80s Cereals Were Basically Commercials You Could Eat

In 1988 you could buy a box of cereal with two cereals inside it. One bag was Super Mario Bros., fruit flavored. The other was The Legend of Zelda, berry flavored. Ralston named it the Nintendo Cereal System, as if breakfast came with a power switch, and by 1989 it was gone.

That box was the high point of a very 80s idea: if kids liked something, it could be a cereal. Movies, cartoons, arcade games, Mr. T. For most of the decade the cereal aisle worked like a second toy aisle that happened to come with serving suggestions.

Why breakfast turned into a licensing deal

Most of these boxes came from Ralston Purina, and Ralston had a problem. Next to Kellogg's and General Mills it was a small player in cereal, and building a brand from nothing meant years of expensive advertising before a single kid cared. A license skipped that step. Warner Bros. or Nintendo had already spent the money making you love Gizmo or Mario. Ralston only had to put him on the front of a box.

Children's TV was loosening up at the same time. In 1984 the FCC, under chairman Mark Fowler, relaxed its rules on advertising in kids' programming, and cartoons built around toy lines, like The Transformers, which premiered that September, filled the kids' TV schedule. The cereal ads ran in the same commercial breaks, aimed at the same kids.

The lineup

This isn't every tie-in cereal of the decade. These are the ones worth remembering, in the order they showed up.

Most lists date Donkey Kong cereal to 1982, but a USA Today advertising column from April 1983 puts the launch in 1983, and it was off shelves by 1984. The arcade game had been out since 1981, so the cereal showed up two years into the craze.

The pieces were shaped like their stars

A tie-in cereal had one real job, which was to look like the license once it hit the milk. Mr. T came in little T's. Gremlins pieces were shaped like Gizmo, and then you poured liquid on them, which breaks one of the three rules the whole movie is about. C-3PO's used two rings joined into a figure eight so the box could promise two crunches in every piece.

E.T. cereal is the odd one. General Mills launched it in 1984, two full years after the movie, and made it peanut butter and chocolate. The flavor makes sense, since that's the Reese's Pieces pairing from the film. The timing doesn't. It arrived the year Gremlins and Ghostbusters took over theaters, which was a bad time to be the movie everybody saw two summers ago.

Mr. T had the better run. In Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Pee-wee builds himself a ridiculous breakfast and pours Mr. T cereal over it, and Quaker kept the cereal in production into the early 90s. For a cereal named after a man from The A-Team, that's a long career.

The prizes were half the point

A lot of the appeal was whatever came attached. Batman cereal was shrink-wrapped with a Batman coin bank on the front. G.I. Joe Action Stars offered a mail-away figure called Starduster, a jetpack trooper who only existed through the cereal and a mini comic and never made it into the regular toy line. He was an action figure you had to eat your way to.

Gremlins went further. Its mail-away Gizmo plush cost $9.95, and according to the collector blog Dinosaur Dracula it arrived in a plain box with air holes punched in the lid, as if a real mogwai was inside.

Morning Funnies tried to make the box itself the prize. The back unfolded into extra newspaper-style comic strips, eight per box. Kids already got their comics in the Sunday paper, and it was gone within about a year.

Why they all vanished

Licenses expire and movies stop being new. G.I. Joe Action Stars was gone within months, and the Nintendo Cereal System lasted about a year. The ones tied to a character rather than one movie held up better. Smurf-Berry Crunch and Pac-Man both stayed on shelves for years. Ralston kept the licensed cereal idea going into the 90s, which gave us Bill & Ted's Excellent Cereal and Urkel-Os, and we'll leave that decade alone.

The mascots a company owned outright did better than any of them. Tony the Tiger and the Trix Rabbit could run for decades, while a movie cereal lasted about as long as the movie's ad campaign. We've written separately about why the old cereal mascots were designed so well.

Can you still get them?

Not to eat. Sealed Nintendo Cereal System boxes sell to collectors for a couple hundred dollars, and the people buying them put them on a shelf, which is the right place for a cereal older than most of its buyers' cars. Ice Cream Cones came back briefly in 2003. The rest mostly survive as old TV commercials, and those are worth finding for the jingles alone.

If you miss the arcade-in-a-bowl years, our Insert Coin Tee 1982 ($34.99) carries the two lines every cabinet flashed before it ate your quarters. And if you're still hungry, we rounded up the strangest 80s food fads and the 80s snacks you can still find.

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