I remember getting one of those once. The song was the Dave Clark Five’s “Catch Us If You Can.” A pretty good song for its era, and the record lasted for at least a few weeks on our basic monaural 33/45 speed record player.
I can’t find a cite, but I think I’ve read that “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies has the highest production numbers of any record in History thanks to the millions included on cereal boxes.
Are they still banned in the USA? I remember buying one for an adult American who had never encountered one and she turned in to a six year old child before my eyes!
We seem to be barraged by them every Easter and Christmas but we have a lot of UK, Irish, and Swiss expats in our social circle.
Kinder Eggs in the civilized world are a toy in a capsule enclosed in a chocolate shell. Kinder Eggs in the US are a half egg of chocolatish stuff packaged along with a hollow plastic half-egg plastic thing containing a toy.
Why do Europe and the United States have different standards for the choking hazard of Kinder eggs?
Ah, the old days of cereal box prizes. I remember opening the package and sticking my arm down the box to get the prize as soon as my mom brought the groceries home.
When I was 5 my dad dad helped remove the “Sugar Sugar” single off the back of the cereal box and I played that on my parents’ old wood-framed cabinet record player until the needle wore though the cardboard.
The best prize ever gotten from a box of Cap’n Crunch was probably the whistle. May not have been an Apple Computer Corporation without it.
Hey, thanks! I said I couldn’t remember any of the cereal toys from when I was a kid, but that submarine was one of them! Of course there’s no way I could remember what cereal it came in.
I’m sure I had at least one of the subs. And one of these space shuttle Transformers.
In the US, it’s illegal to put a non-food item inside of food.
Isn’t that exactly what toys in cereal boxes are? I mean, the toy could literally land right in your bowl of cereal!
I feel like my whole childhood has been wasted now.
Why didn’t I ever think of that? Lol
Sounds like the legalese calls for “imbedded” objects. The toys in a cereal box aren’t embedded into the cereal itself. Google tells me that imbedded and embedded are the same word despite “imbedded” getting redlined by my spellcheck.
Section 402(d)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act provides that confectionery having partially, or completely imbedded therein, any non-nutritive object is adulterated unless FDA has issued a regulation recognizing that the non-nutritive object is of practical functional value to the confectionery product and would not render the product injurious or hazardous to health.
From this helpful FDA import alert re: Kinder Eggs
So, that’s why showgirls don’t jump out of cakes anymore.
I assume this also explains why, when an American bakery makes a galette des rois, it includes the ceramic feve alongside the tart instead of baking it directly inside the way it’s supposed to be.
We had American visitors over for the holidays a few years ago and shared a galette des rois with them. They enjoyed the game (and one of them found the feve and got to wear the crown), so a couple years later we contacted a bakery in their area and special-ordered one. It came with the feve in a little plastic baggie inside the box. I guess with the expectation that they’d jam it into the pastry themselves, or come up with some other game for assigning a winner. Very weird.
My favorite prizes came in boxes of Honeycomb cereal. They were miniature license plates that you could put on your bike. You could collect a license plate from all 50 states, and they looked just like the real state license plates. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1981-honeycomb-cereal-license-plate-3926387230
ETA: In addition, they were made of actual metal and not some cheap plastic!
Those are a relic from a golden age. By far the best IMO were the bicycle license plates that Honeycomb promoted in the 80’s. They were real, stamped metal, miniature versions of the state license plates, that you could put on your bike! I think it was possible to get all 50 states, although for some reason I ended up with a disproportionate number of Illinois plates. A close second would be a tie between the Captain Crunch bicycle spoke reflectors and the wacky wall walker toys. Ahh, the memories…
You beat me to it! But yes, those mini plates were awesome!
Out of the five or ten that I collected, my favorite was Minnesota’s design. Minnesota’s 1980s-era plates were nearly identical to today’s design.
Elmer_J.Fudd
I can’t find a cite, but I think I’ve read that “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies has the highest production numbers of any record in History thanks to the millions included on cereal boxes.
The Monkees had some cereal box singles as well. This was around the time they started outselling the Beatles. I always wondered if the cereal boxes counted towards their singles sales.