FrankenFood

When I was 10 years old, General Mills released two new cereals that my brother and I, following orders from the television, demanded that Mom buy. Those cereals were Count Chocula and Frankenberry. This was about the same time that I was building those Universal Monsters models, and when I stayed up late every Saturday night to watch some B-grade, black and white horror movie on Creature Features. So the new cereals, with cartoon monsters featured prominently on the boxes, appealed to me. (Today, the scariest aspect of these “new” cereals is realizing that they were introduced almost half a century ago.)

Count Chocula, of course, was a chocolate flavored cereal, while Frankenberry purported to be strawberry flavored. Both contained what were called “marshmallow bits.” Alas, it turned out that the dye used in Frankenberry was undigestible in young children, resulting in a condition that came to be known as “Frankenberry Stool.” I’m not making this up. The recipe was soon changed.

A year later General Mills added “Boo-berry,” which was a blueberry flavored cereal with smirking ghost character wearing a porkpie hat and a bowtie. I refused to eat Boo-berry because I thought the ghost looked like Don Knotts in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Later additions were “Frute Brute” and “Yummy Mummy.”

Today Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and Booberry are available for a short time each fall, around Halloween. So I picked up a “family size” box of Frankenberry to see how it stacked up against my memory of it.

1.Packaging. OK, there’s some good Halloween imagery going on here. You’ve got your Frankenstein-like monster (even though he’s pink), a haunted house, a spider web around the General Mills logo, and the promise of “Monster Marshmallows” in monster typeface. And are those ghosts flying out of the bowl? This updated box portrays a somewhat better monster, I think, than the original box, where the monster looks like a pink gorilla with glasses. (Incidentally, you can get an original Frankenberry box — not the cereal, just the box — for slightly less than $1,000 on ebay.) I’ll give the packaging 3 points.

2. Appearance of the Treat. Here’s where things get a little hinky. Let’s separate out the base cereal product (BCP) from the “marshmallows.” (See detail in second picture below.) So, what is the BCP supposed to be portraying? They kind of look like one of the ghosts from PacMan. Or, if you flip it over, is it supposed to be the Frankenberry head, with the gauges and valves on the top? And why is it the color of Cheetos, which is a color I wouldn’t associate with strawberry?

Moving on to the alleged marshmallows: Are these supposed to represent anything? The one of the left (sort of a greyish color) might be a bat. The pink one in the middle might be a ghost, or a left-facing profile of a face with a large nose and a pronounced overbite. I have no idea what to make of the other two marshmallow shapes. The one thing I do know is that none of this adds up to anything even remotely scary, or Halloween-y, or even appetizing. No points.

3. Taste. As a concept, this cereal reminds me a lot of Lucky Charms, which is a cereal I never liked. At least back when I was a kid, Lucky Charms comprised an uninteresting, oat Base Cereal Product, punctuated with little marshmallows, which were the only part you actually wanted to eat. Now, I consider Frankenberry’s BCP to be superior to that of Lucky Charms, insofar as they’re slightly sweeter. Frankenberry’s not as sweet as, say, Froot Loops, and that’s probably a good thing. But the biggest problem with Frankenberry’s BCP is that they don’t really taste like anything. They certainly don’t taste like strawberry. They just have some kind of generic, slightly sweet, cereal taste. Couple that with the odd color and the puzzling shape, and the cereal is just confusing.

And then there are the “monster marshmallows.” They taste just like Lucky Charms’ marshmallows. They’re the only reason you’d ever really want to eat Lucky Charms. So let’s do a little experiment: I carefully isolated a bowl of just the marshmallow bits, added milk, and ate a few spoonfuls. The verdict? These things are disgusting. No points. I should have tried the Count Chocula.

4. Value. This “family-size” box cost $3.50. That seems to be about the going rate for breakfast cereal. It contains about 12 servings of 1-and-1/3 cups, which works out to about 30 cents per serving. There’s no toy in the box, but there is a half-hearted activity panel on the back of the box. I’ll give it 2 points.

Steve’s Spooktoberfest Score: 5 out of 12 points, which is a modest TRICK.