All brands celebrate football season differently. M&M’s slaps eye grease and jerseys on their famous spokescandies. Pepsi erects giant cyborg quarterbacks made out of cardboard and 12-packs for grocery store displays. But Cap’n Crunch? He releases an entire football themed cereal!

It’s called Cap’n Crunch’s Touchdown Crunch cereal, and it was first introduced in 2009. However, there’s one key difference between today’s Touchdown Crunch and the one from 7 years ago. If you cross-compare the boxes, you’ll see that Cap’n Crunch got buff!

Since the Cap’n is a 53-year old cereal mascot, I can’t see why he suddenly reformed his fitness plan. Maybe it was to silence all those high school bullies who made fun of his gravity-defying eyebrows.

Or maybe it was just to impress attractive mermaids.

The cereal itself is nothing special. It tastes just like Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries, except this time those iconic blue, green, purple, and neon magenta spheres are replaced with blue and green footballs.

I’m not saying that Quaker should’ve dyed the footballs light brown and made them maple bacon-flavored, but I am saying that I would’ve written Shakespearean sonnets if they did.

There also appear to be more oblong Crunchberries in Touchdown Crunch than in a normal box of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries. But I’m just a cereal blogger and not some sort of “scientician,” so I don’t know for sure. All I know is that there are definitely fewer Crunchberries here than in a box of Oops! All Berries.

Probably.

All coconut oily berries and buttery golden treasure chests aside, the back of Touchdown Crunch’s box is the real treasure here. I implore you to click on it and gaze at its full majesty.

There’s a lot to drink in here—and I’m not talking about the fruity, corny, and sugary Cap’n Crunch endmilk I’m sipping on as I write this. Just look at all those vintage Quaker character cameos! Recent boxes for HomeRun Crunch and Orange Creampop Crunch provided similar nostalgic fan service, but this one, ironically, hits it out of the park.

Prepare for retro commercial overload. We have perennial Crunch favorites like the villainous Jean LaFoote, the ever-trusty Sea Dog, and Dave & Carlyle from the Cap’n’s crew.

Then we have memorable mascots from Cap’n Crunch spin-offs, like Henry the Hippo, Smedley the Elephant, and the Crunchberry Beast.

Finally, we have some seriously deep cuts: Sylvester the Soggy, a Crunchling from Cap’n Crunch’s famous video game, and even Magnolia Bulkhead: one of the Cap’n’s first enemies from the ’60s. If you look closely, you’ll even see Waldo from Where’s Waldo!

Nah, just kidding about that last one, though Waldo did appear on boxes of Quaker’s Life Cereal in the early ’90s. But I’ll stop cereal fanboying for now. Because it’s time for something even nerdier. See, since there’s nothing I can say about Touchdown Crunch’s flavor that I haven’t already said in my HomeRun Crunch review, I’ll just continue the sports narrative I started in that one.

I encourage you to read my HomeRun Crunch review again to get the full, childish childish story. It’s no Game of Thrones, but it won’t cost you an HBO subscription, either. Now, let’s see what imaginative scenes the fun shapes of Touchdown Crunch have inspired.

Here we see Godzilla and Anguirus playing a friendly game of pickup football with Grimace and the Blue Meanie. The kaiju pair is up 21-0, and Anguirus is lining Godzilla up for a killer Atomic Punt.

But before Anguirus even gets the chance to hilariously yank the ball away and leave Godzilla pinwheeling in the air like Charlie Brown, King Ghidorah comes to ruin all the fun.

Our four plastic friends are about ready to teach this jerk a lesson when Gigan shows up again. Ol’ Gigan is bigger and angrier now, bent on redeeming himself after his embarrassing baseball loss. Silly Gigan: doesn’t he know those claws would just pop the ball?

Now there are too many cooks in the kitchen for comfort, so everyone scatters. Our footballers make a silent pact to regroup at the ice cream shoppe later. Grimace is excited to nosh on three scoops of butter pecan in a waffle cone, but for now, he picks a good hiding place.

Fin.

As usual, that’s what I love about Touchdown Crunch. It has the perfect golden toasted oat and artificial fruit flavor combo to make me feel like a kid again. Meanwhile, the lovingly crafted box art and piece shapes encourage me to embrace my inner manchild.

But best of all, if I eat Touchdown Crunch at next February’s Super Bowl party, I might look like I know something about sports. R-right?

Please don’t beat me up for talking about the Soggies.

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The Bowl: Cap’n Crunch’s Touchdown Crunch

The Breakdown: It tastes just like Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries, and it isn’t terribly innovative. But it’s still tasty, and it’s probably more socially acceptable to eat in your man cave. Fans of crunchy ovals, rejoice!

The Bottom Line: 8.5 cereal box word puzzles that are way too easy out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 100 calories, less than 1 gram of fiber, 11 grams of sugar, and 1 gram of protein per 3/4 cup serving)