5 Awesome Vintage Cereal Box Prizes!
A little over ten years ago, I started collecting old cereal prizes. It was the right time to do it. Even the most humdrum old prize is good for a few bucks these days, but nobody was really paying attention to ‘em back then. I’d win auctions for ten bucks and walk away with piles of the things.
It was another obsession that burned bright for a few months before I moved onto other stupid shiny things. The hundreds of prizes I accumulated have now spent years trapped in plastic bins, hoping/praying that I’d remember them someday.
Well, lucky them — today I did! Below are five of my favorite cereal prizes from the ‘80s and ‘90s. May they conjure up memories and make you crave Corn Pops.
Starbots!
Kellogg’s (1985)
I gushed about the Starbots on a recent episode of the Purple Stuff Podcast, and while I suppose calling them the best-ever cereal prizes is an objective reach, they’re definitely my all-time favorites.
With a wink at Star Wars and Transformers, the Starbots were interstellar ships that transformed into adorably crude robots. Each came unassembled on a plastic rack (similar to how your old Ninja Turtles’ weapons were packaged), with a teensy sticker sheet.
There were four (wildly different) Starbots available, and each came in multiple colors. My favorite is the one shown here, which looked like a cross between Leader-1 and Playskool’s Alphie.
I absolutely treated the Starbots like “real” action figures as a kid. They palled around with Vader and Bumblebee, and it never once felt unnatural. That was an unusually high “rank” for cereal prizes, and I can’t name many others that got that sort of play in my childhood bedroom. Read More…
Remember when Raphael saw Critters? Well…
One of my favorite moments from the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie is when Raphael blows off steam with a trip to the movie theater:
“Where do they come up with this stuff?!”
I was always surprised by Raph’s nonplussed reaction to Critters. It seemed like the perfect movie to see late at night at a sleazy Manhattan theater, where the crowd was sure to be too drowsy to notice the obvious Ninja Turtle amongst its ranks.
Like Raph’s own movie, Critters — released in 1986 — was another gem from New Line. If you’ve never seen it, picture five dashes of Gremlins with two dashes of Ghoulies II.
It’s a throwaway gag, but it speaks to one of the things I love so much about this movie: You really got a sense of what daily life was like for the Ninja Turtles, even when they weren’t fighting bad guys.
But what’s extra interesting about that little moment is that in the various adaptations of the film, Raphael sees entirely DIFFERENT movies! Read More…
Geek Magazines in the 1990s!
From Wizard to Starlog to Hero Illustrated, I grew up surrounded by geek magazines. They were so important to me, but not for the obvious reasons.
If you were a lonely kid in pre-internet times, those magazines felt like travel brochures to some alternate universe where you and your bullshit were mainstream. At least for me, the reason I was so into collecting nonsense and obsessing over particular movies was because I had so many holes to fill. To some degree, geeky hobbies took the place of actual friends.
…but then you’d pick up an issue of Wizard, or Fangoria, or Comics Scene or whatever, and you’d feel some weird sense of camaraderie. It wasn’t the idea that liking comic books or certain movies made you an outcast, but moreover the sense that whatever was wrong with you was also wrong with anyone else who was “too into” those things. Which then made whatever was wrong with you seem less… well, wrong.
While paging through those mags, your world felt like a world and not just an escape from it. Read More…
Dino Drac’s February Funpack is here!
I’m kicking myself for not getting the February Funpack on the site earlier than this, because man, it’s a good one. Oh well. That just means you’ll need to be EXTRA FAST if you want in. (Please be extra fast.)
AVAILABLE IN THE UNITED STATES ONLY!
Dino Drac’s February Funpack is here, with some of the all-time coolest items that I’ve ever put into these boxes!
Y’all know the score by now. The Funpacks are available on a subscription basis, and you can cancel at any time without penalty. The cost is $25, and that includes shipping… which dramatically increased in price last month, so lucky you!
For as long as you remain subscribed, you’ll keep getting awesome boxes filled with old-and-new toys, trinkets, snacks and nonsense. Scroll to the bottom for ordering info, or keep reading to learn about everything you’ll receive in this month’s Funpack! Read More…