Cereal killers

Hey! Have you guys ever cared if your cereal stays crispy in milk? Me neither! In fact, I always preferred half-mush, the texture is that much more pleasing and I just like it so much better when the milk and cereal become one, milk taking on sweet sugary goodness and cereal becoming an entirely different molecular structure that requires no chewing. Plus, when you’re dealing with something like Cap’n Crunch or my old childhood favorite, Quaker Oh’s! (like Quakers really have Ohs! OH!) cereal tends to do to the roof of my mouth what Stevie Nicks does to all her clothes – shreds it to within an inch of its life – and milk acts as Tom Petty, deemphasizing the abrasiveness and toning it down a little. We’re talking about when cereal went solo of course, not while cereal was still effing everyone in Fleetwood Mac.

So this crunch concept is lost on me, ever since Crispix made their claims about staying crispy in milk – corn on one side, rice on the other, I was never into it. Interesting side note, when I was growing up, the local supermarket’s generic version of Crispix was called Crispy Hexagons. That one’s for all you geometry nerds out there. Am I a dork? I guess Euclid say that I am.

This is why I hate those Raisin Bran Crunch commercials wherein employees at a drab, be-cubicled office misconstrue office talk and then misunderstandings ensue because they are obliviously deaf from all the crunching going on.

The Oblivious Deaf Crunch has been used in four commercials so far where everyone from interns to H.R. eat cereal at their desks from real bowls and blankly stare at bosses named “Johnson” and “Smith” who bark at them, all the while the only sound they are aware of is that inner ear crunch. This is actually the kind of commercial that, even when watched 20 times, I still never really knew what it was for and I started paying attention for the last five seconds just to find out. So you can understand why I think the continuation of the Oblivious Deaf Crunch into commercials for other Kellogg’s “Crunch” cereals like Caramel Nut Crunch and Cran-Vanilla Crunch in unneccessary. How many times can we see this same scenario over and over? And I understand that the office is the one stationary location in which all these different situations occur, it’s not like someone can be in the car or shopping while eating a bowl of cereal, but how many people have you ever seen eating cereal at work? At their desks? From a bowl? A Tupperware container maybe, but not a bowl. Two scoops of raisins and zero scoops of actual thought put into the marketing. Caramel Nut Crunch does sound good though, even though they pronounce it Carml and I say Care-a-mell. It’s cereal with caramel! They should be playing up it’s sugary sweet goodness, not the crunch! I know I’d buy that.