Cereal Sightings in 1991’s Stone Cold!
Throw Beverly Hills Cop, Cool as Ice and a big block of Velveeta into a blender, and out would come Stone Cold. The 1991 cult classic stars Brian “The Boz” Bosworth as a rebel cop who plays by his own rules and dresses like a surfer version of General Zod.
It’s terrible and great.
Course, as my pal Hoverbored recently pointed out, the biggest reason to watch Stone Cold has nothing to do with sex or violence or high-speed chases. No, the true draw is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Batman Cereal!
You won’t have to wait long to see it, either.
In the opening scene, policeman Joe Huff (that’s Boz) just happens to go shopping during a robbery at his local supermarket. It’s exactly what you’d expect, with pratfalls involving Coke cans and all sorts of food-related pandemonium.
The scene was obviously shot in a legit supermarket, and judging by what was on display, filming must’ve taken place in 1990.
The money shot is of the lead crook hiding in the cereal aisle. Look close and you should recognize a number of those boxes.
Don’t like to squint? Let’s zoom in:
There are plenty of dead brands visible, but the holy trio includes Batman Cereal, The Real Ghostbusters Cereal and Hot Wheels Cereal.
While Hot Wheels Cereal was mostly famous for including toy cars as in-box prizes, the other two were absolute must-haves. Neither Batman Cereal nor The Real Ghostbusters Cereal were particularly delicious, but they had slick-as-hell boxes and were tied to some seriously white hot franchises.
Look extra close at the second pic, and you’ll notice that the store stocked both The Real Ghostbusters Cereal AND its eventual successor, Slimer and The Real Ghostbusters Cereal. (The latter included Slimer marshmallows and updated box art.)
Methinks some of those boxes were edging dangerously close to their expiration dates!
Watch the whole scene and you’ll spot some other fallen foods, too.
In one shot we get the double-punch of Sunshine’s Hi Ho crackers and Nabisco’s Striped Chips Ahoy. I can take or leave the Hi Hos, but as recently mentioned, Striped Chips Ahoy cookies were awesome in a life-altering way.
Peek around this shot and you’ll see bags of Keebler’s Soft Batch cookies, which are still around today, albeit in packaging that evokes Edna’s Edibles a little less.
More important are the bags of Chips Ahoy Selections, which I’d totally forgotten until framefucking this ridiculous scene from Stone Cold. My God, those were GOOD. The cookies were blessed with obnoxiously huge chunks of chocolate, and were made to resemble the sorts of fancy cookies one might find at a bakery.
At the end of the scene, we even get a brief look at some vintage vending machines, complete with late ‘80s/early ‘90s prizes.
Pay special attention to the leftmost machine, which was filled with cheap slap bracelets. Every kid had tons of those… and the wrist lacerations to prove it. (They ended up getting banned at my school, which naturally only made them more popular.)
If you’d like to try spotting these items yourself, the whole Stone Cold movie is currently on YouTube, I guess because nobody can be bothered to protect the copyright for a 25-year-old Boz movie that made sixty bucks at the box office.
Few things thrill me more than spotting old food in movies. If you have the same fetish, you might also enjoy my dissection of the supermarket scene from Manhunter.
