And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards breakfast to be born?

Seriously: if you showed me the above product 30 years ago, my dad would be putting a fist in your soon-to-be-twinkling eye. But seriously Cerealously: I’ve become so accustomed to the notion of Pop-Tarts as a cereal that I hardly stopped to consider the infinite opportunity within its inverse.

Now, Froot Loops probably wouldn’t be my first choice for a co-branded Kellogg’s Crunch-Tart. I would’ve picked Raisin Bran or Cocoa Krispies, if only so they could be called Snap, Crackle Pop-Tarts. But nevertheless, this sort of fusion you’d think would be forbidden by church and state alike has come to my bruncheon nook

Churning and churning in my widening stomach
The Toucan cannot hear the toaster;
Crust falls apart, the filling cannot hold;
Iced anarchy is Looped upon my bowl.

Wow. Okay, there’s a lot goin’ on here.

Before we even talk taste, I must acknowledge that using the “Printed Fun” graphics on these Froot Loops Pop-Tarts was a deeply dubious choice by Kellogg’s. With all due respect to Toucan Samuel himself, these glossy JPEGs look like the type I’d drag into a clumsy high school PowerPoint summing up my scientific inquiries into fruity cereals’ uniformity of color distribution.

I’m not claiming to be an expert in the medium of iced crust, I feel hot red frosting with an orange drizzle and rainbow sprinkles would feel less like chewing up clipart and more like eating a worthy heir to the Pop-Tarts brand. A new flavor must follow its vehicle’s established decorum of design; otherwise Pop-Tarts Cereal would’ve just been crushed-up pastry handfuls.

But that’s only talking aesthetics. Luckily for Froot Loops Pop-Tarts, though perhaps not surprisingly, they nail their namesake cereal’s flavor with chemical accuracy. In fact, the industrial Froot Loops paste (“It’s not McDonald’s pink slime,” I repeat to myself) inside every Pop-Tart is so sharply flavored with mixed faux fruitiness that it’s tough to even taste the crust or frosting. This filling attempts to cram each of Froot Loops cereal’s nuanced citrus and tropical punch undertones into a millisecond of bursting flavor.

So it’s good. It really is. But it’s intense, and a bit of Dole Cup syrupiness lingers in the aftertaste. For this reason, I sincerely recommend dunking Froot Loops Pop-Tarts in a glass, if not a small trough, of milk. I also earnestly discourage you from crumbling Froot Loops Pop-Tarts in a bowl of milk. Because Pop-Tarts sink, and you don’t want to learn that the mushily soft way.

A Pop-Tart that shouldn’t be toasted is a rarity. Like a flightless bird or a panda who prefers leeks. But as we saw with the scarring phenomenon of frozen bacon, the logical eating temperature of a Pop-Tart’s flavor overrules one’s pastry preparation method of choice. I wouldn’t flambé a bowl of Froot Loops like soggy-naki, so the sensory experience of hot Froot Loops just feels wrong.

The crust becomes hearty and caramelized, unable to gel with the rosy gel inside, which is still too candied of a jam to taste good spread inside toast. Even worse, the scalded icing prints make me think of used paper towel, a perhaps illogical association that nevertheless had to be put to paper.

Freezing a Froot Loops Pop-Tart produces a similarly uncanny effect, albeit a more palatable one. Not quite the Arctic delight of a Froot Loops Milkshake, frozen Froot Loops Pop-Tarts taste more like an overdone ICEE, stewed in its own flavor sauce for a while. It thinly calls to mind a perversely sweetened fruit pie, but really this frozen Tart tastes exactly as you’d might imagine.

In reality, you’re best off enjoying a Froot Loops Pop-Tarts as lukewarm as the day God foil-wrapped it. This makes for a genuinely enjoyable milk-glass companion that evokes the best parts of Froot Loops the cereal, even if this mostly happens during a flash-in-the-pan moment of so-so-sweet jubilation. Serving as an adequate New Hope, I hope Froot Loops paves the way for more Kellogg’s Cereal Pop-Tarts, as the series holds much promise.

Is it weird to admit I’d love a Cracklin’ Oat Bran Pop-Tart that’s just an empty frame of cinnamon-spiced crust?

The Bowl: Kellogg’s Froot Loops Pop-Tarts

The Breakdown: A faithful, if not frenetic, recontextualization of classic Froot Loops fakeness, these Pop-Tarts have real pacing and sugar-balance issues, as well as trouble adapting to Toucan-unfriendly climates. But if you’re a sucker for cheap thrills like me, a box of these is still more enjoyable than a couple Cashword lottery tickets.

The Bottom Line: 6.5 granulated .pngs out of 10