Nerds topped the mountain in a sea of gimmicked treats and candies. The ultimate kid food, it provided us with everything we could possibly ask for: a variety of flavors, size management, strange looking mascots, cute segregated box compartments - the only thing missing was some chocolate nougat, but that's okay, nobody knew what chocolate nougat was supposed to look like anyway.
While you can still buy Nerds today, you can only get it in a select few flavors. In it's glory years you could get everything from 'rainbow' and 'cherry cola' and beyond, but there was always one thing for certain about your box - half the candy was good, the other half absolutely sucked. Let's take a green apple/banana mix for example...
Green apple: savior of millions, it's a flavor that's sweet, sour, and full of unbridled power.
Banana: crude, legal version of Agent Orange that tastes like an owl pellet.
Nerds were too fun and popular to pass up on when I was a child, but I was always so pissed that half the box was filled with useless bad-tasted filth when all I wanted was more cherry, dammit. Retrospectively, I can see that the Wonka company had a plan in mind, and by God was it brilliant.
See, more than anything else, Nerds was a schooltime candy. The tiny pieces allowed for inconspicuous eating, and your teacher really had to be on their game to catch you with it. There was a point in time where the popularity was so immense that any student without a box of Nerds was assumed to be a cootie-infested pauper asshole. CIPA, for short. CIPAs were desperate people - seeing their social stock fall from grace because they forgot to bring Nerds to school, their only remaining course of action was simple: they'd ask you for some Nerds.
That's where the side of the box containing the owl pellet banana flavor came into play. I stand firm in my belief that Wonka purposely filled half the box with crappy candy so children wouldn't feel bad sharing it. The good side - the cherries and green apples of the world - those were all for you. They were your edible rosaries. The other side was what you used to fend off CIPA losers who refused to leave you alone. Hey, beggars can't be choosers.
Somewhere along the way, things got screwy. The Wonka family was well versed in beating dead horses, so as the Nerds fad started lessening from amazing godsend to 'just another candy,' the took a club to poor Eponine's head and marketed endless flavor after endless variation after endless who-knows-what to the point where you could go into shoe stores and find edible Nerdlaces. They weren't going to watch their gravy train dissipate without a fight, no siree. So after six hundred thousand versions of Nerds candy, Wonka performed a bold risk that lives on in infamy to this very day. What do you do when you're out of flavors? What could they do to inspire a resurgence in Nerds' popularity? The answer, they thought, was simple: turn it into a damn cereal.
Calling Nerds Cereal a marketing mistake is like saying King Ralph was a bad movie. You'd be correct, but you're not really doing the scope of the problem justice. There's some flavor agents not really suited for mixing with milk, and I'd say Nerds are right up there with rosemary and dog shit.
Okay, I know what you're thinking - there's already been cereal with fruit flavors, and they've done just fine. You're forgetting that Nerds' definition of a 'fruit flavor' was sketchy at best - they all tasted like nuclear sugar, either sour enough to make us all do fishfaces, or sweet enough to turn us all into talking cakes. Calling one of their flavors 'cherry' was a nice gesture, but that's all it was. Even after they numbed the flavors down a few notches when it came time to sweeten the cereal puffs, it still transcended pretty poorly. But that didn't keep all of us from trying it at least once. After all, if there's anything worse at school than being a CIPA, it was being a CIPA who had nothing to say during the cereal conversations around the water cooler. Or fountain, as the case may be.
Each box of Nerds cereal was, like the candy, separated into two sides. If you ate it straight out of the box, it wasn't so bad. But once you added milk to the equation? A chemical metamorphosis took place that transformed a decent dry snack to a living, eating Hell. Worse yet, it wasn't one of those healthy cereals - this one was fortified with sugarcrack and everything else kids pined for. On principle alone, we had to eat the entire bowl. If we didn't, it'd give our parents just cause to try out Fruit N' Fiber or some other 'natural' cereal. No matter how bad a Nerds breakfast was, it was still better than bran flakes and sliced dates.
There were two flavor combinations - cherry/orange and strawberry/grape. After the initial taste, you'd swear it was really vomit/more vomit. The ads boasted that the cereal was 'tiny, tangy, and crunchy.' This was all true, but they left out 'terrible' and 'your last resort' .
Even if it did taste good, Nerds was doomed from the start. We've safely established in the past that a cereal can only be as successful as it's mascot. So while Cookie Crisp got by with an ongoing chase between a crook and a cop with a fu manchu, and while Sonny charmed the world by being all cuckoo and stuff, what did Nerds have? Fluorescent piles of cat dung wearing high-tops. Take a look...
It doesn't matter if you think they're cute: consider who these guys were up against. You've got Tony the Tiger, the Trix rabbit, even a fully clothed frog who swore that his cereal had 'more honey.' The Nerds droplet guys paled in comparison, and they didn't even have the benefits of a palatable food to shill.
Joey: I'm thinking about trying this new Nerds cereal. Is it any good?
Steve: If treats were awful, you'd be in for one!
Joey: Quit it with the stupid analogies. Is it good or not?
Steve: It's like buying a new house and then setting it on fire.
Joey: Okay, that one didn't even make sense. Can you just answer the question?
Steve: Just answering your question would be like scoring a touchdown and skipping the celebration jig.
Joey: Nerd.
When all else failed, they took to the wonderful world of cereal premiums - the toys either inside the box or free with two proofs-of-purchase. A good cereal premium could make even the worst breakfast a hot seller. At this point, Nerds really had nothing to lose. Word got out and everyone knew the truth - it tasted really, really odd in milk. It was a make-or-break moment for them; either add a great free toy, or close up shop and start marketing Nerds notepads or Nerds bubble bath or something that didn't need edibility on it's side. They opted to give it one last shot. Here's their special free cereal toy, the stuff legends are made of:
A Nerds cereal bowl. A Nerds cereal bowl?! Guys, you missed the point - your only chance is to give us a cool toy, it's the only way we'd suffer through another box of that slop. Not only is the Nerds cereal bowl simply a compliment to the terrible stuff, it's a constant reminder of the torment you went through eating it.
Okay, I'm overstating things a little. It wasn't that bad. Kind of like Fruity Pebbles, just with a lot of salt and Adobo added. It's more suited as a Chex Mix ingredient than as breakfast. The free bowl had a contraption that let you keep the two different Nerds flavors separated - if you removed the plastic slit in the middle, you were treated to something far worse than tangy orange spice milk: tangy orange spice milk mixed with tangy cherry spice milk. These weren't no Froot Loops. Mixing flavors worked well with the candy, but attempting to do that with the cereal truly took a brave soul. If only kids were allowed to smoke, then at least we could dumb down our taste buds. Why doesn't anybody make throat condoms?
 
Oh, they do! Silly me. Dental Dams for a safer breakfast.
No matter the taste, I look back fondly on the days of Nerds Cereal as a more innocent time when it was okay to get excited over candy. I still do, it's just more of a covert operation nowadays. It might not have topped my menu choices, but it sure was fun to look at. Nerds are still around today, usually sold in smaller multipacks especially around Halloween. Gone are the days of finding the jumbo-sized boxes near the supermarket cashier, so if you ever needed a just cause to build a time machine, there's your answer.
- Matt
E-mail me!
Instant Messager: xecharchar
BACK TO X-E!
|
