Honeycomb Cereal

Perhaps the greatest testimony I can give to the awesomeness of Honeycomb cereal is this: I didn't add sugar to it. For a largely unsupervised child, that's the equivalent of a five-star Zagat rating. Honeycomb was just pure goodness. And it was huge: 1" in diameter. I'm not sure why that mattered. Maybe it was riding on the "bigger is better" mentality of the Cold War arms race. Whatever the reason, it worked for me. I'll admit that, at some point during my elementary school years, I fell prey to the cereals that were hawked by my favorite cartoon characters - Smurfberries, for one. And I even tried a box of Mary Lou Retton Wheaties (which was an utter disappointment). But nothing - no matter who endorsed it - ever gave me the satisfaction of plain, honest Honeycombs.

Honeycomb was such a favorite that it didn't even need to bribe me with A-list spokespeople or bottom-of-the-box prizes. Honeycomb got by on size and honey taste alone. The good kids/bad guy dynamic of cereal marketing is requisite, of course, but I give them full credit for developing the most awesome cereal rivalry of all time: nerd robots versus Viking bikers.


Honeycomb is still around, of course, unlike Smurfberries. Unfortunately, marketing has taken a huge dive. The cereal is now hawked by a crack-addled, miscreant freakazoid who can't find more worthy adversaries than uptight librarians or purse snatchers.


I find the new marketing of Honeycomb really disappointing. It used to be about size; now it's about vapid consumption. In that sense, however, Honeycomb commercials are like documentaries of American zeitgeist. We're always at war with someone or something, be it Soviets or drugs or poverty. Cereal commercials reflect these conflicts and encourage patriotism: Eat cereal! Fight rabbits! Of course, there's a huge, gaping hole in that logic. But my ideology doesn't question the awesomeness of robots or cereal, and I'm not going to open that door by too deeply unpacking cereal rivalries. Just take cereal commercials as a statement about American conflicts in general: they make no sense, they accomplish nothing, and they'll never stop. But this deals with the topic far better than I ever could.


I won't apologize for being a child of the Reagan era. It was awesome, after all. But that's quite a lot to dissect early in the morning... Oh! Look! Andre the Giant!