What’s the cereal equivalent of a Bigfoot hunter? A crisp-tozoologist?

Whatever it is, I want a job doing it for the Smithsonian. Empty Bowl listeners should already be familiar with my love of cereal myths—talking about the same cereal legends all day has me craving a tasty enigma—and much like last year’s Freedom Crunch fiasco, I’m proud to report on another cold cereal case, developing in real time.

It’s about a certain Kellogg’s Splatoon 2 Cereal, and I’ve labelled it a loose rumor, despite having no evidence beyond the photographed screen above. There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this possible Nintend-elicious successor to Super Mario Cereal, but other facts that help this story hold milk. Let’s run through the facts:

• This first and only photo came to light just a few days ago, shared by Reddit user /u/carloscd44. They claim to have stumbled upon it on Walmart’s website while looking for other new cereals, but after returning to the page the day after, it was gone, leaving the OP and viewers alike uncertain about its legitimacy.

• To clear up initial fears of fake leaks—a problem that has notoriously plagued the Nintendo Super Smash Bros. community—I confirmed that the URL the OP presented is (or at least was) a real part of Walmart’s site. Now, the link redirects visitors to a page for Super Mario Cereal.

This suggests to me that the cereal was either posted ahead of its planned release, and the URL will remain until it’s time, or Kellogg’s scrapped the cereal concept entirely, and this was a leftover and hitherto undiscovered page.

• While I’d love to believe the former is the case, the clearly unfinished box art presented leaves more questions than answers. Splatoon 2 the video game was first released almost two years ago now, and while the game still releases new content, this time gap is far larger than Super Mario Cereal, which debuted the same month as Super Mario Odyssey.

Back to the box art itself, we can see lots of awkward empty space, seemingly incomplete Inkling models, cereal that cannot be clearly seen, and a logo that bizarrely uses a paint splatter to cover up part of the word CEREAL—which, in itself, appears to use the same font as Super Mario Cereal.

Adding all this up, plus the fact that I can’t dig up any other info about it online, makes me very hesitant to make any confident conclusion on Splatoon 2 Cereal’s legitimacy. In my eyes, the most convincing clue is the timing: the fact that the page went down the same day /u/carloscd44 found it seems like quite the convenient coincidence, but whether I’ll be wrapping my tentacles around a bowl of it or just crossing it off my rumors list with red ink remains to be seen.

If you have any information about Splatoon 2 Cereal, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’ll even play you on Final Destination for it—no items, of course.