Category Archives: Specials

Meet the Illustrator Behind Cap’n Crunch!

Yep, you read that title right. Recently, Cap’n Crunch’s box art game has been very on point—and I’m not just talking about the boxes that involve Cap’n Crunch playing actual sports games.

From HomeRun Crunch and Touchdown Crunch to Orange Creampop Crunch and super close-up revamps of classic boxes, the white-haired Cap’n has been looking more spry and animated in 2016 than ever before.

Better yet, the backs of these boxes feature more than just the ever-lively cereal ship captain we know and love. Alongside games, puzzles, a bustling zoo of caricatured animals, and at least one Statue of Liberty, recent Cap’n Crunch boxes have featured countless revivals of vintage Quaker mascots.

From Crunch mainstays like Jean LaFoote to obscure, decades-old villains like Magnolia Bulkhead, these 2016 boxes have something for cereal lovers from the ’60s, ’80s, and every where (or should I say every when) in-between.

As a serious cereal fan myself, I wasn’t content with just looking at these awesome new boxes. I wanted to find out what was behind this recent Crunchatized revitalization, especially after boxes of Peanut Butter Crunch have featured that same Olympics scene since the 2008 Beijing Games.

Before long, I found out who was behind this shift, too. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, quaker. 8 Comments

Aug. ’16

Four More from “Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca!”

Need something to Brite-n your day? Okay, do you need four things to brighten your day after that terrible pun?

Well you’re in luck, because there are four new episodes in cereal archivist Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series. Longtime Cereal Time binge watchers know the drill, but I’ll catch everyone else up to speed on this series in one sentence:

One man spotlights one cereal every one week to produce three-to-four fun-filled minutes of breakfast nostalgia.

Intrigued? Let’s start somewhere over the rainbow with Gabe’s episode on Rainbow Brite Cereal. As he states in the video, this 1985 cereal was a tie-in with Rainbow Brite’s animated feature film, and it features a literal rainbow of fruity and crunchy…shapes?

The more logical would see them as Rainbow Brite’s hair curls or shirt sleeves, but I prefer to call them “Macaroni & cheese mixed with the colorful grubs Timon and Pumbaa eat in The Lion King.” Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, cereal time, cheerios, general mills, life, pumpkin, quaker, ralston. Leave a comment

Aug. ’16

Spooned & Spotted: WWE Booty-O’s Cereal

Who? Who? Who is ready to elbow drop into a bowl of the first wrestling cereal since 1991’s WWF Superstars?

That’s right: The New Day’s once fictitious Booty O’s cereal is now 100% real and “made with 100% positivity.” It’s available at FYE stores and FYE’s website for “only” $12.99 a box.

The cartoonized trio of Big E, Kofi Kingston, and Xavier Woods appears on the front of every box, while dance move instructions and a unicorn cutout populate the side and back, respectively. Inside, the cereal itself consists of crunchy oat triangles and a superstar marshmallow ensemble of “magic,” smiles, tag titles, unicorn horns, booty crowns, rainbow hearts, and, well: actual stars.

The cereal’s colorful look sure ain’t booty, but how does it taste? We’re going to tag in cereal title belt champion Gabe Fonseca for this one. The latest video in his Cereal Time YouTube series takes an in-depth look at Booty-O’s, complete with a taste test.

As Gabe states, the cereal isn’t entirely like Lucky Charms: the chunky oat pyramids are much denser and less delicious delicious than the pillowy bits you’ll find in Lucky the Leprechaun’s breakfast of choice. Apparently they taste similar to Kellogg’s recent movie tie-in cereals, like Finding Dory Cereal.

I will say, though, that the oat pieces look an awful lot like cute little Triforces. So if we’re ever blessed with another Legend of Zelda cereal, I hope these shapes make a reappearance.

Preferably not in “Fruity Octorok Flavor.”

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cereal time, spooned & spotted. Leave a comment

Jul. ’16

Spooned & Spotted: Nature Valley Maple Brown Sugar & Cinnamon Granola Crunch

If you haven’t heard, I’m now a born-again granola evangelist.

See, I once doubted that granola was right for me. It felt wrong to munch on sticky Aggro Crag chunks of oats and healthy protein while I sat criss-cross applesauce in front of a Nickelodeon Guts marathon. But then a wise granola sensei taught me that “it’s not about the nutrition destination: it’s about the cinnamon syrup-coated journey.”

Or maybe I just read that on the back of an ’80s Southern Comfort Cookbook in the 10-for-$1 bin at a Salvation Army. I can’t quite remember.

Regardless, I’m ready to start seeing other granolas again. And thankfully, Nature Valley has just pushed out these new Granola Crunch pouches. Each satchel comes in either Maple Brown Sugar or Cinnamon and promises to contain the equivalent of 21 Nature Valley granola bars.

Anyone who’s ever sat on a Nature Valley granola bar, left a Nature Valley granola bar in their pocket, or even looked at a Nature Valley granola bar for more than 5 seconds knows that those things love to explode into avalanches of microscopic crumbs, so I don’t doubt Nature Valley’s claim. They probably just stuffed 21 bars into each bag and said some rude words about them behind their back.

Poor Nature Valley granola bars: too fragile for this world.

Oh, and here’s a bonus Spooned & Spotted for those of you who tragically don’t follow Cerealously on Instagram. Chex cereals are starting to roll out new box designs, and these ones are way more aesthetically pleasing. Posting this photo of those geometrically crisp pieces probably just made my high school geometry teacher cheer out loud without even knowing why.

I spotted both all of these products at Kroger, but if you’ve seen or tasted something awesome, you can send your picture or thoughts and have them featured on a “Spooned & Spotted” post. All you have to do is head over to our submissions page or email us at cerealously.net@gmail.com.

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: chex, cinnamon, general mills, granola, maple, nature valley, spooned & spotted. 2 Comments

Jul. ’16

Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca: Mr. T Cereal and Donkey Kong Cereal!

I pity the fool who doesn’t enjoy cereal power player Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time: a YouTube series jam-packed with more nostalgia and whole grain than that creepy Chuck e. Cheese next to a corn field your parents never let you go to.

Regular Cerealously readers know that I like to do “watch-alongs” as new episodes of this series come out, and now there are two more to share with you. These two episodes are packed with even more ’80s throwbacks than usual, so chug an Ecto-Cooler and hold on to your Dunkaroos, because Gabe’s not messing around. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cereal time, quaker, video games. Leave a comment

Jul. ’16

How Cap’n Crunch is Quietly Winning the War Against Cereal

I know I don’t often dabble in editorial content here on Cerealously, so feel free to ignore this if you’re only here for reviews. I just wanted to finally give a long-form answer to a question I’ve been asked a lot recently:

“What do you think about the future of breakfast cereal?”

There’s little doubt that cereal is at a crossroads. Between an increasingly health-conscious society, claims of “lazy millennial breakfasters,” and longer work hours that require on-the-go meals, it’s becoming harder and harder for some to justify a dazzling rainbow bowl of Froot Loops at 5:00 A.M.

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, quaker. 8 Comments

Jul. ’16

Happy 1st Birthday, Cerealously!

Today marks the one year anniversary of July 5th, 2015: the day I woke up in a post-potato salad & fireworks daze and decided it’d be a good idea to launch a website about breakfast cereal. Call me sentimental, but looking back on it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Or maybe that’s just yesterday’s potato salad again.

365 days, 133 reviews, thousands of kind readers, and countless happy calories later, Cerealously is still alive and kickin’ it: no sugar crash here. I’ve had the chance to taste some cereal-ously tasty stuff (it’s my birthday, I’m allowed to make lazy, self-referential puns), as well as a few that really tested my taste buds. I wanted to give a better visualization of this past year’s reviews, so I went back, tallied the scores, and made this:

As you can see, I love cereal: so much so that I have a hard time giving below average scores. But it isn’t just cereal contained in that Honey Nut Cheerios-colored graph, either. Those bars also represent the many Pop-Tarts, cereal bars, oatmeal, granola, and yes—even Taco Bell Cap’n Crunch Delights—that I stuffed in my face, all in the name of showing the public what makes breakfast so “grrreat!”

For those wondering, the lone “1 rating” in there is from when I ate a 3-year old box Frute Brute. Sometimes I still taste its stale ghost haunting my cereal bowl.

Since there are so many cool things in this first year to look back at, I thought I’d do a good ol’ fashioned countdown of my “Favorite Five Blog Entries from Year 1.” So without further ado, let’s relive 365 days in the course of 5 unnecessarily rambling blog posts. Click any of the titles to read the full thing: Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cerealously. 9 Comments

Jun. ’16

Cereal Time with Gabe Fonseca: Kix, Chex, Tiny Toast, and Cap’n Crunch’s Orange Creampop Crunch!

Need a YouTube series that’s kid tested, mother approved, and berry berry nostalgic? Well look no further than cereal documentarian Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time! This series brings colorful cereals of the past, present, and future right to your computer screen, and we want to share Gabe’s latest bowlful of videos with you.

The first is all about Kix. Kix seems to be a wildly divisive cereal: in most cases, you either grew up with sugary cereal and found Kix too bland, or you weren’t allowed to have the sweet stuff and treated Kix like a glazed oasis. Gabe, like me, falls in the former camp, but that doesn’t stop him from showcasing all of Kix’s cool extinct mascots.

Somewhere, buried in the plateaus of Montana, are the fossilized remains of that toothy cartoon cow. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cap'n crunch, cereal time, chex, general mills, kix. 2 Comments