I remember when I was a kid, fighting with my brothers over who got the prize in the cereal box - although for the life of me I can’t remember any of the actual prizes.
Over the last year or two, however, cereals have started packing CD Rom games in them - I’ve got Clue, Life, Monopoly Junior, and a few others. I thought that was pretty cool, until I stumbled onto what might be the bestest cereal box prize ever:
Free movie tickets. Cheerios, Shreddies, and a few other cereals that I can’t think of right now have free movie tickets printed on them. Kids’ tickets on the sickly-sweet cereals, and adult tickets on the less sweet. Bear in mind that you can sometimes get two boxes of cereal for $5.00 (on sale) and that movies around here cost $9.00 each - it makes sense at this stage to buy the boxes and throw the darned cereal away.
I remember getting real records that played on a 45 player, and I loved my Cap’n Crunch diving submarine- what bathtub fun that was! You put baking soda in it to make it work.
YES! YES! YES! The baking soda submarine! I had one and it was the best bathtub toy ever. And now it’s gone. I wish I had one to show my kids. I’d even eat a box of generic froot rings to get it
As kids, we liked the Post Cocoa Pebbles and for a while they had rubbery coin purses shaped like Fred or Dino, etc. In a family with three girls, these became real prizes, but I gave my Fred to my Daddy because I loved him so much and he carried that thing for his pocket change for years. My sisters had since grown to teen-aged sophistication and were appalled whenever he pulled this scummy aqua coin purse out of his pocket. He still carries it!
My favorite was “The Morning Chex Press.” It actually was on the outside of the box – a very funny newspaper printed on the back of Chex cereals (which made sence – I always read the box back).
DEED TO LAND!
Yes…manymanymany years ago, a cereal box offered ONE SQUARE INCH of land (Canada or Montana?) and I sent in and got my deed for 1 square inch of land.
Fast forward manymanymany years, and I was flipping through channels and there was some roving reporter standing at the site of the cereal box land owners. Unfortunately, land reverts back to the gov or whatever after a certain amount of years, and the land he was standing no longer was deeded to me.
I always wondered what would have happened if they had found oil or gold on that land and had to pay out the thousands of kids like me who held their little deeds in hand…sounds like a good plot to a movie to me!
BTW, I also remember the baking soda submarine…too cool!
It was a piece of cardboard, with three people/animals/aliens printed on each side. You could flip the top, middle and bottom of the sides to make new pictures.
Like if the middle picture was a cowboy, and on the other side on the flap there’s a anthropomorphized lion, and you could flip the lion’s head over to cover the cowboy’s head, and all the pictures were supposedly lined up to make a new picture, although in practice the artwork wasn’t as well implemented as it could’ve been.
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I was always inspired to make my own. They were fun and easy.
Great fun for kids to make their own.
How many pictures could you make? Let’s see. Two sides times three cubed is 54, yes?
Once, Cheerios actually put dollar bills in, like, every tenth box. I got one, which I seem to recall spending on either a pretzel at lunch or on a comic book.
Apparently geocities won’t let you link to an image.
You have to copy the URL and paste it into the browser address.
Hardly worth the bother of posting three messages to show this picture. Sigh.
I was living in a group home in '84 here in Canada, and they’d never buy us the sweet cereals, but I remember Shreddies would sometimes come with that sub, usually the newest kid in the group home would get it, and if they got anymore boxes that had it, then someone else would get the next one.
Does anyone remember the huge bag of puffed wheat that always had a prize in it?
Sorry for bumping an old topic, I just came across the site while searching for something on Google.
Remember those sticky stretchy hand things? They only worked if they were clean, and they were made out of some sort of plastic, and they worked sort of like a frog’s tongue - you “threw” the one end and could grab stuff (mostly, you know, dust and dog hair) and pull it back to you.
Years ago I volunteered at a food bank one day and our job was to take a bazillion boxes of Captain Crunch, take the bags out of the boxes, cut the bags, and remove the toy because the toy had been recalled. They were those little popple things that you turn inside out, put on a table, and they pop up and reinvert themselves. Anyway, they came in I think four colors, but the box had a huge picture of the blue one on the front.
We must have taken out at least five hundred of the things. There were FOUR blue ones.
