Cereal Killer; or

…fun with homonyms!

Inspired by a new reader’s casual comment, I began to dwell on my history with cereal.  My first memories of the ultimate breakfast fare are sitting on the floor on Saturday mornings watching cartoons while my parents slept in.  Now remember, this was back in the old days when there were only three channels, maybe five or six if the atmospheric conditions allowed reception of the Los Angeles independents (non-network… we didn’t have any of those in San Diego).  Sometimes I was limited to two, if the local weather messed with Channel Six, which was broadcast from Mexico.  Funny thing, even though Channel Six (XETV) was broadcast in English for an American audience, their Mexican license required that addresses by the Presidente of Mexico be broadcast.  This resulted in the occasional limiting of available cartoon fare; I suppose it was for the good of the peoples.  But I digress.

My career as a cereal killer began with Kellog’s Frosty Flakes.  It was the perfect food for a five-year old; corn flakes encrusted with sugar.  This built-in convenience stripped away one whole step in breakfast preparation.  Just pour in the bowl, splash on some milk and you were ready to assume multi-tasking; calorie intake and intellectual sterilization ala Huckleberry Hound.  If Tony the Tiger’s favorite was not available there was usually Raisin Bran; most probably responsible for this authors lifetime of efficient evacuation, or regular corn flakes (just add sugar).

As I aged, the purveyors of boxed breakfast fare developed ingenious stratagems for increasing the population-wide consumption of the produce of our nation’s breadbasket.  First, there were the box-top offerings.  Cereals marketed to wee folk offered incredible toy acquisition opportunities if one could amass the requisite number of box tops, later proof of purchase tabs, and manage to scribble the correct address on an envelope as directed by the manufacturer.  In a mere six to eight weeks, voila!  The much anticipated prize was delivered, never quite meeting the expectations generated by the promises inscribed on the back of the cereal box.  Sometimes, if the offer was for a more sophisticated goo-gaw, the transaction required a small monetary stipend accompany the box tops, but the quality of the bauble was generally of much higher caliber than the gratis offerings.  I remember sending away for two (had to eat a lot of cereal in furtherance of this acquisition) F-100 Super Saber fighter jet models.  To my surprise, when they arrived, they were of reasonable scale, relatively accurate in design detail, featured retracting landing gear and fired a missile from a spring-loaded recess in the jet intake.  Okay, I recognized that last bit of engineering as a stretch of reality, but I lost the projectiles the first day anyway so I wasn’t too troubled by it.

The next development in the marketing of high-sugar content dietary offerings was the cross marketing of cartoons with cereals.  As I recall, the originator and run-away leader of this strategy was Post.  Some network executive, or maybe it was a corn farmer, came up with the notion of creating animated animal characters as brand identifiers for their products.  These characters first appeared in commercials.  But they quickly expanded into actual episodic television shows which in reality were half-hour long advertisements.  Brilliant!!!  One could not watch Post’s Crispy Critters featuring Linus the Lionhearted while eating Kellog’s Frosty Flakes.  The half-hour program which featured a plethora of Post Cereal trademark characters was first aired in 1964 on CBS, running until 1966.  The program was then picked up by ABC until 1969 when the FCC made a ruling that prevented children’s show characters from appearing in advertisements on the same program.  That sure seems like governmental creep to me!

One of the universal experiences of cereal killers is the milk: cereal ratio conundrum.  I challenge any one of my readers to honestly attest that they were able, on the first pour, to achieve the optimum ratio of cereal to milk so as to result in the same relative density with the first spoonful as with the last.  I’ll be able to tell if you’re lying… because your lips will be moving!  No one has ever achieved this lofty goal.  If we’re honest, we admit to having to add just a little more cereal to absorb the excess milk.  Then, with the second application of cereal, the mix proves too dry and we add a just a splash of moo-juice.  And it seems, by the time we have accomplished our goal of perfect resource allocation, we have eaten a whole box of cereal and a half-gallon of milk (Uuurp!)

I don’t each that much cereal today.  Oh, I’ll imbibe in a bit of granola (gluten free, of course) when part of the motel breakfast bar offering. But the truth is, one cannot pack that kind of dense fodder into the stomach after reaching a certain age.  And the roof of my mouth is just too sensitive to handle Cap’n Crunch anymore.