1998’s Bedrock Blizzard Pebbles Cereals!
When you hear “Fruity Pebbles” and “Christmas” mentioned together, it’s usually in reference to that classic commercial – the one where no less than Santa himself persuaded Fred to give Barney cereal.
But Post’s Pebbles brands did more Christmasing than that! Look no further than 1998’s Bedrock Blizzard promotion. Not once did it use the word “Christmas,” but with a snowy motif and the image of Fred Flintstone wearing green earmuffs, we all knew the deal. This was as rife with holiday spirit as flying reindeer or After Eight thin mints.
For the Bedrock Blizzard version of Fruity Pebbles, the multicolored boulders gained a coat of snowy frosting. This tempered the cereal’s overwhelming fruitiness with deep sugary hues, though I doubt that Post ever described things that way. I really need to work on my sales copy. Sometimes I feel like Van Alden with a steam iron.
The commercial for Bedrock Blizzard Fruity Pebbles clocked in at just ten seconds, but it made its point. Bedrock gets hammered by snow, and not even its famous hometown cereal is safe.
The hysterical thing is how Barney skips his usual protracted scheme to swipe Fred’s cereal. With a mere ten seconds to get free breakfast and make an ass out of Fred, he just casually chucks a snowball in the guy’s face and runs off. Awesome. The events of this commercial definitely set the speed record on Barney fucking with Fred Flintstone.
You’d assume that Post would’ve just given Cocoa Pebbles the same frosted treatment, but nope, it actually got a whole different gimmick! Bedrock Blizzard Cocoa Pebbles was no different from regular Cocoa Pebbles…save for a packet of snow sprinkles that let you turn bowls of cereal into bowls of cereal and CANDY.
I know it’s difficult to imagine, but luckily, you won’t need to. BECAUSE I ACTUALLY HAVE THE SPRINKLES. I’ve been saving them for this very moment!
…and as much as it pained me to open them, my journalistic integrity was on the line. That, and I really wanted to know what snow-covered Cocoa Pebbles looked like.
It’s interesting, but I can’t imagine it with milk added. Fortunately, the last time I let milk touch my cereal, very few of you were even alive.
Post gave you a LOT of sprinkles, too. Then again, it’s entirely possible that they didn’t intend for people to pour the entire contents of the packet into a single bowl, like I did. In my defense, who wouldn’t “live in the now” with something like this? There’s a marked difference between a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles with a few sprinkles and a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles with ten trillion of them. It’s the difference between “kinda cool” and “Christ I need to sign up for Instagram to make that photo even prettier.”
Post would have us believe that Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles are on equal footing, but we all know the truth. Fruity Pebbles runs that show. This is a rare case where Cocoa Pebbles clearly came out ahead, because even if the TV commercial totally ignored it, there’s no way frosted Fruity Pebbles beat a packet of tiny edible snowballs that made bowls of cereal look like imploded bean bags.
The winner of the Great Bedrock Blizzard War of ’98? Cocoa Pebbles.
Oh, and there’s this, too. I have no clue what the surprise gifts were, but according to Fred, each was valued between 3 and 8 bucks. I bet Post leaned to the low side of that range, but maybe 1 out of every 500 kids got something better than a cardboard Dino tree ornament. If that’s even possible.
This post is a lot shorter than I’d anticipated. Maybe I should increase the font size by like, 400%.
