man were rare. The Magic-Motion card features alternating images of Little Mac, ranging from "pre-fight uppity" to "mid-round face bashed."
#049 - Kool-Aid Point Collection Bank: (Post, Alpha-Bits, 1989)
Additional Images:
Alpha-Bits box -- front. Instructions.
One box of Alpha-Bits cereal...two prizes...both having to do with Kool-Aid! It's my own personal tasty geek stupid heaven, and even in the days before Alpha-Bits got all silvery slick with their box art and added a computer whiz dog mascot, this was insanely good stuff. The box makes a few mentions of the Children's Miracle Network Telethon; I can't seem to make the connection between
that and giving out Kool-Aid junk, but so long as they
are giving out Kool-Aid junk...yeah, that Children's Miracle Network Telethon was a cause and a half.
You've been reading the
Kool-Aid Section, I hope. You know what "Kool-Aid Points" are. If you don't, I forgive you and will sum it up for the umpteenth time: Each packet of Kool-Aid had cutout points, which could later be traded in to the fictional "Wacky Warehouse" for everything from Kool-Aid branded Walkie Talkies to Kool-Aid branded fanny packs. The small point collection bank was shaped, vaguely, like the Wacky Warehouse, complete with requisite coin slot for kids to drop Kool-Aid Points inside. The little bank ends up a lot smaller than the uncut/unfolded version on the back of the box suggested, but then, you really don't need that much space to hold tiny, paper-thin fruit points. Kool, but #50 was
much cooler...
#050 - Kool-Aid Packet: (Post, Alpha Bits, 1989)
Additional Images:
???????
Yes -- free Kool-Aid packets! I've done a bit of research on this promotion, and can say with certainty that the three examples shown on the box art were indeed the only three up for grabs: Purplesaurus Rex, Berry Blue and Black Cherry. Holy crapshoot. Obviously, every kid on the planet gunned for Purplesaurus Rex, though I'd think Berry Blue would have been a very close second. Now, even though many could successfully argue that Black Cherry is the tastiest of the three, it was obviously the least interesting. It'd been around for decades, it had zero mythology and no store was ever going to run out of it. Besides, Purplesaurus Rex
and Berry Blue were both new additions to the Kool-Aid family, debuting in 1988 just months before Alpha-Bits got around to giving the stuff out.
The beads of sweat mounted on the brows of every Alpha-Bits-eating kid in 1989. Which Kool-Aid would it be? Purplesaurus Rex, the infinite gold? Berry Blue, the silver knight? Or merely Black Cherry -- maker of tears. Click
here to solve this mystery.
--
Matt (7/18/05)
