I Just Got A Prize In A Box Of Cereal!

How long has it been since you got a toy in a box of cereal? I suppose I could ask how long since you bought a box of cereal in the first place, which could also be an interesting discussion. In my own case, we have established your author’s weakness for old-fashioned sugar-fortified breakfast cereals on multiple instances. But it has been a long, long time since I opened the box and got a toy.

In the way of self-justification, I should note that I do not consume these chemist-created and Mad Men-promoted grain products on a day-to-day basis. Those products do, however, find themselves in my pantry for occasional treats, such as early on weekend mornings for me to enjoy before Marianne (who has much better sense than to eat that stuff) arises.

It was on one such weekend morning when it happened. As I was pouring some glistening yellow Corn Pops (which I still call Sugar Pops) from the box, it fell into my bowl. It was two toys in one little plastic bag – a lime green Buzz Lightyear

and a card depicting something called Lilly Pad and noting that the occasion was the release of the movie Toy Story 5.

When I was a kid, the idea of putting a toy in a box of cereal was a normal, everyday occurrence. So normal that it was a rule in our house that nobody was allowed to stuff a small (possibly probably unwashed) hand down into the box to dig around to find it. Instead, the rule (strictly enforced) was that the toy had to fall into your bowl, so that both my little sister and I had a theoretically equal chance of claiming ownership of the prize. The side effect of this rule was that it encouraged overconsumption of cereal. Another side effect was that sometimes the toy would be poured into a bowl that already contained milk. Which was one of the reasons plastic toys were always more highly prized than those made of paper or cardboard.

My most memorable childhood toy-in-the-cereal-box memory was the Cap’n Crunch cars. Cap’n Crunch was always a favorite, at least once the roof of one’s mouth recovered from the abrasions that resulted from the previous box. It was probably 1969 or so when that cereal’s brand extensions moved beyond the regular variety and the kind with Crunch Berries (round cereal blobs with deadly red dye and flavored to resemble strawberries). The new variety was peanut butter flavor. I like peanut butter and I like sugary cereal, but I had no interest in sugary cereal that was peanut butter flavored. But it was the toy cars.

The diabolical advertising people for Cap’n crunch put little toy cars in each box. But to get a complete set of the three cars, you had to buy a box of each of the three varieties of Cap’n Crunch. And because I wanted the little red Dodge Charger Daytona, I had to consume a box of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Cereal. Which I did. Because another rule was that if you picked out a box of cereal, you had to eat it all.

I got my little red Charger Daytona. Which came in a few small pieces. And then disaster struck when I broke one of the axle/wheel sets as I tried to clip it onto the underside of the car. That was that, because Charger Daytona or no, there was no way I was going to eat another box of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter. I may have told this story before, but this only tells you how traumatic the whole thing was.

Now I have the opposite problem. I will happily eat all of the boxes of Sugar Pops (OK, Corn Pops) that I can carry into the house, but am trying to figure out what to do with my prize. Which I now discover is a “spoon figurine”. I had no idea that a spoon figurine was a thing. This proves how I have fallen way off in my cereal-box-reading habit. Careful viewers will note that the photos of the box were taken after I had emptied it, folded it and torn it in two so that it hogs less space in my kitchen trash can. I can now see that Woody and Jesse are the other two spoon figurines (I can’t believe I keep using this term), should I choose to “collect all 3”. Which is something I will not be doing.

I was a parent during the long arc of the first three installments of the Toy Story franchise, and will watch those movies as an adult as often as I buy Sugar Pops (I will not apologize for using the old name, so stop asking). But the later sequels (Toy Story 4 and now Toy Story 5) seem to me an indication of the film industry’s inability to generate decent ideas for new movies, and the constant debasement of old movie franchises that are a shadow of their old selves. So I don’t really plan to watch Toy Story 5, and also don’t plan to buy other boxes of cereal with the sole aim of collecting other prizes from this series. Who says I have not matured?

By now, it should be clear that I am more excited about the idea of getting a toy in my cereal box than what that toy might be. OK, not a toy but a spoon figurine. [Author smacks head] I will not be using it to eat cereal – how pathetic would that be, a man of my age and experience eating cereal with a green plastic Buzz Lightyear spoon. Maybe if I keep it for another 60 years or so, it might bring big bucks in whatever has replaced our current online marketplace app. (Marianne: “Keep eating Sugar Pops and you won’t make it another 60 years.”)

Whatever I do with my lime green Buzz Lightyear spoon figurine (gaaaa – I just did it again!), I guess the payoff is that I still experienced that momentary sense of awe and wonder when some trinket falls into my cereal bowl. It may not be the same as it was decades ago. Or maybe it is.

Photos by the author, and believe me, he is pretty embarrassed about them in both their subject and their quality.

41 thoughts on “I Just Got A Prize In A Box Of Cereal!”

  3. I remember the little plastic cars from 1969, but the one that sticks in my mind is the 1969 Mercury line-up – Cougar, Cyclone, Marquis and Marauder in Post cereals.

    There was only one car in each box, and, of course, the commercials told us to make sure we got the full set of cars. Which meant I pestered my mother to regularly buy the cereal so that I had a chance to collect all of those Mercurys.

    To this day, when I see a 1969 Cougar, Cyclone, Marquis or Marauder, I think of that promotion.

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    • Oh, you have unearthed a memory, because I remember those Mercurys too! I am sure I managed to get most of them. I just found that you can buy sets of them online from people who have kept them. There were also a number of Ford/Mercury models that Post offered in the mid 50’s. It’s funny that I cannot find as much information on the Kellogg’s counterparts.

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      • I had a couple of those Mercurys when I was a kid, I think they were hand me downs from an older neighbor because I was eating baby food in 1969.

        When helping a retired friend move in the early ’90s I noticed some of them on his model railroad and commented that I’d never seen any besides mine. He proceeded to dig out and give me a carton full. some loose, most still in the paper wrappers, apparently he had known someone who worked for Post in Battle Creek in those days.

        A decade later a bit of housecleaning and the rise of ebay led to an inventory of what was in the box. For the completists, there are the 4 different models and 6 different colors. I know I kept one set of 24, probably sold about 100, and there are still more lurking around somewhere. So, if you need any… 🙂

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  4. In-the-box prizes were often pretty lame. Although I do remember getting a miniature 1971 Buick “boat-tail” Riviera which might have been part of the Cap’n Crunch cars.

    The greatest prize I ever received you had to send away for. It was Merlin’s Magic Kit, which was offered by King Vitamin cereal in the early 1970s. Yes, I was a sorcerer’s apprentice once! 🧙‍♂️ This was a beautiful kit, and I remember all the little tricks: the magic wand, the disappearing coin box, the thing you balanced on your finger that looked like it wouldn’t balance, the card deck–all of it!

    I was astounded to discover that someone on Facebook still has an original kit, all intact. Probably the last one in existence; I don’t know what happened to mine.

    I would have loved to work at the company where they design all this fanciful stuff for little kids to have!

    Merlin's Magic Kit

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    • Wow, I had forgotten about King Vitamin – I just looked it up, it was a Quaker Oats product and was spelled King Vitaman. It was apparently introduced in 1968 and discontinued in 2019 – so I guess I have missed my chance to relive that one. I am sure I consumed at least a box or two of it. If it was advertised on Saturday morning TV, I am sure I at least tried it once.

      And your memory of the things you sent off for, with box tops and probably a little cash opens up an entire new set of things to think about. I remember being thrilled by the Tony The Tiger mug and cereal bowl set – that was a wonderful thing until some of the items went through my mother’s dishwaser. It was very early that I learned that not everything is diswasher safe!

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  5. Weirdly enough, I have zero memories of eating cereal with prizes in the box. My food-stuff/prize memories are limited to Cracker Jack only. My parents didn’t buy us a to of sugar-cereals and we ate “grown-up” cereal like Wheaties. The only cereal I remember eating that was sugary was Cap’n Crunch, and I probably wasn’t eating it by 1968 or so, since I had to take a city bus to high school and was always running out of the house “breakfast-less”. A quick check with various sources shows that prizes in the cereals I was probably eating were only put in about the time I quit eating cereal breakfasts, so a loss for me; but research shows that the cereal/prize world started about 1945 but was not an “across-the-board” offering.

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    • I am now wondering what led to my mother’s choices for what her children ate for breakfast. My mother wasn’t much of a cook, so a daily breakfast of bacon and eggs was never going to happen. I guess the cereal was easy – something I have learned for myself.

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      • Interestingly today, I rarely eat cereal and milk for breakfast as an adult, usually just a banana and maybe yogurt, BUT, about every year or so, I get a “jones” for it again, and might spend between two to four weeks eating cereal again. During this period, I generally eat Corn Chex or Corn Flakes, or maybe regular Cheerios, with a banana cut into it. After a while, I get tired of it again and may not eat it for a long time. I’ve occasionally tried the “lightly sugared” version of all these cereals but something about them makes me gag. I don’t generally put sugar on these cereals (in fact, I don’t even have “free standing” sugar around), but sugaring these cereals taste better to me than the “pre-sugared” versions.

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  7. JP, I didn’t get to eat fun cereal as a kid except when we were on vacation and had the variety pack of little boxes at a hotel breakfast bar. I did try Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter cereal and liked it, but it is rough on your soft palate, that’s for sure. I don’t remember toys in the cereal, but I do remember cardboard 45s attached to the back of the box, maybe Cheerios or Corn Flakes – we did have those cereals as my mom liked them. I had to have hot oatmeal. The record actually played too as I recall. It’s a good thing I had a portable record player as I’m not sure my parents would have indulged me playing the cardboard record on their stereo. My father would have said “your stupid record wrecked the stylus!” Isn’t that Buzz Lightyear spoon a choking hazard? It seems like it would be. I smiled at Marianne’s quip: “Keep eating Sugar Pops and you won’t make it another 60 years.”

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    • I also remember the records, and in my mind the cardboard had a wax or wax-like coating to enable playback. I’ll bet that in excellent condition those boxes are worth quite a bit to collectors, especially since the majority them undoubtedly had the record cut out.

      Now I may have to splurge on a box of Cap’n Crunch the next time I’m in the store!

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      • Brad, I just hopped onto eBay and searched for cereal boxes with 45 rpm records on the back and there were a lot for sale. Incredibly, there were records from the 1950s and a 78 rpm record of “On Top of Old Smokey” from a 1954 Wheaties box. JP could have some fun with this.

        I was an adult when I tried the Cap’n Crunch peanut butter cereal and I really liked it, with milk, or without. I hope you like it too!

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    • Now I remember those records you cut out of the box! I seem to remember “Sugar Sugar” by The Archies, and I think I had it. This would make a great deep dive. Our record player at home around 1970 was an old one from the late 50s, so I never got any pushback for playing the cereal record.

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      • I think you should do a deep dive into records on cereal boxes! “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies would be a perfect accompaniment to listen to while munching your Sugar Pops, a/k/a Corn Pops. 🙂

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    • My local grocery still sells a small six pack of the single serve boxes, usually all really sugared up stuff. Still, when I’m on my cereal jones, it’s hard not to grab it! As I recall from my youth, those small boxes were wax paper lined, and had perforated flaps, so you could split them open and pour the milk right into it!

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      • I remember those too…..as kids would go to church before school during Lent on holy days like Ash Wednesday and bring those little boxes and milk to eat after as you couldn’t eat before communion. My mom never bought them though.

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      • Andy, they were always a treat for me because they were all the sugary stuff, not a sensible cereal in the bunch. My family made a few long road trips out west and if the hotel didn’t have a breakfast bar, my mom bought a couple of pints of milk and she had some of those six packs in the car, so we did that for breakfast as well. Vacation time, so you got to relax the rules a bit. It was either that or a donut.

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      • Those were the breakfast highlight of family car trip vacations when I was a kid. I remember several of the places we used to stay along the way, and at the end (which was inevitably Maine) would serve those for breakfast. The idea of special packaging like that just blew my mind as a kid…even if I could seldom open the box along the perforations (much less the wax paper inner liner) and usually ended up ripping the whole thing open and then needing a bowl in humiliating defeat.

        Kids nowadays have it too easy what with a plastic (disposable) bowl and a foil lid…thereby nearly guaranteeing a humiliation-free breakfast experience.

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  9. “When I was a kid, the idea of putting a toy in a box of cereal was a normal, everyday occurrence.”

    A toy? I’m surprised the cereals of your generation didn’t come with cigarettes and switchblades. ;^)

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  10. I don’t really remember actually getting a toy in my cereal box, but my younger brother did, so it might have been a later fad. Although I remember getting it in Cracker Jacks, which is the only reason we ate the stuff. After my two hospital stays I started eating cereal again a couple of times a week – as MultiGrain Cheerios was always on the breakfast menu in the cardiac unit, due to the oat fibre bringing down cholesterol. Not the regular Cheerios though as it’s mostly wheat and tastes like cardboard. So I just checked my box, and there is a contest to get Canada FIFA soccer merchandise if you enter online with your proof of purchase receipt. I must be dense today, as it didn’t dawn on me that a spoon figurine was actually a spoon you could eat with.

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  12. I’d imagine that most of the “spoon figurines” get used once, the removable headcap gets lost, and the thing gets tossed. And then there are the kids who don’t understand that the “headcap” (a non-standard spoon component even for most of Toy Story’s target demographic) is removable…can’t figure out how to use the spoon…and then toss it. Plastic cars were a much better prize.

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  13. We didn’t eat cereal in my household; can’t say I’ve eaten more than a few bowls in my life (awww, ain’t that a shame!).

    But I have a similar set of mementos. A local potato chip company – Crane Potato Chips from Decatur, IL – had a promotion in the mid 1960’s where each week (or every few weeks?) they gave a away miniature ‘statue’ of a president. In sequence from when they served. Unsure if they came in the package or if you had to mail away for them with a number of logos off the bag or something. Anyway, these statues are about 3 1/2 inches tall and I still have them, sitting on a shelf in my den. Every president from Washington through Johnson – we must have eaten a lot of potato chips back in the day! I have a vivid memory of my dad bringing a ‘new’ one to me when I was in the hospital having my tonsils removed, which would have been 1963 or 64. In those days it was 2 full days in the hospital after the surgery.

    I’ve asked around and none of my friends from Central IL can remember this promotion. But they’re here and I’ve got ’em. Of course through 8 or 9 moves they now show a few nicks and chips as we never thought to try and preserve them. Wish I could send a picture of these, its a truly unique keepsake.

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  14. Oh my – Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch! I’d forgotten all about that staff and unlike you, I loved the taste (tho’ Crunch Berries was always the best IMHO). When Toy Story 5 was first advertised I thought, “wait, there was a Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4”? It screams of moneymakers versus any effort to create original content. Prizes in boxes always makes me think of individual boxes of Cracker Jack (and at least you didn’t have to fight siblings for those). But with cereal I also remember puzzles/games on the back of the box; wonder if they still do that? Which now has me thinking about those old-school metal lunch boxes, and the one that came with a little magnetic race car or two for the track imprinted on the surface. Man, you’re opening up a part of my brain that’s been dormant for decades!

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    • Just think of me as a can opener for the human brain! 🤣

      Funny thing, the Mrs and I just watched Toy Story 3 last night. In it, Andy is heading for college and the toys face an uncertain fate. It came out the year our oldest was graduating high school, having grown up to 1 and 2. No. 3 has always been a bit of a tear jerker at the end for us. Highly recommend!

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