Dinosaur Dracula!

Christmas Cookie Crisp, from 1991!

Christmas Crunch may be the most known “holiday edition cereal,” but friends, there are OTHERS. Or at least, there were others. While Cap’n Crunch surfed the red-and-green wave to obscene heights of glory, other cereals tried to do the same.

Post’s Pebbles cereals and General Mills’ Lucky Charms might not be doing it this year, but in the past, they too made dark pacts with Santa. Most of the “big cereals” gave Christmas a shot at least once, so long as it made sense. Sometimes, a “big cereal” gave Christmas a shot even when it made no sense.

Case in point: Christmas Cookie Crisp, from 1991.

Rare during its time and all but forgotten today, I have never once eaten Christmas Cookie Crisp, but I am still IN LOVE WITH IT. Rightly believing that it would take extreme measures to pass Cookie Crisp off as holiday cereal, Ralston went incredibly over the top. This wasn’t a measured bet. Ralston put it all on the line, and they used enough red food dye to mimic 100% of the bloodshed from both world wars.

Before we talk about the cereal, consider its box. It’s a tricky box. If you look at it too quickly, you might not notice its many justifications for acoustic tribute songs.

Let’s start with the logo. The “Christmas” part makes it seem like Ralston was aiming for old-fashioned sincerity, but the “Cookie Crisp” part throws a serious wrench into the works. I guess they were trying to convey candy and icing, but by using two shades of green, it comes off more like slime, as if this was a Halloween version of Cookie Crisp, masquerading as a Christmas thing for reasons we don’t want to know.

Then, there’s the trio of characters. Officer Crumb, the Cookie Crook and Chip the Dog. I love how they maintained the illusion of strife even when it was so obvious that all three were friends, because come on, only friends would conspire to don equally accentuating Christmas costumes.

It doesn’t end there. Check out that cereal bowl. Not what it’s in it, because we’ll get to THAT in a minute. I mean the bowl itself. There’s a goddamned ribbon tied around it. And wait, what’s that? Look closer! The whole bowl is actually in some kind of miniature sleigh!

“Boring white box?” My ass. If Ralston was guilty of anything, it was a poor sense of arrangement. Read More…

Dino Drac’s Advent Calendar: 12/3/12.

Dino Drac isn’t thrilled with today’s device and map. For one thing, he has no idea what the map represents. It says nothing on it, and seems to only detail a thirty foot area consisting of a bridge and a bonfire. What is he supposed to do with a map like this?

The device is even more troubling. I call it a “device” because God only knows what task it’s intended to perform. Dino Drac enjoys pushing the illuminated buttons, but it’d be way more rewarding if they caused any perceptible action. I suppose some garage door fifty miles away could be crashing up and down, but it’s a reach.

42″ Dinosaur Dracula, Christmas Edition.

Thank you, Home Depot. Thank you for selling an animated holiday Tyrannosaur.

One devil medallion and a cut-up t-shirt later, and I’m now the proud owner of a 42” Dinosaur Dracula, Christmas edition.

Life is weird, and good.

Mad, hysterical love to the few of you who tipped me off. And to the guy at Home Depot who so generously offered to climb up a giant orange ladder so I could buy the store display version. (They were otherwise sold out.) Best $65 bucks I ever spent.

The M.U.S.C.L.E. Hard Knockin’ Rockin’ Ring!

It was Christmas Day, 1986. Maybe ’87. Let’s say ’87.

Thank God for my friend across the street. As mentioned before, my family celebrates on Christmas Eve and celebrates it hard. Christmas Day was never much of anything in our house, and in some ways, it was actually depressing. The “post-holiday blues” are familiar to many, but it hits so much harder when you feel it on Christmas morning.

But my best friend’s family was different. They did nothing on the Eve, and everything on the Day. Growing up, I spent many of my Christmases at his house, to the point where his aunts and uncles felt like my aunts and uncles.

The way his family celebrated was so foreign to me. For dessert, there’d always be these enormous plates of salted green apple slices. (They were better than they sound.) The atmosphere was so much quieter than my own family’s party, in part because there were less people, but also because nobody at his house was Italian.

A key part of these visits was to compare Christmas presents with my buddy. Honestly, I was there to brag. It’s not like he didn’t get good stuff, but his parents were much more practical. He played sports, so he got tons of sports equipment. Great in the long run, but not so great for showy boasts. He also wasn’t at all greedy or materialistic, even at a young age. If he even once made a Christmas list, I’d be surprised.

Not that it was a competition, but I’d grown accustomed to besting him on the fronts that mattered most to me: Toys and video games. He didn’t care enough about those things to have a lot of them, and I sure didn’t mind my role as “boy with the better toys.”

Well, in 1987, the fucker finally beat me… Read More…