Pebbles seems to be challenging Cap’n Crunch when it comes to random brand extensions. Not long after introducing Poppin’ Pebbles, they release a limited flavor – Summer Berry.
The downside to this cereal being Pebble-theme is, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm are boring. Pebbles is just kind of there, and Bamm-Bamm has mutant strength yet doesn’t fight caveman crime. Although at least Pebbles makes sense – she has red hair like Wilma. Bamm-Bamm’s white hair makes you assume that his mutant powers gave him some physical abnormalities besides the strength. That or the more obvious assumption that Betty wasn’t very faithful.
The box reads Fourth of July pretty well, although the abundance of white and very light blue gives it a more immediate impression of being winter themed.
I don’t know if the cereal tastes exactly like Poppin’ Pebbles, minus the exploding boulder things, but from what I remember it is similar. They both had that strong, unpleasant, almost medicinal initial scent. The first impressions of the flavor was similar as well – not that good at first, but you get used to it and it averages out to a decent bowl of cereal.
Visually, it’s nice – the red and blue are very vibrant, letting you know that the coloring is sure to be all natural.
But overall? Eh. It has the downsides of Poppin’ Pebbles without the fun novelty. It’s not bad, just forgettable, and definitely an inferior sibling of the original Pebbles cereals.
[no seal of approval]
I was rather confused when I saw the box for Jif Cereal.
First, the design just looks old. I know it’s based on the Jif label, but still, it looks like a box of cereal from the 70’s. Especially since Jif isn’t exactly a hot commodity right now – it’s just sort of there. I know choosy moms have been supporting Jif for a long while, but they might not be the trend-setters they think they are.
Not helping the situation is the not particularly attractive cereal pieces taking up a good portion of the box.
The cereal itself doesn’t really look like a cereal that should be made any more. It just looks… old. The shape seems arbitrarily chosen, and the shade is sad looking – it’s not even close to the same shade as actual peanut butter.
But the taste is what really counts, right? And the taste is pretty good. I’m coming to the conclusion that with cereal, the more “real” the peanut butter flavor is, the less I enjoy it – especially in the long run.
Cereals like Peanut Butter Cheerios and Peanut Butter Toast Crunch tasted great at first, but quickly grew tiresome to me. I’ve never bought a second box of either. Meanwhile I love the less authentic representations of the flavor like Reese’s Puffs. I also love the flavor of Peanut Butter Crunch, but I lack the jaw of Trap Jaw from Masters of the Universe to be able to chew through those rock-hard pieces.
Overall, the flavor is good. It’s not as super peanut butter-y as some other peanut butter cereals, which is ironic given the brand it’s attached to. It finds a pretty comfortable middle ground between authentic taste and “cereal” taste. It kept its crunch for a reasonable amount of time, and flavored the milk a little, just so you knew it was there.
Will I buy another box? Probably not. But I do think it was good enough to check out to see if it’s up your peanut butter alley.
[insert half-hearted seal of approval here]
BONUS CEREAL REVIEW!
On the back of the box for Jif Cereal, they suggest mixing it with Double Chocolate Krave, to MacGyver your own chocolate and peanut butter cereal.
This sounded like a pretty awesome combination. Double Chocolate Krave is one of my favorite chocolate cereals in a while, and while the shapes aren’t identical, it seemed like they’d blend together pretty well.
First off – the cereal didn’t look nearly this ugly in person. My camera just seemed to get super confused about the color palette and decide, “Everything in this picture should have its brown-ness tweaked!”
The Krave pieces were bigger than the Jif Pieces, which surprisingly hurt the mixture more than you’d think. It took actual effort to balance the spoonfuls, since even after thorough mixing I kept winding up with almost all Krave or all Jif on the spoon. But I persevered through these hardships to determine the flavor.
In the end, it was okay. The flavors didn’t really go together that well – it just made me wish I was eating the cereals separately.
What I think would be a much better solution would be to use Quik instead of milk when you have a bowl of Jif Cereal. I think I might have to try that.
I appreciate the recognition of Kellogg’s, who is finally catering to the “eating cereal at 3 AM before going to bed and / or waking up in the middle of the night and eat cereal, bleary-eyed, then go back to sleep” consumer category of which I am a proud member.
One aspect of childhood that will fall by the wayside in this “everything on the internet” time is the concept of only having vague memories of some form of media from when you were younger.
There won’t be any more “there was this movie, and there was this guy in it and I think he had an eye patch or a hat or something. Anyway, it was weird.” Because now you can Google “movie weird eye patch” and bam, there it is.
Which isn’t to say this is a foolproof plan. I’ve long been trying to find the name of this series of books I had as a kid. The main character was a lion (or some other big cat) with a Cap’n Crunch-esque sailor hat, and he had a rodent friend who put ketchup on his ice cream. And yet, searching “children’s book lion sailor ketchup” has not helped me one bit. No Google, for the thousandth time I am not looking for “Ketchup On Your Cornflakes” – stop showing me this result!
So if you know what those books are, let me know.
Searching for stuff from your childhood can be a rewarding task, though normally it just sends you into some weird, vertigo-inducing spiral of deja vu which ultimately just ends up with an indiscernible feeling of sadness.
But pre-internet, talking about stuff from your childhood that no one else remembered just turned into some stoner-esque conversation, where the two sides of the conversation are talking to each other, but neither side knows what the other is talking about.
I had this phenomenon for two main movies from my childhood. One was less vague, because I knew the title – “The Peanut Butter Solution”. But I’d only seen it once or twice, so my pieced-together memories didn’t help explain the movie, and instead made it sound like a truly horrific thing to watch. Now, in the internet age, I can watch a VHS-rip of it, to realize that the movie actually kind of sucked. Oh well.
The second movie achieved a far more legendary status in my childhood. All I remembered about it was some teacher and her class getting kidnapped by some guys wearing creepy children’s masks. Then, at some point about ten years ago, I looked up “movie creepy masks teacher” and there it was – “Fortress”.
Fortress used to air on HBO a lot in the mid-80’s. And I’d watch it all the time. In retrospect, this was a really weird movie for a child to watch, which you’ll understand more when you see how the plot unfolds.
The creepy masks really were the movie’s selling point. They had a variety of movie posters, I guess for different video, TV, and movie theater releases. This is why I had to specify “1985 / 1986” as the release year(s) – 1985 was the TV movie release, 1986 was its theatrical release. But they knew what the public wanted on this box:
What’s odd is that my situation was not unique – every time I’ve mentioned this movie online, I get the same response from numerous people. “I used to watch this as a kid, and I can’t believe my parents let me.” This isn’t to say this is some depraved horror movie, or something truly terrifying – it’s just a weird movie for kids to watch, and a weird movie for so many kids to have watched.
And while it didn’t entirely hold up to this mythical movie my memories had turned it into (that was a lot of “m” sounds), it does hold up as a “Well, that certainly was… something” type of movie.
The movie starts off employing the concept of “scary music makes things scary”, as we pan across a farm while creepy music plays. This is, presumably, to lure you in, because the next five minutes or so just involve a rural Australian family eating breakfast. The school teacher also lives with them, for some reason.
We find out that the reason she lives with them might be because she isn’t getting paid much, because she is a terrible role model. She is walking two of her students to school, walking on train tracks, which are clearly in use. She finally steps off the tracks as the train passes her, literally less than two seconds behind her.
The movie keeps playing creepy music, as a hint to not turn the movie off, despite the fact that all we’re watching is Australian school children, of a variety of ages, playing in a school yard.
I’m not sure how the school actually works, since they are multiplying fractions, despite the fact that half the class appears to be made up of five year old children.
Fortress decides that ten minutes of watching rural children discussing killing foxes and classroom antics is enough, and gets things going with a cut to…
BAM! Creepy duck mask guy!
I’m sure there were a lot of things I was afraid of as a kid, but there are two things that vividly stick with me. That shot of the duck mask guy, and when Ronald Reagan’s head comes out of the water in the video for “Land of Confusion” by Genesis.
The creepiness can be found at 3:30 in. Well, the creepiness can be found in the entire video, but that part was traumatizing to me as a kid. I’d look away every time it was on. I’m much better now that I’ve grown up – now when I watch it, I’m only a little scared of that part.
Honestly, this movie doesn’t even need a plot.
Just give me ninety minutes of creepy-masked guys scaring children while that stressful 80’s synth music plays, and I’d be happy.
But, for some reason, they felt a plot was needed on top of the awesomeness that is little kids being terrorized.
The children (and the credits) name the masks as Dabby Duck, Mac the Mouse, Pussy Cat, and Father Christmas. Looking more into the movie, I wondered if these were Australian cartoon characters, or just ripoffs of the name Daffy Duck and Mickey Mouse. I didn’t find anything regarding the characters, so I assume they’re just for the movie.
What kind of insane grammar school is this?
Given how many people apparently saw this when they were little, I don’t understand how we didn’t all grow up absolutely terrified of Santa Claus. All of the masked men in this are creepy, but Santa is far and away the worst. Especially since he’s the one tasked with riding in the back of the creepy kidnapper van with the teacher and the kids.
When the teacher suggests the kids all sing, Santa threatens them with a gun, screaming “SHUT UP!” to them. Which, really, is fair. Who wants to be stuck in a van with nine singing kids? The mask will only muffle your ears so much.
When they stop the van to go to the bathroom, the teacher suggests one of the kids, named Tommy, hide in the bushes then run for help.
Kids being kids, they blow the plan within two minutes.
On the bright side, the news gets better when the kidnappers reveal where the kids are off to next:
Despite the imposing entrance, the cave they are shuttled into isn’t so bad. So now, they’re in a cave. Which is still better than stuck in the back of that creepy van with evil Santa. And you could even make an argument that it’s better than their classroom. Actually, forget it – no argument needed. That cave is awesome.
Oh…
wait…
I must admit, the cave is decidedly less awesome now.
After eating lunch and starting a fire from paper and books they had, which will surely last at least four minutes, the teacher tells the kids to gather around so they can have a “council of war”. None of the kids asks what that means, which implies that they’ve already had a council of war before, which is… odd.
Their plan of action is to move the boulder blocking them in. The two older boys start making boasts about moving the boulder, and that they’re not just a bunch of kids.
So after not being able to move the boulder, they make a new plan.
After realizing one of the kids has a bottle of oily salad dressing, the teacher puts a shoelace into a can filled with the oil. I thought, “oh cool, they’re going to make a Molotov Cocktail to throw at the kidnappers.” Instead, it turns out they’re making a lamp. That works too, I guess.
They go off to explore the cave, and come upon a pool of water. Since they see daylight on the far end, the teacher decides to swim over to see if it leads out. But not before stripping to just her underwear in front of a little kid.
The whole group heads to the water to swim out. Now we’ve got a bunch of almost naked little kids, which is rather off-putting.
After a bunch of slow motion footage of the kids swimming underwater (in their underwear, which is now wet, which is now much worse), they all escape the cave.
Now, the most logical course of action would be sneak towards society and find a phone, right? Well first, they decide to have a picnic to eat more lunch. After they eat, the teacher encourages the kids to take a nap. Huh? They couldn’t have been swimming underwater for that far. You know, because of the possibility of drowning, and all. So they have no idea when the kidnappers will return, they couldn’t have gotten that far from the cave’s entrance, but sure – time for a nap!
My plan of going to the first house they can find turns out to not be as solid as I thought…
… since the first house they come upon results in this.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
So, they’re kidnapped again.
Besides the inherent creepiness of the Santa kidnapper, one other wild thing about him is – just how big are his eyes? They fit the mask perfectly, he just looks like a scary Santa cartoon character. Like, he’s got his eyes pressed right up against the mask – that can’t be comfortable. Kudos to you, Santa, for going the extra mile. You’re a good guy.
The teacher asks for something to eat, and Santa tells her that their food is back at the cave, where they were bringing it to them. So he tells them that they can go without food. He then tells the lady of the house to serve up four plates. Four – you know, like the number of kidnappers. Faced with these facts, one of the kids declares, “I hope she gives us lots of spuds!” I know they’ve been through a lot today but jeez – these kids are stupid.
In case you’re wondering which kid uttered the line about spuds, it’s the one at the bottom right. You know, the only one smiling.
The man of the house gets mad because Santa hit his wife, so he attacks Santa and Santa gives him a shotgun blast in the chest. As Santa is wont to do.
The shot breaks the fish tank, spilling fish everywhere. So the oldest girl starts picking up the fish. Really, that’s your go-to first priority? Although I guess they are hungry.
While stuck in a barn, the group hatches a plan to get free. This plan seemingly relies on one of the kidnappers being dumb as rocks. They invite the cat to sit next to them by the fire, offer him cookies, while the older girl (who has apparently gotten over the fish trauma) flirts with him. And the cat kidnapper thinks this is all status quo.
One of the older boys hits the cat, knocking him out, shooting Tommy in the process. Tommy isn’t dead, but he did take a shotgun to the shoulder, so he’s probably not that good, either.
While escaping (again), the teacher comes across the duck kidnapper, whose head is tied to a fence. Very soon after, his head is not attached to his body, which is even less good than getting shot in the shoulder. It’s also worse than being tied to a fence while your head is still attached to your body.
Presumably, the other kidnappers killed him, because one of them was heard earlier yelling that he wanted out. I’m going to rule out suicide, since decapitating yourself whilst attached to a fence is tough to pull off.
Keep in mind – this movie aired on TV.I know it was HBO, so maybe I should add some extra details – this movie aired on TV in the daytime. When kids get home from school and watch TV.
Fun Fact: the guy who plays the duck also played Bennett in “Commando”. He would also go on to star in another movie in 1992 named… “Fortress”.
After escaping the barn, they hide out in another cave. I guess the director really wanted to get his money’s worth from the cave set they already paid for.
The next morning, the teacher finds Santa wandering the woods, so she shoots him in the head. That would be too easy, so it turns out she just shot the mask. The remaining two kidnappers are elsewhere in the woods, shouting taunts to the kids.
The teacher decides that they need to fight back, pointing out that they outnumber the kidnappers four to one. She’s forgetting the fact that most of their numbers involve little kids, but okay.
We are then treated to a montage of the kids making lots of spears, setting deadly traps, and doing all sorts of other fun activities.
Oh, and putting on war paint. The “Lord of the Flies” ending this movie is about to reveal just wouldn’t be complete without it. That little kid is a total Jack in the making.
I’m assuming the final battle takes place two weeks after they started, since that would be the minimum amount of time needed to make the hundreds of spears and traps they created.
The oldest girl, Narelle, tells the teacher that she got her period, then proceeds to disappear in the woods, as teenaged girls often do. While wandering in the woods, she is chased by the mouse kidnapper.
After dropping boulders on a fighting teacher and mouse, the kids watch them as they fall on the spears, where the mouse dies. The kids have also taken to calling the teacher “Sally”, as a very (cough) subtle way of showing that this experience has forced them to grow up.
We get our first glimpse of an unmasked Santa, with his mask-eye-hole-filling eyes. You can tell he’s a villain because he’s got an earring.
And Santa gets his first glimpse of the dead mouse.
Everything I know about shooting guns, I learned from video games, so I’m certainly no expert. But this isn’t a normal way to fire a shotgun, right?
Santa finds his way into the cave, where he trips and falls into a campfire, and somehow it gets worse from there.
Sally and the kids proceed to stab Santa with spears, hit him with axes and rocks, and just generally make Santa’s life not great for about five minutes, while they repeatedly beat and stab him to death.
Also they hit him with rocks. Don’t forget the rocks. Come to think of it, this might be overkill.
Back at the school, it appears they finally decided to go dig Narelle out of the woods. Nice of them.
Some policemen show up, following up about why their kidnappers wound up stabbed seven hundred times and mutilated. The kids encircle the policemen, in a vaguely threatening manner, and the policemen decide that they’d rather not piss off the group of killer Australian outback kids that stabbed a man seven hundred times and mutilated him.
Tommy, a boy who has no idea what the term “too soon” means, decides it’d be hilarious to stand in the window with a Santa mask on. Good job, Tommy. Spook a teacher who is now a hardened killer, and is very likely armed in the classroom at this point.
You might think, “Oh, they killed the kidnappers because they had to. It was a one time thing and they took no joy in it – they’re not hardened killers.” I could buy that, if it weren’t for the fact that the last shot of the movie is Sally smiling at a glass jar, which contains the Santa kidnapper’s heart.
I mean, yeah, that’s an awesome classroom decoration, but that’s still some macabre stuff.
And there you have it – Fortress. A movie that countless children watched countless times. It sure beats most daytime entertainment for kids being aired these days.
If you’ve recently thought to yourself, “I love peeling bananas, but I don’t actually like eating fruit or even taking in nutrients, for that matter.” – you’re in luck!
Presumably after their mind had been altered by a trip on the terrifying chocolate river ferry, someone over at Wonka came up with the Peel-a-Pop. This is an ice cream confection where you peel the “skin” off the ice cream, to get to the “fruit” within. Sure, why not?
By the way, I apologize for using the term “ice cream confection” – it sounds too grown up. But it’s not an ice pop, or even a bar, so I didn’t know what else to do.
Unlike bananas, unless you are eating them incorrectly, with the Peel-a-Pops, you are expected to eat the peel. You probably won’t want to (more on that in a minute), but you can and are encouraged to do so.
The Peel-a-Pops come in Vanilla Grape and Vanilla Banana. I didn’t buy the Vanilla Banana flavor because that sounded vile. But in case you require a review of both flavors, here is my review of Vanilla Banana: No.
On the back of the box is where things take a bit of a turn. This is mostly due to some very creepy terminology being used.
Wonka advises you to stay fit by balancing tasty treats with oodles of active play. First, “oodles” is an inherently unpleasant word. The only time it is acceptable to use that word is when you are referring to Oodles of Noodles. Otherwise, you sound like a pervert.
And speaking of perverts, I can never hear “Tasty Treats” and not immediately think of this:
Apologies for the atrocious quality but the show likes to take down everything of theirs from Youtube, so I had to make do with what was available.
In case your interest is piqued by the “fantabulous fact” that the pops are 70 calories each, the box also rewards you with twice the nutritional facts.
Apparently Wonka assumes that people who are enticed by foods that you can peel will not be good at math, so they felt the need to not only tell you the calories for two bars, but for one instead.
Fret not – you don’t have to do all the complicated “dividing by two” here – Wonka’s got your back. Although some of the numbers, when compared, do show off that nutritional fact information rule of “if it’s less than half a gram, let’s just pretend it’s not there. (shrug)”
I was surprised by the size of the pop itself. I wasn’t expecting it to be the size of a banana, but it was still much smaller than I expected. (Insert Michael Scott .gif here.)
The pop also reminds me of the exogorth (AKA space slug, for those of you who go outside) from Empire Strikes Back.
After breaking out a ruler, since writing “about this big” while cupping my thumb and fingers into a rough estimation of size doesn’t translate well into text, the pop is about four inches tall.
The peeling, while not effortless, works fairly well, and results in sort of a banana-looking thing. It’s at this point where much of the appeal (no pun intended) falls apart.
I was expecting the peel to be sort of like Fruit By The Foot. It obviously needed some sort of chewy texture to peel like that, so I figured that made the most sense. Instead, it had the texture of what I assume that wax you peel of Babybel cheese would be like, if it was left outside to soften. And tasted about as good as that, as well.
The peel is simply awful. The texture is horrifying, and it has a taste not unlike children’s cough medicine.
The ice cream itself is good – the vanilla flavor tastes similar to vanilla Jell-O Pudding Pops, with a very light hint of grape flavor sucked in from the peel through osmosis. But in the end, you realize that the only edible part of this pop is a few inches of vanilla ice cream, and decide that’s not a very exciting treat.
Don’t get me wrong – Wonka products are awesome… usually. This was just a miss for them. I appreciate the idea of adding a novelty factor for absolutely no other reason than adding a novelty factor. They knew it wouldn’t make the product taste better, and that it would just make it harder to eat. But they still made it just to have this strange product thrown out there, and I respect that.
But when my dog, who literally eats feces out of my cat’s litter box if given the chance, refuses to eat the peel, it’s not a good sign.
It’s possible that this was one of the products that Charlie green-lit after taking over, so maybe Willy isn’t at fault for this. If the Peel-a-Pop was a song from the movie, it would be “Cheer Up Charlie” – not good, off-putting, has a weird grape flavor, and dogs don’t like it.
Well, most of those attributes apply to both the Peel-a-Pop and the song, anyway.
Unless there is a gigantic “NEW!” or similar claim, I don’t usually get too emotionally invested in cereal boxes. Sure, sometimes they are depressing, like when the drawings of Lucky the Lephrachaun get a little too realistic, or when the vibe of a “budget” cereal is just a little too sad.
But other than that, for the most part, whatever you want to throw at me on the front of the box is fine.
Until now.
I’ve long spoken of Honey Nut Cheerios as a cereal that doesn’t get enough respect, especially from me. It’s a very good cereal that, for some reason, has an overwhelming aura of boringness to it. I’ve done a better job of powering through my irrational prejudices against it, and making it part of my regular rotation. But now, they are really testing my newfound loyalty.
The new Honey Nut Cheerios box is an abomination.
By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials set to Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me”, oh so cleverly re-imagined as “Must Be the Honey”. It’s the sort of parody song that Weird Al would crank out in a few seconds, should he ever develop an addiction to cocaine that destroyed his existing finances.
You know when you’re talking to someone, and ten minutes after the conversation ends you think of a really funny reply? And you’re just angry at yourself, knowing the chance has passed and you will never get to use it? That’s what this should have been. When the song was relevant, “Must Be the Honey” could have been a moderately clever jingle, for the month or so we would have put up with it.
But thirteen years after the fact? I’m sorry, General Mills – you’ve got to let that idea fade into the ether.
Small favors, I suppose – they give you some good news on the front of the box – it’s “Limited Edition”. Not limited enough, unfortunately, that it didn’t reach my supermarket.
Even Buzz Bee’s redesign makes him look like a jerk. Here he is, on the box of Medley Crunch:
He’s got some style there – rocking Chuck Taylors, a modern, smooth crotch region, and Bart Simpson’s shirt. Now he’s wearing Fred Durst’s shirt, let his undercarriage hair grow out, and is wearing some sort of chromed sneakers.
The awfulness continues, and actually grows, on the back of the box.
First, he addresses us as “Home Bees” – bad start. Regarding his signature, at first I thought it was an amalgamation of a drawing of a bee and his initials, since the wings look like the “B” in “Bee”. But since his first name is Buzz, and I couldn’t find the first “B”, I think his signature is literally a drawing of himself.
For that, I have to give him credit – that’s awesome. I’m tempted to just put a little stick figure man on my credit card signature line, and sign all my legal documents that way. So, fair’s fair and give credit where credit’s due and all that. Well done, Buzz.
Back to the terribleness. Although I’m feeling a bit of fatigue from this box, so we’ll wrap this up.
No.
What I don’t get is, why did Buzz Bee decide that he wanted to adopt the persona of Kenny Fisher from “Can’t Hardly Wait”? Although I can’t decide if Buzz Bee Tweeting “Why ya’ll gotta waste my honey flava? #mustbethehoney #loveburger4eva” would annoy me or make me proud. I think the latter.
After successfully avoiding using Twitter for however long it’s existed, I had to create an account, if only to tweet this, in response to General Mills’s request that I share my “Must Be the Honey” moments:
Listen, Buzz, or General Mills – whoever reads this – stop this. Right now. Honey Nut Cheerios is an awesome cereal. But it isn’t, and never will be, a cool cereal. It’s a cereal that people don’t have for a while, then go, “Oh, 2 for $5? I guess I’ll grab a box.” Then they enjoy the boxes, and next time they’re at the store, they remember this and buy more. Then they forget. Repeat pattern.
Bring back Buzz’s Chucks, clean up his act, make him pull up his pants / fuzzy crotch, and cut this crap out.
It seems that lots of my cereal reviews start off with an admission akin to, “I don’t usually give (whatever cereal) the credit it deserves. Then I eat it and am glad I got it.” So I guess that can be my catch phrase.
I don’t usually give Honeycomb the credit it deserves. Then I eat it and am glad I got it.
Hmm, not as catchy as I’d hoped.
While confirming the actual spelling of Honeycomb, it became clear that Post isn’t particularly strict about presenting the cereal’s name. I always thought Honeycomb was one word, but the box indicates it is “Honey-Comb”. But according to Post’s web site, it is indeed Honeycomb. So on the box, they broke one of the main rules of professional writing – avoid that dangling hyphen thing. Oddly enough, “dangling hyphen thing” is the actual term.
What an exciting paragraph that was!
I saw the “Limited Time Only!” and was confused. Then I noticed the almost subtle “With Twisted Marshmallows” subtitle, and was even more confused. Why would they add marshmallows to this? Honeycomb’s cereal pieces are gigantic – they are probably the biggest pieces of any cereal. So are the marshmallows going to be as big as quarters to keep pace, or are they going to be regular-sized cereal pieces lost amidst the monstrous Honeycomb pieces?
What was also surprising was the box’s design – usually when a cereal comes out with a limited-edition variety, the box design gets a dramatic makeover. Instead, Honeycomb was chill about it, content to just add a little line at the bottom to let you know what’s up. There are also marshmallows flying around, but they’re almost camouflaged.
In retrospect, I don’t even remember seeing regular Honeycombs on the shelf – only this. So is this “limited time only” edition taking the place of Honeycomb completely, albeit temporarily? It is extremely possible that I just forgot to look closely for the regular version. I’ll let you in on a little secret – my reviews don’t have the most stringent of guidelines and aren’t the most disciplined. This might also help explain why this site clearly hasn’t been re-designed since the year 2000.
So the official answer on whether or not the marshmallow version has temporarily replaced the regular version altogether is – “maybe, I don’t know – it’s possible”.
Again, the biggest question for all of this is, “Why?” Some cereals seem like they don’t need marshmallows, but wind up being pretty solid – Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, and other examples I don’t feel like remembering at this moment. But Honeycomb? It makes about as much sense as adding marshmallows to Frosted Mini-Wheats. But then again, they did get me to buy a box, which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, so I have no real room to talk.
Pouring the cereal, I was (again) confused – I didn’t see any marshmallows. Upon closer inspection, I found some of the saddest looking marshmallows you will ever see. They are about 1/6 the size of the cereal pieces, and colored in this tan and slightly tanner tan color scheme. They look expired.
When I did my reviews of expired cereals, many of the old marshmallows looked similar to Honeycomb’s marshmallows. Which, as you may have guessed, is not a compliment.
This is Pokemon cereal from 2000, eaten in the year 2012 – look how much more vibrant and appetizing they look, as compared to these:
So visually, the cereal is not a home run for Honeycomb.
As for the overall taste and eating experience – it’s like eating a bowl of Honeycomb cereal, except once in a while something feels different while chewing and tastes sort of different, but you’re not sure why.
I’m not saying it isn’t a good cereal – it is. It’s just a strange and very unnecessary change, especially given how unappealing the marshmallows look. Speaking again of the marshmallows, that “Twisted Marshmallows” claim on the box is a bit of a sham. I was initially expecting something shaped like a little Twizzlers Pull ‘N’ Peels.
Instead, we get little hexagons with a swirl on it. Twisted marshmallows? More like swirled marshmallows! I feel sorry for Post after that burn.
So the marshmallows are pointless and rather unappealing to look at, but the gigantic Honeycomb pieces crush the marshmallow sadness, and make for a standard enjoyable Honeycomb experience.
While visually the marshmallows aren’t a home run, the overall cereal-eating experience is “a foul ball that goes into the crowd and hits a little kid in the head and he’s bleeding and crying but the team gives him some autographed memorabilia to make him feel better so in the end it’s a pretty good deal for the kid.” Or something like that.
I thought Birthday Cake M&M’s might be to coincide with some landmark anniversary of the candy’s release, but the packaging indicates nothing. The pastel blue gives off an “Easter” vibe, or even might make you confuse it for M&M’s Minis, due to the similar shade of blue. But nope, it’s different.
Sorry for this obvious filler, I just have nothing to really say about these. I guess I’ll talk about the candy itself? That’s always a good topic when reviewing food.
Opening the bag, you are absolutely punched in the face with a sugary smell. Birthday Cake is almost never a flavor I like, because companies tend to just think, “What does Birthday Cake taste like? Weaponized levels of sugar? Okay, go with that.”
The M&M’s come in red, yellow, and blue. These are, apparently, the official colors of birthdays.
If you’ve ever had anything artificially “Birthday Cake” flavored (ignore the fact that most real birthday cakes are artificially flavored), you know what these M&M’s will taste like. A little bit of the average chocolate flavor they are known for, mixed with an overwhelming fake cake flavor.
Similar to their Gingerbread variety, the fakeness of the taste is off putting. If you’re a huge fan of the Birthday Cake flavor of sweets, you’ll probably find what you’re looking for here. For me, bleh.
Diet Coke-Babies 