Bumping this with gift link to a recent NYT article about a collector of cereal box records. Like others, I also cut out the backs of cereal boxes, only to be sorely disappointed in the sound.
I also have a National Lampoon magazine from the 1970s which had a paper record insert. Which they thoughtfully creased and stapled into the magazine.
I have clear memories of sitting in our first house (so, it was back in the '50s) digging through a box of … either Rice Krinkles or Sugar Crisp.
Then I had to really work at putting together a plastic submarine that surfaced and dove, thanks to the baking soda that my mom helped me fill it with!
When I was a kid I got a small puzzle in my Kellogg’s Corn Flakes…and an offer on the back to send away for a Yogi Bear mug and cereal bowl. I mailed in the coupon and maybe a couple of quarters, and four weeks or so later they arrived in the mail, looking even better than I thought they would be.
That reminds me of the Cap’n Crunch cereal bowl shaped like a treasure chest and spoon shaped like a shovel I sent off for. I remember being very pleased with it.
I was listening to the archives of the CBC radio show “Under The Influence” (about advertising and marketing) and they mentioned a cereal box prize promotion in 2021.
I had a Woody Woodpecker kazoo. I honestly can’t remember if it came in the box or I had to send away, though. I had it for years, never could carry a tune…
I’ve been doing some research on this and I found that the first premiums to be inserted in cereal boxes came in 1933. (Cracker Jack long preceded them.)
Skippy was the name of a famous kid comic strip which had been turned into a hit movie in 1931 and a radio show in 1932.* Wheaties did a tie-in with the show and produced 12 Skippy baseball-like cards of him playing sports, you know, “The Breakfast of Champions.” The deluge followed.
* Skippy peanut butter was also introduced in 1932 but just traded on the name and was the subject of a lawsuit it finally won.
So it actually had nothing to do with “Skippy The Bush Kangaroo”? 
Sounds like Australian porn.
Wow, I’ve traded “Childhood Dreams Shattered” stories with friends, this is the first I’ve heard of Expectations Met! Well done, Kellogg’s!
When I saw this cartoon, I thought of my cereal box u-boat experience (the real thing, dug out of the box, was a little over an inch long):
One time, the box was the toy. Some brand of chocolate cereal had a rail car printed on the lower portion of the carton. I guess you were supposed to “collect them all!” and have a whole train.
They shouldn’t have. If you look at the contemporary ads for Skippy peanut butter, they’re a direct ripoff of the comic strip. There’s no doubt in my mind that the peanut butter was riding the popular coattails of the comic strip. But then again, I think that Baby Ruth should’ve lost their suit, and that Helen Kane had a legitimate case against Fleischer Studios and Betty Boop.
Percy Crosby, Skippy’s creator, actually won at first, but his later life presented problems for his ability to defend continued attacks.
Shreddies almost always had some sort of a toy in it when I was growing up. (I hated Shreddies, but Big Bro loved them, and I always scooped the toy. Win-win!)
The one that really stands out was the movie tie-in to “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” from Disney, starring Kurt Russell as college student Dexter Riley, with Cesar Romero as the heavy.
Shreddies had these little plastic cube robots with movable arms and legs that you put on, in a variety of colours. They came in two sizes: one had just a bump on top of the cube for a head, and that’s what most of them were. But every so often you got the bigger one that had a bigger bump with a triangle on it! And, they came with decals that had the face of the characters from the movie on them, that you could peel and stick on the front panel of the robot.
Of course, they had nothing to do with the film, because there was no actual robot in the movie, but the different sizes and the decals were cool.
I remember pouring a new box of cereal into a very large bowl. Find the prize and refill the box.
I found a lot of reflective cards. They changed depending on how the light hit them.
The cheap plastic toys were usually disappointing.
The tattoo cards were fun.
Can’t forget this equivalent C&H classic:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241214211408/https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/03/14
In my case it was a send-away-boxtops for a plastic 3D Tony the Tiger that IIRC was quasi-mechanical, twiddle his tail and he’d jump or something. I too couldn’t get the pieces to fit together and work correctly. First step on my path to being utterly disillusioned by this society…
Yes, I was as underwhelmed as the kids in the above strips were (note I was a big submarine geek as a kid-I would simply get my mom to go with me to the nearest hobby store and get a full-sized one).