I couldn't find a picture of Post® Corn Flakes w/Dried Strawberries!
"The one and only cereal that comes in the shape of animals!"
Post had some really classy cereal characters in the 1960s. There
was Sugar Bear (Sugar Crisp), So Hi (Rice Krinkles), Loveable Truly (Alpha-Bits),
Rory Racoon (Toasties), and a few more. Linus the Lionhearted (who
is pictured on this box of Crispy Critters) had a Saturday morning cartoon
with all the other Post characters on CBS in the late 1960s. I always
thought it would be funny if someone snuck in a Kellogg's Froot Loops commercial
on one of the shows!
I was a little beyond kiddy cereal when this stuff came out and I still
had no thoughts of having my own family.
Pink flakes? NO! Pink milk? YES!
The original Hawaiian cereal that originated in Battle Creek, Michigan!
(I found it amusing, in doing research for this page, that the Canadian
version of Puffa Puffa Rice didn't have the Hawaiian theme: It was a steam
train bellowing, "Puffa Puffa Rice!")
I couldn't find a picture of the original Quake® box, in which the character was fat and frumpy. He wore a miner's helmet and carried a metal lunch box. When they changed the looks of the character (he became thinner, freckles were added, his nose was bobbed, and he now looked like a cowboy superhero) the formula of the cereal changed. It was made crunchier, which meant instead of letting the cereal soak five minutes to get to the consistency I liked, it now took a little over an hour! No wonder they pulled it off the shelves! (Why couldn't they have reintroduced the old formula?)
You can still buy sweetened rice puffs; that isn't the point here. In the mid 1990s the Nabisco cereal lines (owned by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco) were sold to Kraft Foods/Post (owned by Philip Morris Tobacco). Gone were such cereals as one of my favorites, Nabisco Team Flakes. This picture was previously missing.
Can anyone guess why they were called Sugar Jets?
Wasn't there a little bit of a hillbilly fad in the 1960s, thanks to the Beverly Hillbillies TV series? And what ever happened to the Ideal Toy Company?
There was a book embedded on the back of the cereal box, making Twinkles the only cereal endorsed by librarians!
Last updated May 24, 2001 (and missing pix added)
