Watch your back, Count Chocula. Lock your doors, Frankenberry. Keep aware, rare Boo Berry. Stay dead, Fruit Brute. There's some new Monster Cereals in town, as Kellogg's finally decides to strike back with a hatchet at General Mills to end a decades-long monopoly on All Things Spooky at the breakfast table. Get a load of the three new contenders -- old favorites given deadly upgrades to become more in tune with Halloween...
Yes, three established cereals have been grouped into a "Haunted Manor" motif, featuring eerie box art and gory marshmallows that won't be there come November. Froot Loops, Cocoa Rice Krispies and Apple Jacks might not seem like perfect candidates for spooky makeovers, but you won't be able to say they didn't try. The marshmallow shapes vary ever so slightly from cereal to cereal, as do the strange puzzles and games printed on the back of each box. The boxes are smaller, almost novelty-sized. You couldn't fit them in your pocket, but you'd probably be able to convince someone with worse vision to try to. If there's anything Halloween's taught me, it's that people who try to fit cereals too big for their pocket into their pocket are funny. That was the 7th lesson, right after what really lurks in the dungeon.
The Haunted Cocoa Krispies Manor: Snap, Crackle and Pop look too rosy to be up to anything but no good, one of them going as far as dressing up like a mummy. The marshmallows include eyeballs, bats and ghosts. Peppermint Lifesavers are evidently included as well. The ghosts arrive with an inconsistently patterned blue-and-white swirl, a trait that's as synonymous with Halloween as a zestfully clean Zest commercial. The bats are velvet purple, a soft color that I feel conveys the intelligent innocence of bats far more than any mere facial feature or vague shape of a bat ever could.
A closer inspection of the characters paints "Crackle" as the mummy-dressing culprit, an all-around attention in the realm of cereal spokesmen. Pop could barely utter the one syllable that was his name without Crackle barging in with a joke that, sequentially, probably should've been Snap's. Taking autumn residence up in what the box art depicts as a spooky house made entirely of CHOCOLATE WOOD, the champions of Rice Krispies absolutely swear that their cereal is worth twice the money because they added eyeball marshmallows.
The Haunted Apple Jacks Manor: Since Apple Jacks has no standard mascot, Kellogg's created a generic ghost character to shill the haunted Hell out of their appledy sweet cereal. He looks like of the questionable brothers of Casper The Friendly Ghost during the franchise's regrettable attempt to resurface a few years back. On the bright side, his marshmallows look prettier in Apple Jacks than Crackle's eyeballs did in Cocoa Rice Krispies. The assortment of chalky bits this time includes bones, ghosts and masks. The masks are obviously meant to be skulls, but Kellogg's just couldn't pull the trigger on actually calling them that. I guess that's what separates them from General Mills. If this was Count Chocula, they'd be showing birds getting their intestines ripped out by red-eyed women and fed to the red-eyed women's snarling children right on the box. And they'd all be shouting curses in word balloons.
The "crunchy, sweetened three-grain cereal with apple and cinnamon" looks great teamed up with the many orange-and-white marshmallows, which nicely compliment their radioactive green and not in a "hey nice shoes" kind of way.
Man, I'm looking at all of the comics and games on the back of the box, and the cereals are totally worth buying for that alone. There's dozens of characters on the back of each box, and some of them are the most blatant rip-offs of other characters ever. That's fine when we're dealing with Dracula and Frankenstein -- those are fair game for all -- but I'm clearly looking at Wednesday Addams, Robocop and -- hey, wait a sec -- they snuck the Honey Smacks frog in there! Guys -- get these cereals. I haven't been this excited since DW finally got it on with Whitley.
The Haunted Froot Loops Manor: Whoa...Toucan Sam? I guess all those run-ins with the Alien Fruit Monster really empowered him -- we never would've seen a bird like this embrace Satan so openly a few years ago. Dressed in a witch costume that doesn't alleviate any of the negative rumors surrounding him, Toucan Sam promises to make your Halloween fruity by tossing a rainbow of fruity colors at you alongside marshmallow bats, ghosts and eyeballs. Yay the eyeballs are back. Hey how come all of Kellogg's marshmallows have green eyes? I thought that shit ended with WW2.
It seems silly to consider Froot Loops a Halloween cereal even when it's packaged in a half-assedly spooky box -- you can't top fruitcake with orange and black sprinkles and expect it to switch holiday allegiances, and likewise, a few purple bats aren't going to take Froot Loops any closer to my demon master, Jasferepho. You have failed, Toucan Sam. Failed to make me sleep with one eye open in me mum's bed. I'm also left wondering at what stage in the game did Toucan Sam tattoo his name on his upper chest. It's in the pic, and it's not part of the costume.
Of course, the best part of the deal are the absolutely insane recipes printed on the side panels of each cereal box. They pull off a good trick -- if you buy the Froot Loops, you get the recipe for Apple Jacks, vice versa so on and so forth. All of the recipes briefly seem palatable, and you'll have a hard time justifying the passe "served in the milk bowl" crap when you're staring at such exotic presentations. The "Stacked Ice Cream Sundae" is normal enough, but check out the other two. "Creepy Crunchy Snakes?"
According to the recipe, the ingredients for a "Creepy Crunchy Snake" include everything from licorice to Cocoa Rice Krispies, Fruit Roll-Ups, blueberries and peanut butter. I hold no ill-will towards any of those ingredients, but I'd never invite them all to the same party. And "Ooey Gooey Banana Ghosts?!" The holiday treat that keeps getting your kid called a fag all year long? Well that's it -- stayed tuned to the Countdown, because on a rainy day I'll post my experiences making Ooey Gooey Banana Ghosts. Maybe the others if I need filler, too. We'll find out just how sick and twisted bananas dipped in molten chocolate and dragged through piles of Apple Jacks really are. It'll be so Halloweenish.
