Five Cereal Boxes from Christmases Past!
Below: Five cereal boxes from Christmases past. They’re all from my personal collection. I’ll thank you in advance for reading this, as it helps to justify why I have a personal collection of Christmassy cereal boxes. As always, you’re my silent enablers. My tongueless Iagos. Go you.
Christmas Crunch! (1999)
I love that Quaker still makes Christmas Crunch, but hate that they haven’t updated the box design in umpteen years. It doesn’t help that the current box looks like a Target circular, stylish as hell but completely bereft of the simplistic charm that originally brought Christmas Crunch to the dance.
Heck, even this box — which came out more than a decade after Christmas Crunch’s debut — still knew how to work it. This is all I want from my Christmas Crunch boxes. Flat colors, art that looks like it was torn from Dollar Tree coloring books, and advertisements for Pokemon watches.
“Dear Santa, and this is gonna sound weird, but…” Read More…
Classic Christmas Commercials, Volume 7!
It’s time for another batch of Classic Christmas Commercials, featuring pizza and laundry detergent and Ronald McDonald. Three of these are from my collection; the remaining are from our pal Larry. May they fill your hearts with joy, and your brains with really old ad jingles.
A Toys “R” Us Christmas! (1984)
So much to love about this one, from Geoffrey’s old school “baseball mascot” visage to that rare shot of Takara’s Kronoform watches, which transformed from timepieces into robot warriors!
While the commercial highlighted some specific products, it was more meant to reaffirm Toys “R” Us’s standing as the best place on the planet. For the seven-year-olds who hummed along to its theme song, that was 100% truth.
(And yes, you might notice that this “Christmas” commercial cannibalized footage from other, evergreen TRU commercials. Since the new footage consisted of Geoffrey and a little kid chilling in what was for all intents the house from A Christmas Story, that’s totally forgivable.) Read More…
2015’s Best Holiday Junk Food, Part 3!
I’m back with another batch of this year’s hottest holiday junk food. If you missed the previous reasons to look like Santa, click here and here.
Cracker Jack Holiday Sugar Cookie Popcorn!
It took me over a month to find a bag, but it was worth the wait. I’m not a big Cracker Jack guy — it’s honestly one of the last junk foods I’d ever buy for myself — but I was still super intrigued by their obvious dedication to the theme.
It’s not just “Cracker Jack with a twist,” but really a whole new product. The popcorn is coated with snowy frosting and topped with holiday sprinkles, and as promised, it takes like legit sugar cookies. It’s not something I’d want to eat every day, but for the purposes of making a Plain Jane December evening feel like Christmas morning, I’m giving it the full 10 points.
Actually, I’m giving it 12 — one bonus point for the traditional Cracker Jack prize (mine was a reindeer sticker), and another for the fact that this shit will work great as tree garland. Read More…
Eight ’80s Xmas Specials You Might’ve Forgotten.
When we think about “animated Christmas TV specials,” our minds drift to the likes of Charlie Brown, Frosty, Rudolph and yeah, even Garfield, because we’re never gonna let it go with that one.
Of course, the wealth of Christmas cartoons runs so much deeper than that. In the early ‘80s especially, it seemed like there were five new ones every year!
These were the halcyon days of television Christmas specials. It wasn’t just that so many were produced, but also that the major networks gladly ran them in primetime. (In fact, there were years when multiple networks competed for young eyeballs by programming different cartoon Christmas specials against each other. When’s the last time we’ve seen that happen?)
Down below: Eight animated Christmas specials from the ‘80s that you may have forgotten… and tips on how you can see ‘em today!
Christmas Comes to Pac-Land!
Premiered Thursday 12/16/1982 @ 8 PM
Synopsis: Santa crashes his sleigh in Pac-Land, so it’s up to Pac-Man to save Christmas! In the end, Pac-Man feeds Santa’s reindeer power pellets to get them back into flying shape (seriously), and the holiday is spared.
Highlight: Watching the usually-evil ghosts act like pretty okay guys, all in the spirit of Christmas.
Background: Christmas Comes to Pac-Land was spun from Pac-Man’s Saturday morning cartoon series, which debuted earlier that same year. Now mostly counted as a mere holiday-themed episode of that series, it really was an honest-to-goodness TV special, with a spot in primetime. (In more recent years it became a Cartoon Network favorite.)
Viewing Options: While Warner allows a preview clip on YouTube, you can find the whole special on Pac-Man: The Complete Second Season. Read More…