Happy Thanksgiving, cereal lovers!
I know it’ll be hard to work a bowl of your favorite breakfast cereal into this day of turkey, green bean casserole, and yams glazed with some magic syrup your grandma must’ve bartered with Zeus to obtain, so I won’t blame you if you go breakfast-lite today.
But I’ll also give you six words: Cap’n Crunch in the mashed potatoes.
Regardless of how many Crunchberries find their way into today’s turducken, those of us gestating through day-long food comas can still celebrate cereal’s spirit by gobbling down the latest 5 episodes of cereal pilgrim Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series. Every episode is a feast for the senses, as Gabe nostalgically waxes on the past and future of a different cereal each week.
I apologize for stuffing so many episode recaps into a single post, but hey—it is the season of stuffing.
First up is Kellogg’s new Disney Moana Cereal. Gabe and I both rejoice that Kellogg’s decided to stop being such squares with their movie cereals, using thematically appropriate swirl pieces for Moana Cereal instead of the boring JIF Cereal squares that’ve probably appeared in more movies now than Samuel L. Jackson.
As for taste testing, Gabe noted a citrus note in the cereal that I never picked up on. I likened it more to crispy vanilla sugar wafers, but after watching Gabe eat Moana Cereal, I can also sense secondhand citrus flavor ghosts of my now-long gone bowls of Moana Cereal. There definitely is a subtle lemon zest to this cereal, as if every Moana Cereal piece awkwardly hugged a yellow Trix corn puff. With this in mind, Moana Cereal is probably the closest you’ll ever get to an orange creme cereal without blowing your retirement fund on an eBay listing of Cap’n Crunch’s Orange Creampop Crunch,
I’m equally thankful that watching Gabe’s video taught me how “Moana” is meant to be pronounced. I won’t tell you how badly I was butchering the pronunciation, but I will tell you I was moaning with embarrassment when I heard the truth.
Strawberry Shortcake? At the Thanksgiving dinner table? I’ll allow it, because between pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and apple pie, cake doesn’t get enough love in November.
As Gabe states, he doesn’t actually have a box of this cereal. And from cursory Internet searches, even empty boxes of Strawberry Shortcake Cereal (and Orange Blossom Cereal) sell for enough dough to make a whole bakery’s worth of pies.
This video still provides an insightful history of Strawberry Shortcake’s character, a proud legacy that my younger self brattishly ignored because Strawberry Shortcake isn’t a grizzled action figure with five o’clock shadow and a kung-fu grip.
The sweetest trivia tidbit? Strawberry Shortcake’s cat is named Custard! That’s now what I’m naming all of my pets, plants, and children.
The cereal itself was apparently just strawberry-coated Kix, but I like to imagine it tasted more like a bowl full of the strawberry jelly spheres in 2016’s JIF PB&J cereal. If only there were custard-flavored marshmallows.
Speaking of fruit, here’s another cereal that somehow doesn’t contain cranberry sauce: Ralston’s Fruit Islands!
Though it looks like Cookie Crisp that went to Woodstock, Fruit Islands are far more unique. The conical cookies—I mean islands—are cherry, orange, and lemon-flavored. A cherry-flavored cereal is already rare: the only other ways to get that puckering tartness for breakfast is to stockpile Frute Brute or use Kool-Aid instead of milk.
But Fruit Islands are also studded with glittering apple bits! Since apple is also a rare cereal flavor—I’m still waiting for that iPhone cereal—pairing it with cherry in the same box is more mythical than the Loch Ness Monster scaling Everest.
Fruit Islands was truly one of a kind. I can only hope to re-create some of its ’80s magic by cheese-grating a leftover slice of Grandma’s apple pie over tomorrow morning’s Cookie Crisp.
Speaking of kung-fu grips, I’d love to kung-fu grip a handful of G.I. Joe Action Stars, tossing them into my mouth with the intensity of Snake Eyes chucking a ninja star.
Even though this Real American Hero’s cereal didn’t have a really exciting flavor, it had a gritty comic book aesthetic—almost as if the cardboard grew five o’clock shadow—that contrasts the eye-burning neon energy of other ’80s cereals.
It was also one of the earliest star cereals, a surprisingly large family tree that includes Sprinkle Spangles, Dora the Explorer Cereal, and the most recent Cinnamon Star Crunch. Cinnamon Star Crunch looks uncannily similar to G.I. Joe Action Stars, leading me to believe that the seemingly cute star mascots on General Mills’s newest holiday cereal defeated the G.I. Joe team in hand-to-hand combat for star-shaped breakfast dominance.
Cobra Commander’s got nothing on cannibalistic corn polygons.
Last but (kind of) not least is Body Buddies: a largely overlooked, flavored corn puff cereal from 1979 that came in both Honey & Brown Sugar and Natural Fruit Flavor. Since Honey & Brown Sugar is another rare cereal flavor pairing that makes me want to crush Teddy Grahams into Maple Brown Sugar Life in a vain attempt to re-create it, I can forgive Body Buddies for not having boxes as cool as its name.
All I wanted to see were My Buddy dolls body slamming each other, Wrestlemania-style. Is that too much to ask?
But as Gabe’s video shows, Body Buddies lasted far longer than its ho-hum theme would have you think. Maybe ’80s cereal lovers were really into healthy, flavored corn puffs—or maybe alliteration was just the decade’s hot trend.
“Body Buddies breakfast bowl” does have a nice ring to it.
Now trying saying that 5 times fast while you stare at the alien-necked mother from the back of Gabe’s Body Buddies box. I call her “Momthra.”
If you’re hungry for Cereal Time seconds (or in this case, sixths), every episode can be found here. Be sure to check out Gabe’s Twitter, too, and drop a “Happy Thanksgiving.”
Can you eat frosted mini wheats on thanksgiving day mornings