Remember Nintendo cereal? It was 2 cereals in one. Half Mario/ half Zelda. It was the blatant commercialism that the video game generation was brought up to love, and now we find it to be a nostalgic icon. I bring it up because I just found a petition to bring it back. Sure petitions are meaningless and never work. But if only one in the history of the world ever works shouldn’t it be this one?
Or just discuss this and other childhood memoribilia in this thread. I admit I’m generally a smart consumer, but when it comes to things related to my childhood, I’m a whore to marketing. If a product has the Ninja Turtles, Transformers, or Mario on the label I WILL BUY IT.
Pff. Though I have Nintendo to thank for many misappropiated hours spent in my youth, I don’t feel that they deserve my loyalty. Especially considering the way they’re running the shop these days, obviously not giving a rat’s ass about their fans who are pretty much 20 years of age and older these days.
Nintendo cereal won’t sell as well today as it did back when we actually were reading Nintendo Power, shooting the baddies with the SuperScope and watching The Wizard with Fred Savage. Nintendo is a diminished insitution now, with very little influence over their audience, hence the cereal won’t sell.
You are applying that to most of the original Nintendo generation. Yeah most have moved on, with a few like me who can’t let go. But I think there’s a new one being brought up, too. My brothers (age 10 and 11) are just as brainwashed (in the good way!) as I ever was, and apparently a very large percentage of their age group is, too. Does it compare to the height of Nintendo’s popularity in the 80s and early 90s? Well, I don’t know; doubtful, but I think they can still make a strong marketing effort like this work.
I dunno… At the time, Nintendo’s big gimmick was the whole “two games in one” thing. You got Mario together with Duck Hunt, or whatever, and I seem to recall that most of the early games were packaged that way (though I can’t remember specific examples). So when they made the cereal, they adapted Nintendo’s gimmick and made it two cereals in one.
But I don’t see the point in it now. I can understand loyalty to Nintendo, I suppose, but loyalty to a particular brand of brightly-colored sugar? I’m not seeing it.