Lucky Charms and Trix: perhaps two sides of the same coin?
With Lucky Charms, the kids are always trying to get the cereal from Lucky.
With Trix, the Rabbit is always trying to get the cereal from the kids.
I’ve noticed that few, if any, commercials for kids’ cereals do NOT feature the idea that to have the cereal, you must beg or steal it away from whomever has it. Sugar Bear, The Cookie Crisp Cop, Fred Flintstone, Trix kids, and Lucky–all of them feel a need to keep someone from getting that cereal. Way to go, cereal companies, for reinforcing the ideas of 1)selfishness (if you have something others want keep it for yourself at all costs), and 2)greed (if somebody has something you want, steal it if you must to get it).
Shifty looking fellow walks into corner store, nervously looking around. Grabs a stack of three boxes of cereal from the shelf and takes them to the counter. Checkout lady asks “is that all?” and looks up to see the door swinging shut and the coins rolling to a stop on the counter.
Fellow hastily bangs his way into his dingy apartment, discarding the box of Cheerios from the left side of the stack and the box of Wheaties from the right side of the stack leaving only the box of Trix that was hiding in the center. Grabs a large wooden spoon and a giant mixing-type bowl and dumps pretty much the whole box into the bowl.
Shifty fellow rips off his rubber face mask to reveal - He’s the Rabbit! He was in disguise! He’s finally going to get his Trix after all these years!
He grabs the milk carton and upends it over the giant bowl - and only one single drop plops out.
Congratulations on your tour de force history of the Lucky Charms marbit. Not only did you provide what was arguably the definitive answer to the question (making further hijacks the only appropriate way to continue the thread), but you did it in a manner worthy of the great Cecil himself.
In fact, I liked it so much, that it pains me to be compelled to pose a nitpick:
I don’t think Cecil would have either misspelled the word “triumvirate”, nor implied that it could be properly used to describe to a group of any size other than three.
Part of the marketing plan: teach kids that if they want that sweet, sweet cereal, they’ll have to learn how to beg mommy or daddy for it at the grocery store.
Also, I’m thinking of changing my username to “marbit”. Great read, bravo all.
In the Cocoa Puffs commercials, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird is addicted to Cocoa Puffs and is trying, desperately, to kick the habit. He knows if he has Cocoa Puffs he’s going to Go Cuckoo. And what do the kids do? They tempt him! They’re like frat boys trying to convince you to drink another beer. In the end, poor, weak-willed Sonny is unable to resist the siren call of the Cocoa Puffs, and Goes Cuckoo all over the screen.
My apologies to grvedig a thread that is over a decade past its prime. but I felt that sharing a few memories may add to the history of this marbit phenomenon.
Either before, or just after, the whales were placed into the cereal, General Mills first produced a Lucky Carms, with either the swirled whales, or merely swirled normal marbits were included in a sealed, white plastic envelope that you could add yourself. I had one of those baggies in my icebox for decades that I saved for its possible collectible value in the future, until my icebox had a meltdown decades ago and lost some of my preserved food collectibles, along with Nintendo cereals and candies.
Charms often placed these promo baggies of special marbits inside the box, to add as you saw fit, for later shapes. I believe that the whale was in a baggie to insert before it was later mixed with the cereal, and after that, the swirled main shapes were in a baggie to add to the cereal before they made them a temporary standard. I recall, witching pointless television in college with the commercials of the whale spouting L.C. Leprechaun into the rainbow and scattering the colours.
I also very fondly recall the original Charms mix, and I didn’t fond the horse shoe objectionable in '83 or ;84. it did seem appropriate, and I liked the feel of the shape on my tongue, but when they started meddling with the shapes, I started to become increasingly disgusted.
part of the ‘charm’ of the marbits was the feel of them in your mouth. They had a distinct shape, and were small, and nice to look at. I liked the clear, but pastel colours. My method then, and now, was to eat most of the cereal as a mix, and when I started to reach the end of the bowl, to save at least one or two of each marbit shape, and eat them last to appreciate them when they became a bit soft.
Even the classic shapes suffered many alterations:
For example, the old orange star was initially six-pointed. How many of you folks recall that? Apparently, us Jews were again shunted aside and the star was morphed into a five-pointed star in its later incarnations, followed by the star-in-balloon abomination. I often found myself literally carving the star out of the baloons before adding milk with a Swiss army knife, merely to re-add my lost shape.
The only share that remains from the original LC is the moon, which is now blue. I would prefer my blue diamonds, original hearts, clovers, stars and even the horseshoe. It would be nice if GM made a promo version with the 60s shapes in their original sizes, and colours.
I hate the new colours, and miss the smaller, pastel shapes. For one thing, the food colouring has changed the taste of the marbits, anfd the larger size has altered their feeling. This is why instead of buying the name-brand, I buy off-brand alternatives, such as the Malt-O’Meal variation. It tastes more like the old LC than LC does today.
As to the oat shapes, I believe they used the same shapes as cat food. They had no relevance to the cereal theme, and I always thought that they were base don Tarot and French tarot card suits (save for the fish) as swords, spades, clubs and fish. Th fish to me says that these are catfood shapes, which if you compare to MeowMix or similar feline cereals, you will note a distinct and eerie similarity. (Possibly from the same factories.)
Trix is also a ruined cereal for me. It used to have a fruitier, distinct flavour. A few years back, when Gm produced 'Lessened Sugar Trix;, i bought a box and was shocked that it was nearly identical to the original from my childhood (the 60s).
I stopped buying Trix when they shifted to the non-spheroid pieces, although I seem to recall the the original trix balls had a pebbly appearance and texture, like little bumps, and were not fully-round.
Froot Loops is another of my complaints: I discard the blue and purple loops. I can accept the green, despite it not being an original colour, but if I eat those blue and purple pieces, the extreme colouring has an effect on my bowels:
Digesting blue and purple (also a blue colouration) coloured grain tends to make stool greenish, and very disturbing. When Cap’n Crunch released 'Deep Sea Crunch; years back, I tried it and liked the taste. When it was discontinued, and the price slashed, I bought many boxes only to find out that I was excreting flourescent green stool due to the blue, yellow and green colours that it used for everything.
From that lesson, I learned to dispose of blue, purple and often green cereal pieces, rather than injesting them. The brighter marbits and the stronger colouring in LC also taint the milk to a disturbing murky green. I’ll eat the generic variations to avoid this.
I would pay twice the normal retail price for ‘Classic’ versions of these cereals (including Count Chocula, which nas also changed greatly, with the original white marbit bats replaced by chocolate marbit bats).
LC with the cultclassic mixture of pink hearts, orange stars, green clovers, blue diamonds and even purple horse shoes, in their original size and colour; trix with the original shapes and colours, and Fruit Loops with the original three colours and flavours (orange, lemon and cherry) would probably sell, even if only via special order, in a classic-themed box–an exact replica of the original packaging, without gaudy, modern promo rubbish slapped on the front.
I’d pay a good amount per box, well over the already heavily-inflated price for these classic cereals in their original formula.
At least Cocoa Pulls is still what it has always been. I miss GM’s ‘Smores’ cereal, and buy white marbits from a bakery source, mixing Cocoa Puffs and Golden grahams with them to reproduce it perfectly, despite the marbits not having the LC star shape that the original cereal used.
There’s this guy in Montana that sells bulk marbits from his website. He wasn’t around for the original thread. Claims to have scoured the world for the perfect cereal marshmallow. http://www.cerealmarshmallows.com/default.aspx
