Podcast: The Ride - General Mills Monster Cereals with Mike Scollins

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Mike Scollins (Late Night with Seth Meyers) joins us to discuss Count Chocula, Franken Berry, Boo Berry and the rest of the gang! Horror Hall of Fame episode up at The Second Gate: Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide WATCH THIS EPISODE: https://youtu.be/novadfBpikw FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

FOREVER! DOG! Mike Scallons joins us to discuss General Mills' monster series on Hauntcast the Fright, a hauntcast about Scream Parks, or in today's case, serial killers. I'm Scott Gravedigner, joined by Jason Skeleton. That was very slick. Serial killers didn't occur to me until I heard you say it. You know, and it's a joke that would work for a mom or a child. That's for everyone.

Yes. Except for mentioning killing, which I guess isn't good for children. Anyway, also joining us is, and this is a new development off of The Second Gate where we brainstormed a little more on the spooky names. Uh, let's just, all right, I'll just lay this in. Michael Madsen is where, okay. We're comfortable with that. for days, maybe two or three days. I was thinking about it. I think the way it should be sold is like Michael Madsen, you know, like mad in a crazy way,

not angry, because I think it could be misinterpreted pretty easily. And I want to make sure it's more like a mad scientist than it is like somebody just generally mad, like a sports fan is mad

that his team lost. That's not what I am in Halloween season. But that's the issue, not the confusion. You like that it's the actor's name. That's good. We like that. I love that.

But you wanted to make sure that we know that the mad is a mad scientist mad. Exactly, yeah. Okay. So that's where we've landed. Let us know what you think of Michael Madsen. And today we are talking about the monster cereals. These are from General Mills. This is a frightening brand that has, I think it's a very good choice for us

who are kind of scaredy cats because these are soft scary characters who themselves are scaredy cats. Like that's sort of the thing with them. They are monsters. I didn't know that. That's how they were characterized. They're monsters who are scared a little bit.

So appropriate for us, I feel. Count Chocula, of course. Frankenberry. These are the big stars. And this topic comes to us courtesy of a person we were just meeting for the first time, whom I'm so happy is here. I love when a funny person outs themselves as being into the bullshit that we are into. Visiting from New York from Late Night with Seth Meyers, it's Mike Scullins.

Hi. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Oh, wait. I was going to say Mike Scaldings, maybe. I want to say the real name and then throw one at you, a spooky one. Scullins is probably the easiest. Scullins, wait a minute, of course.

Okay, because it keeps more of the real name. I had the skull is coming from inside the house. That's great. That's great. Okay, okay. Love it. Now, with that, we've already given you several introductions due to the spooky names, but I'm going to back it up.

I wanted to do the one where we said your comedy credit, the show that you write for, but now I'm going to do a different intro that is maybe super relevant to our audience, and that is, please welcome our guest today, a guy who used to run the Six Flags Twitter account, Mike Scullins, let's go used to run the Six Flags Twitter account. Mike Scullins, let's go with, or calls coming from inside the house. Yes, are you willing to discuss this? I am willing. I'm willing to. I think all the NDAs have expired.

I think I can talk about the Six Flags Twitter account. You're not going to get a visit from Mr. Six looking pissed off. I may well, who I've seen out of makeup in Handsome Guy. Oh. Oh. Oh, that's right. That's the idea. You saw the real actor who was like a,

there's photos of him out there. He's a buff gentleman. Well, he's like a proper dancer. I mean, it's a lot easier to make a dancer look old than make an old person look like a good dancer. Oh, yes.

To like inject life into a extremely, like 100 year old. I don't know how old he is canonically. But whenabouts did this happen and how did this happen? I needed a day job in 2012, 13 maybe. I was there for like a year and a half, two years. I'm sure you guys know that the headquarters is in Dallas.

I don't know if I did know that offhand. There was a small satellite office in New York that I worked out of, but barely because all my bosses were in Dallas, so they didn't really keep tabs on me. And it was also Twitter was kind of still new at this point. They wanted a social media expert, but at that point, one didn't exist. Just by saying you had a Twitter account, you kind of wear one uh and i remember they would like ask for like metrics and reporting and i'd be like oh it's such new technology that stuff doesn't really exist like

as long as your followers are going up you're doing a good job uh and i knew that like this was a job an intern should be doing so i'm just gonna ride until the wheels fall off and i get let go uh I would use all of their office supplies to print everyone's mod sketches at UCB. Oh wow, great. I would tweet like maybe three times a day and they would ask like, why are you tweeting so

little? And I'd be like, oh, like it's really alienating to the consumer because it's their space, not ours. And they were like, oh no, that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. And they were like fully on board with it. As as day jobs goes it was like one of the best ones i've ever had geez and good and incredible perks what what'd you get what are perks uh took my whole 13 person mod team to six flags bracelets that you go right up the exit line it was a blast you were the guy to get on a team with clearly yeah i mean there's a high

roller here six flags great adventure which is the one closest to new york um also has like a safari oh yeah oh yeah and they like let me go and like feed the tigers and pet the dolphins it was you got like closer animal access yeah it was oh whoa because I tweeted four times a day just like, who's going to the park? Oh, yeah. That's a good question. Wait, Mike, did you have a question? I was just going to say, like, if you buy a wristband at that park, can you go up and pet animals or touch them? Or was that just sort of like a teen was like right this way?

These bracelets are only for internal use, so you can't buy them. But if an investor's coming to the park, they'll give you two. And I was like, well, I need 13. But like... Well, you got to take the coach. You can't leave the coach.

And he did come. He came and he had a blast. Yeah, the director has to come too. And let's just say I had some sketches in the show that month. Smart. Wait, yeah, then you gave me the question of like you kind of previewed it, but like what was it?

A general tweet might be like who's ready for roller coasters? That's basically what it was. And then like every once in a while I would like, I'd get like a customer service question that I would answer like, all right, the park closes at 8. Or whatever time Six Flags closes. Yes, we are very sorry that King Da Ka is shut down again. No car has made it up that hill today.

And I would just pack my briefcase and go home. Job well done. Wow, an empty briefcase. Full of packets. Must be a lot of analytics in there, or else you wouldn't have this gig um that that is so fascinating well that's some amazing theme part cred um and also you you're here kind of on uh personally for work but you're also doing you you've been uh traversing the country checking out the haunt season. You've done a bunch in Florida as well, correct? Favorite time of the year.

I mean, like you said, I'm here like partially for work, but it was planned around I want to go to Halloween Horror Nights. I did Not Scary Farm on Saturday. Okay. And then the beginning of the month of September, went down to Orlando to do – we did Disney and we did Halloween Horror Nights. I'd never been to the Orlando Park before for Halloween Horror Nights and hadn't even been to Florida in like 15 years and forgot how big it is

oh yeah I mean I go to the one the Hollywood Horror Nights every year and forgot comparatively the Orlando Park is just huge yeah yeah it's a giant camp like rivaling Disney World at this point. If not in physical space,

then like stuff to do. How'd you dig it? I don't think we've, you know, we haven't made it down there. We don't know what's going on for Halloween right now. How was it?

Dug it quite a bit. The Orlando and the Hollywood parks usually double up mazes a lot and houses a lot. And this year they haven't really. There was one down there, Dead Man's Pier, that I thought was just fucking awesome. It's kind of based on the fog. And I know you did last summer a little bit because there's a fisherman with a hook.

But it takes place in New England, which is where I'm from, and I was just all about it. Wow, wow. We got the flash passes, went through, and then my buddy Kevin and I also like went through the standby line and did it again. Okay, sweet, sweet. Wait, so like spooky fog then, scary creatures? Yeah, it was not like, it wasn't the scariest house they had,

but just like the atmosphere and the mood was so great. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. A lot of like barnacles, like like, dead, bloated corpses, beautiful ship props. The biggest set piece was, like, this lighthouse that everything was kind of, like, built all around. And it had, like, different tiers.

So there was, like, perspective and depth that you don't always get at a lot of haunted houses that I was just was just like fully on board for. Oh, like a multiple level? Yeah, yeah. So like the lighthouse, you were always, it was always a focal point in the horizon no matter where in the park you were or where in the house you were, I should say.

Wow, wow. That's cool. They have a Wolfman Dracula mummy like versus maze down there. Is that one not at Hollywood? They have it, but it looks like it's different like because when i did it out here i don't know maybe your experience was different because sometimes like the scare actors will maybe be on a break so you miss an important

element of the maze but when i watched a walkthrough uh of it in orlando they always had like a very clear winner that would apparently change at the end of among the three monsters oh man if that happened i missed that okay because like at the end of among the three monsters oh man if that happened i missed that okay because like at the end it was like mummies holding up like wolfman's head mummy wins and apparently they rotate through winners which i thought was awesome so when i went to hollywood i was like here we go let's see which monster wins and then we got to the end and it was like just nope nobody was there and i was like is, is this because of Hollywood or is this because somebody's on break or just for their work?

I did watch them like cycle out scare actors and the standby line gives them like a real like, when we used to like bang pots and pans for first responders, that's the reception these guys got when they were like leaving to go on a 15 minute break. Yeah, these are the heroes. And correct me if I'm wrong, are they usually covered

in black hoods or black cloaks? Yes. It looks like a funeral procession. They really try to keep the mystery so that you're not watching Wolfman take his 10-minute break. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Which is, I guess, good, but then you

suddenly are noticing 20 people in all black walking by. Yeah, if you don't know, it, like, raises more questions. It's scary. But that's good. Mark of Thorn. That's what you want. Yeah.

I mean, we did, one year, were backstage at Knott's Scary Farm, and it was very funny just to see, like, a ghoul taking a lunch break. Like, a ghoul eating leftover spaghetti so they put less thought into we were allowed access to see like the real oh like a media yeah like i came out of the bathroom and was startled by like a headless creature like oh excuse me uh i did knots on saturday and a decent amount of it was closed down because of flooding. It rained a lot on Saturday. Oh, no. You said in lines?

Like, you just couldn't? Yeah, we also had flash pass, and they were like, flash pass is flooded. You're going to have to get in standby line, which was kind of a bummer. What? Oh, wow. The line is, wait, the line, the actual pavement is, like, goes more underground? According to them, and then I guess the standby must be uphill or something because that was not flooded. That doesn't seem right to me, I'll be honest. There's stuff like that.

Think about like Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider has like a – it goes down. Like there's like a slope to it. So maybe they – It's not a totally even park. Usually the lines are just like next to each other. This was not. The lines were around the corner from each other, but I guess I don i don't get the benefit to lying to me yeah it's true although like don't you find in just real life

especially in retail and i don't blame people you get lied to constantly and you know you're being lied to and you go yeah okay like somebody you ask for something in a target and they go ah and they like pretend to check and they go oh we don't have it. And I go, okay. And I go, that person has lied to me. Yeah, you're right. I just feel that happens a lot. Yes. And I guess I'm, like, too conflict-averse to call them on. Like, you didn't go in before it.

McDonald's, they said, you know, the ice cream machine. Ice cream machine's broken. Yeah. Yeah. Carlson, what toy were you after that you didn't get that made you mad at the Target? It looks like Boo-Berry. Oh, it happened i do have a toy the toys it is a toy story about the target yes so okay so i'm driving to glendale's

target i'm trying to pick up the ninja turtle punk frog set which is uh napoleon bonafrog and i think attila the frog was the other one in the two pack and i call on the way over and i say oh do you have this and i explain what it is and the guy he's like confused obviously because he's an adult man and why would he know anything about what i'm talking about this is a niche product for weird people in their 30s and 40s and mainly it's people calling to ask like like do you have formula or not is that still happening or not this was pre-formula shortage I want to. Oh, really? Okay.

This is a longstanding story. Okay. This is before the supply chain issues. And he's like, oh, yeah. And he's like, he looks. He goes, oh, yeah, we don't have this. So sorry. And I go, okay.

All right. Thank you. And I pull into the thing. I go up to the section sitting right on the shelf. They have it there. And I go, well, the guy lied to me, but I don't blame him. I'm not upset with him. It's a happy ending for you, too.

Oh, yeah. So I was, yeah. Are those toys behind you somewhere? You're in front of your toy collection. They are behind me. Do you want to see them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it a hassle to get up, though?

I don't know how many rigs you're connected to. Mike's going to lie and say we don't have it and stop. I love the audio picture this is painting. It's like theater of the mind. We can hear him stepping away from the mic to find his little guy. Even if you're not watching on the Forever Dog YouTube, now you know kind of the distance from microphone to turtles,

which is not very far. Here's all four of the brother, of the punk brother frogs. These are really cool looking. I'm not going to lie. As much as I'd love to make fun of it, it is like a 2D drawn style made 3D. These toys rule, Scott. It's hard to deny that even if you go,

this guy's out of his mind, you go, but they are like really cool looking and the colors are really well chosen. The style is real like Battletoads-y, right? Yeah, well, yeah. Battletoads, I'm trying to think what the timeline is, because they had the whole run of, like, Biker Mice from Mars, Street Sharks,

and Awake of the Turtles. But I'm sure there were, like, I'm sure there were animal crossover, like, Turtles did Punk Frogs, but then the Toad, like, I think there were evil toads on turtles as well is what I'm saying but the battle toads themselves were never there but yeah it's all

in the same family that's what I'm getting at so it is Ninja Turtle universe or not wait I don't remember yes yeah these four these guys were in the original so I really don't want to bog this interview down excuse me but these are all in the style

of all characters that appeared in the 1987 cartoon so all the ones that look like this were characters that you saw in that original like 7 year run of that Fred Wolfe cartoon with the Chuck Lorre theme song oh yeah

do you like the one giving the peace signs the best because it reminds you of Ringo? Well, Jason, I do like that, but I will also say this. They all come with a lot of hands, so I could make them all doing peace signs. Oh, those are opposable fingers? Well, no, they're different. The hands come off. The hands come off.

The heads come off. The accessories, again, the accessories, it's just out of control with how crazy these things are. Unbelievable. For a man in his 30s. But you would not, like, swat your newborn daughter away from... No, but she does get... To calm her down, I bring her in here, and I just have her look at the colors, and it does seem to work.

Of those specifically, or what's the most calming toy you got? Yeah, the shelf with them on it and then above are all pretty colorful. So I don't know that – she just likes looking at colors. I'm not out of my mind where I'm like – she's like, Attila the frog is my favorite. I'm like, I'm not imagining her talking yet. I like Dirtbag and Groundchuck, the villains from season three. Yes, daughter.

You're learning. There's plenty of time to train her. You can set her just like you're going to listen to every episode of Daddy's Podcast, which covers approximately 4% of what you need to know to know what all these toys are. Exactly. You've got something else behind you, which ties us right into, wow, we've done a smash. Good for you. Thank you, Jordan.

I can bring him closer, too. But yeah, I'll put him back. But yeah, I'm a big fan of the Monster Cereal mascots. I'll say this, which might be controversial, not a big fan of the cereal itself. Oh, this is interesting. I like the cereal, but I like a lot of other cereals better. But I have a, thank you, Brian Mariotti, COO of Funko. I have a Funko vinyl soda toy of Fruit Brute.

Whoa. That's also cool. Anything that's like 2D animated but made 3D, this rules. And it's flocked as well, which means it has kind of a fur on it. Okay. So that's a toy term. You're going to start crossing the – you've given us Brian Mariotti and you've given us flocking.

Yeah. And this is – I don't know the name of the CEO or COO of this company, but this is a company called Jada Toys, which made classic – I don't know how – Well, you can see it. Great. Frankenberry. And the box, the toy box looks like the vintage cereal box. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if they're making the other ones, but. Currently just the first two, Chocula and Frankenberry. They look great. You got multiple heads on there. I don't think I knew there were, you know, carefully constructed toy versions of these characters. These are new.

And here's also the thing, as I maybe said before, anything you want a toy of that was around when we were kids, somebody's either working on it or has made it already. I would really like. Are there any earnest toys? Are there earnest? I was just talking about this with a friend of mine a week ago. And for some reason there are not earnest toys and that feels like just like neca is the toy company i talk a lot about they're doing alf now they're doing dinosaurs they're doing a like a baby sinclair

and an earl earnest seems like this is a no-brainer for them to get on board here so yeah it's in the zone it's in that time frame but no i for some reason there are no good earnest toys right now wow wow because i'd like earnest going on splash mountain from the special that's kind of like finish the loot mike anything would is there something you would like a really perfectly a upscale toy of from that time period, I feel like it would have been the cereal monsters, which we got. Wow. Wow. No kidding. Geez.

Oh, so you're a fan. You dig these guys. Well, I think same as Mike. I think the cereal's fine. I think the mascots are unbelievable. Yes. Oh, boy. Oh, great, great.

Well, this is great because I wanted to calibrate how everybody feels about these characters, what their general, what your general feelings are. How do you think you came to that conclusion? Just is it from commercials or just the existence of them on boxes? I mean, definitely commercials. Like, if those would count as a Halloween special, that would be like my favorite special is the commercials for the monster cereal. Yeah. But also we like weren't much of a sugar

cereal family growing up so walking through that aisle is like the equivalent feeling you get like walking through like the video store aisle at blockbuster and like looking at the things you can't get sure um but they've always been like fascinating to me and they're like a they're like a gateway horror like they're not meant to scare anybody. They get scared by kids in the commercials. Yeah, kids, cats, any sudden movement. Each other. Each other.

The first Boo-Berry commercial, which I really like, is Boo-Berry, like, first off, a lot of these commercials involved all of them arguing about their cereal being the best. But then Boo-Berry is introduced and, like, shows up and is like, I'm your new neighbor. Jordan, actually, will you just bring that up? The one-minute version of the first Boo-Berry commercial. I know we're going a little out of order because Boo-Berry was the third one introduced.

But I was always very fond of. Yeah, that's the one. Okay. First Boo-Berry. Someone's come for a nutritious breakfast. What? Hello, my name is Boo. Let me finish.

Boo-Berry. My ghostly good blueberry-flavored cereal, Boo-Berry, is part of this complete breakfast. Who do you know, Ray? Frankenberry's got strawberry flavored marshmallows. Cultracula's got chocolate marshmallows. But I've got blueberry flavored marshmallows. Frankenberry.

Cultracula. And blueberry. They're terrified of this Peter Lorre-esque. Was shocked to find out that was not Peter Lorre this week. It's not. In fact, it's Paul Freese. The ghost host from The Haunted Mansion. It's the same voice that narrates The Haunted Mansion.

He does an incredible Peter Lorre. It's really, really good. And it doesn't sound at all like the ghost host, so that really shows you his... Isn't he also the Pillsbury Doughboy? I think so, yeah. He was. He's so many things back in the old days.

Yeah, yeah, which none of these voices are similar remotely. Yeah. He's Ludwig von Drake. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. I feel like in these commercials, lots of times it's about a serial mascot trying to get the cereal. Like Barney wants pebbles or Trickstrap wants tricks. And these guys, like, have their cereal all the time.

That conflict is not there. And you don't have to meet all these kids that change out every time. You get to focus on your core characters. That's a good thing. I also really liked in that ad that they are scared. These monsters are afraid

of just the word boo getting said. And then he says, let me finish. Boo Barry. Which they don't. That softens it yeah yeah oh jesus christ thank god it's just been a hanging boo scott and jason that's what you're most afraid of in these haunted houses is someone's gonna say boo at you oh yeah yeah yeah or then if they tack berry on you can relax yeah yeah yes berry boo to you like i i you know there's there's ways

you can soften it. Soften the blow of boo, yes. This is the thing we're the most afraid of this season. Unfortunately, that version is missing a thing in other commercials that I'm very fond of, where they refer to their cereal as being filled with chocolate sweeties and strawberry sweeties. Which, as soon as I heard i heard i was like uh-oh i'm gonna be into this and some like i immediately played it for my girlfriend and she was like i i don't care for the sweeties i don't like she's not on board with sweet what is what is the

breakdown there what why do you like sweeties why i don't know i just think it's really cute i think it's a cute way to refer to marshmallows. To refer to like. No, the Sweeties are not the marshmallows. I thought the Sweeties were the marshmallows. The Sweeties are the cereal pieces. Okay. And then they also have marshmallows.

It is a little unclear because it seemed like they went back and forth on some commercials. I believe, yeah. They're not the marshmallows. They're not the marshmallows. They're the regular pieces. Sweeties are regular pieces, not marshmallows. That's really confusing. So it's a bowl of sweeties with added marshmallows,

which on top of that, there's like a clinical term that I don't know if it's ever said in these ads, but I think if you're talking about any of this Lucky Charms, anything with marshmallows, that a term you could use is Marbits. Anybody previously familiar with Marbits? The word scared me when I saw it because it sounds like something you have to exterminate. But Marshmallow Bits shortens into Marbits.

Marbits is like a trauma horror movie series with little creatures that are are gross and it's very low budget but some people like love it it's their whole personality the box outs they're just coming out of the toilet or something like ghoulies yeah no marbits marbits um uh to just generally well first things first here's something we haven't acknowledged is that uh this is the first case of a topic from our Patreon polls, Club 3, where the audience chooses the topic. This is the first where a topic did not win the poll.

It's what I wanted. It's what I was vouching for. Me too, yeah. So now we know, Mike, you were the first to initiate a protocol, which is if we have put something in the Club 3 poll and also asked a Club 3 member thank you, by the way, to, if we've already asked somebody to

be on the show, you yourself have the power to pull it out of the Club 3 crypt and put it on main feed, baby. Oh, I love this rule. Thanks for doing it. I remember being a little bummed that Monsters didn't win. I think it's the one time I voted, and I was like, well, clearly this is the frontrunner, right?

And no. Second place? Was it? By five votes? No, it was third. It was all so close. It was a little bit behind Spirit Halloween. Sorry to everyone that didn't want to hear this one.

People actively campaigned, and you're slapping them right in the face. No, thank you for saving it. Very excited about that. Especially given your passion for the commercials. I love that you have like pre-standing fondness for them. For sure, yeah. I think

if Joe Camel counts, this feels in the spirit. Like I know it's not a theme park ride. Although there is that cereal theme park, right, in Mall of America? Oh, this came out. I didn't know about this at all. In the Club 3 comments, somebody suggested as a future topic, General Mills Cereal Adventure, which was some sort of exhibit or walkthrough or something in the mall of america right and this topic works for sure oh yeah yeah absolutely so yeah it's got a got a tie-in right there there's another theme park tie-in which which we'll get to but also look we love yeah absolutely i think

mascots we've decided mascots count they have to because we love them too much mike has toys of them uh they're definitely in and this is going to crack open a whole thing because we're clearly going to have to step through other ones because there's a whole dense ecosystem um and i was trying to sort sort out in my head who goes together because like with disney and universal and then the stray characters who get picked up by Six Flags or licensed to Universal or whatever this has one of those like sorting out which serial mascots go together is a big confusing game and we like big confusing games um which let me let me get to this let me see if you guys know actually who belongs in the same universe um because for a brief time, there were essentially beanie babies. They were breakfast babies.

What's the name of them? Oh, little sweeties. Little sweeties. Breakfast baby. This is a nice like a little bed of cute to rest on in the middle of a horrifying month. Yeah. So breakfast babies were out there.

There were seven of them, and these all came with General Mills cereals. I don't have the slide of this for the main camera, but there are here is the breakfast baby of Count Chocula. So this was one of seven. And this which means like we talk about the Disney, the big five, like the primary characters. General Mills had like the breakfast gang, the big seven. Does anyone know offhand who's in the same universe as Count Chocula besides the monsters? I think I can do this. Oh, really? I think I can do this. Okay, okay.

Yeah. Let's see. Either of you chime in. The cuckoo bird? That's right. The Lucky Charms leprechaun? Yes, Lucky the leprechaun. Trix Rabbit? Yes. God, you guys.

You really know it. Michael? Wendell from the Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Yes. And you know the name Wendell? You guys are acing this. I would have gotten... I would have gone...

I would have tossed... Well, I don't want to say one that isn't in there because it would be great to trick you still. Who's left? Do you know offhand? Yeah, how many are left? We got, I think, I think just two left. You guys are nailing it. We got the Cocoa Puffs bird, right?

Did you? I don't think you did. Sunny the Cocoa Bird? Yeah, that was the first one. Oh, sorry. Chokes are happening. Lucky Charms. Wendell. Wendell has been said. The wolf? The cookie crisp wolf? Or the bandit dog? A bandit dog

I think is what you're Wait are those different characters? Yeah two different characters Cookie crisp has been a little lost Wendell is cinnamon toast crunch Yeah Which is a delicious cereal A really good cereal that will really Cut the roof of your mouth and then wedge cinnamon in there.

Jason has weak skin in his mouth. I have very weak mouth skin. Tissue paper in his mouth. Golden Grahams is much more gentle. That's true. You got to be careful for shrimp in those things, too. That's a point. Yeah.

Don't forget, even though it's been a while. Never forget. We got one more left, I believe It's kind of a big one, actually Shoot I was going to be so upset Can I give you a hint I can give? Give a hint, yeah

I don't want to give a hint that's too Oh, the Fruit Loose Bird? No, that one is That's Kellogg's Captain Crunch? No, that one is Kellogg's. That's Kellogg's. Captain Crunch? No, that's Quaker. That's Quaker.

It's in the Animal Kingdom. Oh, Tony? No, that's Kellogg's. That one is Kellogg's. Yeah, yeah. Because I was wondering, are all of the characters in the General Mills family? But there's more Kellogg's than you would think. And Tony, one of the big ones.

Right. And then there's Post, which has the Flintstones. That's right. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Sugar Bear, who is from Golden Chris. Captain Crunch is kind of an island in Quaker Oats. Yeah.

He doesn't have a lot of friends. Just his religious friend who's always trying to get him to come to a meeting. Come to a Quaker meeting, friend. Sorry, sailing to do. We're going to hit the seas. Here, I'll eliminate Toucan Sam. I'll eliminate Digum Frog. And I'll eliminate Snap, Crackle, Pop.

We got a big one left. Does that narrow it down? Oh, gosh. Those are all Kellogg's. Infiliating. People are screaming at us right now. Little guy. Little guy. It's not the Rice Krispie guys. No, I just said Snap, Crackle, Pop. Snap, Crackle, Pop. And that's Kellogg's. Humiliating. People are screaming at us right now. Little guy. It's not the Rice Krispie guys.

No, I just said Snap Crackle Pops. You said Snap Crackle Pops. That's Kellogg's. Sorry. I remain. Please, no one here be ashamed because I'm amazed how well everyone has done. I am ashamed, though. I am ashamed.

Little guy. He's a little guy. Oh. I'm going to be. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's it. Honey Nut Cheerios. That was not said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. I was going to give you the hint something yeah

buzz buzz it'd be a little too obvious what's funny is I have right here a new Trix Rabbit toy that they've released retro toys for all seven of those icons a Trix Rabbit who's they've released. Retro toys for all seven of those icons. A Trix Rabbit who's into asphyxiation

still wrapped in plastic. I haven't opened his package, but he's in a little 80s aerobic outfit. Great. Wow, wow. For running away. That's great. That's the family that we're dealing with. They're all kind of a gang all together somewhere, but I'll bring

that up later. None of these cereals were in my house, which is partially why I was so fascinated by all of them. Oh, like the distance from, would you like go to a friend's house? I guess kind of Cheerios would make an appearance, but nothing else. Because were you avoiding, was the family avoiding crazy rich cereal, sugary cereal?

Yeah, it was just sugar cereal. We didn't have much soda in the house ever. Okay, sure. Okay. We had not a million. We would go to the store and look at the cereals and stuff, and I feel like I would usually hear, I was like, can we get this? And it's like, you have to finish the Apple Jacks at home first

before you get a box of corn pops. But there was always lots of flakes. There was always like a honey bunches of oats or a raisin brand. Jason, just for clarification, was Apple Jacks considered like a better cereal in the house or was it just that you hadn't finished it? Well, it was just that I think it hadn't finished. I think some of the sugary cereals did seem more like food. Because Apple Jacks was pure sugar.

It was. Apple Jacks was just as bad. That's what I was wondering. If you was like, do you have to finish your healthy Apple Jacks? Yeah. Because my mom would do stuff like, well, I'd be like, we want to go to McDonald's. And she'd be like, all right, but you have to eat a filet of fish there because it's healthier. Oh.

And I was like, yeah, all right, fine. Well, that's like in these commercials when they show you a complete breakfast, which is a full bowl of Count Choculo, a full glass of orange juice, a full glass of milk, and a couple pieces of buttered toast. With like full square melting all the way. With full square melted butter. I feel like at one time as a kid, I was like, oh, I should be healthy. I should have a piece of toast with my cereal.

Put a ton of butter on it. Yeah. I watched a few commercials the other day, and there is a quick drop off between part of this nutritious breakfast and part of this complete breakfast. At some point, they were clearly told, like, you cannot say the Count Chocula is part of a nutritious breakfast. Oh, yeah. It's not.

Oh, fascinating. It's like when they brought back Fruit Brute and stopped spelling his name Fruit and started spelling it F-R-U-T-E. Did they switch? They switched at some point when they brought him back. This world is full of this stuff. Like the sushi crab with the K these weird little subtle

things. You think it's like making it fun but in fact it's legalese. I do. I love crab with a K. There's a still from one of the do. I love crap with a K. Yeah, it's not bad. There's a still from one of the commercials. I forget which one it is. It just says vitamin charged with a picture of the cereal.

Choose your letter. D, C, we don't care. That's insane. Well, let's get into kind of how these rolled out a little bit, and we can kind of like welcome each of them to the show. This is a post Lucky Charms era. I think that seems to be the one that landed the most and for the General Mills family. So they are trying to find new fun characters left and right.

And this gets us into the early 70s uh and the launch was a a dual launch in march 1971 um of count chocula and frankenberry together let me give the full intro count alfred chocula i don't know in what media that was established but it seems to have been established um so count alfred chocula and frankenberry um let's address these guys first do we have a strong favorite you're both on your seems to have been established. So count out for Chocula and Frankenberry. Let's address these guys first. Do we have a strong favorite? They're both on your shelf, Mike. Any particular fondnesses for these characters?

Well, yeah, but I would just say off the top of my head, Frankenberry always as a kid was my favorite for two reasons. I was a Frankenstein liker, and i was a strawberry liker so it was just easy chocolate as much as a kid but now i like it so yeah i was a big i was a big frankenberry that was always my number one i think i was frankenberry uh for the flavor reasons and also count chocolate i think was clearly the star and i and I felt a little bad for Frankenberry. Oh, well, and it's kind of a night like, you know, when you're trying to pick a favorite Muppet or something, it feels a little boring to pick Kermit maybe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you go off the beat. The fun sidekick. He looks, I really love, I mean, the box you were showing us, Mike, that replicates the old cereal box. It's a really vibrant pink it like and all his shades you know from from his face to his arms to his uh head doodads which is like a little like uh uh you know the whistle that blows when you're off work you know those that we all i kind of wish we still had those in a comedy in 30 rock brontosaurus tail on our way out you'd feel

more like an adult. That's how what we were taught jobs were. And then like a little like meter on his head, you know, that would be on like a pool, like a pool filter. Seemingly like a stick of dynamite in the side of his face. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Like there's like, what are his ears? They've got like little strands that, it feels like you could like light his fuse. He've got little strands. It feels like you could light his fuse. He's got a dynamite face. Oh, maybe. But then I don't know what the strings are. You're close to a big picture, Mike. Yeah, I'm looking at it.

They're not really that well represented on the toy because they don't have any little string hanging off. But yeah, I don't really know. I think those are like you could hook up like jumper cables to them maybe. Oh, bring them back to life. That's what I think they are, but I could be wrong.

He's also, are his fingernails anything? Am I crazy? They're like strawberries. Strawberries, cool. Count Chocula clearly just has little claws. He just has little grabbers because they do close-ups

where they're nudging the sweeties in the bowl, and Count Chocula just has long nails, and then it cuts to Boo-Berry doing the same thing, and he clearly has strawberry fingernails. Very fun. Jason is often nudging the sweeties in the bowl. Just nudging the sweeties so I get a good scoop, so I get a good spoonful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want a good distribution between the marshmallows and the sweeties. I don't think it ever occurred to me, because the change would have happened the year I was born, that I always liked Count Chocula, often at count Chocula in the house. Cause I was a little chocolate boy. Um, there,

the, the shapes of the cereal, I always knew to be ghosts, but that was like a big marketing chain. That was like a big change. They used to just be circles with like crosses in them with X's in them. What do you think a vampire would not care for? Just a little garlic sweetie. Just little garlic sweeties.

Just little garlic sweeties. Did not also these characters, I don't know if I have the chronology right, it seems like in classic era, they had pupils, but lately as they have returned to shelves, they have X's for eyes. Well, yes.

That's because of street artist, is it pronounced Cause, Jason? I believe it's pronounced Cause. K-A-W-S. Yes. I was on, I watched a video about the current run of Monster Cereals, which helpfully gave out the code to enter to win

a set of the limited edition Cause Monster toys. Yes. Guys, we got a winner in the room. I want to win. No, I'm talking about myself. Oh, yes. Wait, did you win? I did.

A winner of that. I'm really excited for them to come. I got the email that I won the next day, and then they said they'll arrive in 10 weeks. So I was like, oh, that'll be fun for the, I was going to bring them here. I thought they'd be fun for Halloween. But I'm going to get them sometime

around Christmas. Weird. Why did they not line that up better? Wait, sorry, what did you have to do? What did you have to do to win again? Well, I'm just going to do what this YouTube channel Serial Time did. Go to the website, callusmonsters.com and when it prompts you for the code

type in monsters for two, for one word. That's what this boy did. Yeah. So, and then you will be entered. You can enter once a day. So I have a reminder for noon, uh, to, to enter. And I'm just going to keep hitting, remind me tomorrow every day.

So that I, I get reminded. It's during the episodes. You have to you don't have to do this well i'll but i won't see the notification until i turn off do not disturb and look at my phone when we're done recording okay okay good but if you i think you should do it on the air i can do it on the air please do we we are like we all got clocks in front we'll we'll alert you we'll give you a heads up great um cause is like he's been it'll be like if they're doing the x it's like call monster cereals x cause and like he's done like a sesame street line of clothes at uniclo lately yes with like big big bird that's the first time

maybe that was on my radar where i was like why is big bird dead on this sweatshirt like why like all the character like burt and Ernie have X's for eyes. And it was, like, signed off on by Sesame Street, which seems crazy. Yeah, yeah, it was all officially licensed. Yeah, you can make Big Bert dead on a shirt. Yeah, so that is, I guess it's just a hit. It's not dead. I don't think

it means they're dead. It's just hip, but they're cool. It means they're cool. If you have X's for eyes, you're cool. So is the the recently discussed adult happy meals which don't have x eyes they have double eyes that's not cause i know it's not cause but is that trying to to be is it a fake cause no that's cactus flea market cactus plant flea market cactus yes flea market i don't know an attempt to play into the cause i see what scott says scott is right i this could be this is something we need to do more investigating because

who came first a cactus plant flea market or cause i have a feeling of this cause i feel like you're right scott maybe the trend now is to make stuff like a look a little bit like fucked up yeah yeah well in all scenes did kid robot come first i mean that kid robot of course i believe was doing the vinyl toys that disney was just like we're going to do this and just change it from like certain shapes to mickey ears you know jason would it surprise you to learn that kid robot is owned by ne? It does surprise me to say that. And the company also owns Graceland. The Elvis? Elvis is Graceland.

Elvis is Al? Okay. Okay. Very strange. Paul has also redesigned the Moon Man statue. Oh. They're the ones who put Johnny Depp inside of it? Yeah. But he has these puffy-

Absolute silence. It looks like they're wearing earmuffs. Some of the General Mills monsters, they have these ear things going on too. Okay, gotcha. So what do you get when these arrive in December? Is it the two- How many boxes?

What are you getting? I have no idea. I think it's four of something. I don't know if they are action figures. I don't know if they're little erasers, but I saw it on Bloody Disgusting. And I signed up, and I thought, like, everyone won because I did it once, and they sent me an email the next day that said you won. Maybe I just got really lucky.

Oh, yeah. It seems like you did get lucky. I think it's all four. I think it's everyone but Fruit Brute. It's like whatever's out this year. Okay. Because that's the other thing. Monster cereals are now entirely seasonal.

Seasonal, that's right. It's around Halloween. And I was, when we first started talking about this as a potential topic a while ago, I was in the stores going, where's the Count Chocula? I don't see isn't count chocula regular cereal this has apparently not been year-round for years oh interesting yeah like i guess they they come around enough that like i i see them in my periphery at a target enough that i think they're around yes and they they do a lot of stunts there was like a bunch of the dc comic artists

redesigned them for a year and then there was last year there was a monster mash cereal which was supposed to be all of them combined but was just boo berry and frankenberry combined and then marshmallows shaped like the other guys called monster mash Mash? Called Monster Mash, yeah. Jason, I want to correct real quick. Yummy Mummy is the one that's not in the Cause collection. Right. Yeah, because Fruit Brute is back. Fruit Brute is back.

Yummy Mummy is not. Yummy Mummy you cannot get this year, right? Are they the same thing, Yummy Mummy and Fruit Brute? They were never available at the same time. They were both kind of generic fruit. I think when they brought Fruit Brute back, they made it cherry flavored. There was a time when Fruit Brute was lime, but that is not the case when it comes back now, I think. They brought all five back like five or six years ago, and I bought all five at that time.

Oh. And I don't remember any major difference between Yummy Mummy and Fruit Brute. Okay. But there was technically something. Is it like Fruity Pebbles where that's sort of like whatever that flavor is, is a blanket fruit? Yeah, I think that's probably right. But the taste is Fruity Pebbles is like gourmet compared to the taste of these. Yeah, I was going to say, that makes me feel like I would like it. Fruity Pebbles is the best cereal of all time.

Fruity Pebbles, yeah, exactly. Fruit Bird, I don't think I've ever actually had. Huh. Well, yeah, tell, it sounds like maybe, Mike Carlson, you have the most experience with the eating of these. What report, I mean, granted, we're mainly about the characters here, but what can you tell us about the taste? Here what what what report i mean granted we're mainly about the characters here but what can you tell us about the the taste uh here's what i think okay i don't remember the year and then some of these videos have mentioned it and somebody pointed this out to me and it was

a revelation to me is that at a certain point a lot of these cereals switch from oats to complete corn syrup oh and it ruined the i. Not ruined, but made the taste worse. Made everything taste worse. I don't know. Some things like... I remember I've said this before. This is maybe a five timers. I've said this on the show before. I remember when Trix announced like, oh, we got new shapes or whatever. I ate

Trix and I went, this tastes different. This isn't as good. The flavor isn't as vibrant anymore. I don't know. I don't remember all as vibrant anymore so i don't know i don't remember all that to say i don't remember eating i don't remember the taste of these cereals when i was a kid they were probably better but eating them now i find all the taste all the kind of flavors pretty i don't know like like not strong like not they it all tastes like a little watered down to me it all tastes like it's a little stale and i don't know why that is i'd still eat them but it's not

something i crave every year as a sugar hound to get a box of i like the eating marshmallows and cereal always fun just like the idea when you're taking a bite you get a little surprise it's always going to be good i'm not going to turn that down but all of the cereals feel to me like they had oh they only put like 50 of the flavor that they should have put in them yeah that makes sense more potent in the 70s like a like drugs probably it was like certain drugs were better in the 70s certain cereals fruity pebbles i would say, stood the test of time. That actually still tastes to me like it did when I was a kid. And that is a strong, delicious flavor.

Yeah. As someone who's not into these kinds of cereals, I might have even had this opinion as a kid. I definitely had cereals here and there with the marshmallows the mar bits but um when you describe i just i remember even as a kid thinking i know what marshmallows are like and then there's mar bits i didn't have the word then but i knew but it's helpful because it is a different thing and i think of them now and i'm like these are pencil erasers these i don't i don't think i like the texture about a marbet yeah yeah marshmallow uh-huh yeah and that turned me off i think i maybe soft is a lot of what i want out of a

marshmallow but am i is this heresy to people who like marbots more than me yes it is here okay heresy uh uh because like especially lucky charms as a kid so much of the heavy lifting was was just the shapes and going oh like looking at the shapes and seeing which one you got um and there is something satisfying about eating them i acknowledge that they're not a tasty marshmallow yeah yeah but which is an unfair expectation i just like um i don't know i thought it didn't give me enough of what i expected a marshmallow to be. Yeah, you want it more of a kick.

I do remember a few years ago buying Frankenberry when it was out and back. And in high school, I have a very distinct memory of buying a box of Boo-Berry because I was so excited because I had heard about a Frankenberry and Boo-Berry for years. And I'd occasionally see Frankenberry, but I was like, oh, my God, I've never seen Boo-Berry. I have to get this. And that I remember being pretty good. But a few years ago when I bought Frankenberry, it took me a while to get through that box. Okay, okay. Because I feel like I'm back to being like child rule where like I have Raisin bran crunch in the house and then I have like Reese's Puffs. The middle ground of that is Trader Joe's makes a like flakes and granola vanilla flavored cereal that just tastes like candy.

It's delicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had like nothing but that through the pandemic. I was just like, this is my only breakfast. It is. And there's a maple pecan one, but that one just doesn't hit the same way. Totally agree. I had a joke on late night.

I don't remember what the joke was, but it was about Lucky Charms. And General Mills sent me a box of just marshmallow Lucky Charms. Oh, wow. Oh, the dream. What could happen on a show? I mean, the most incredible mail day of my life. And, you know, I, like, popped a couple. Like, they were, like, Cheez-Its or something, and then just tossed the box.

I can't even hold on to this because I opened it, but I'm not going to eat a box of marshmallows. Marbits. Yeah, after a while. Yeah, and as weeks go by, like, what happens to those? You should have just used it to season dishes that you were making. Like, put it in things as you were. God damn it. Cocktails.

Yeah, yeah. Let's bring Boo Berry into the mix. Let's welcome Boo Berry to the show. Introduced in 1973 to expand on these two successful characters out of the gate. Jason, you said some of this already, but these animated commercials, which are very well done, the early ones, at least Bill Melendez was involved, who was behind the Peanuts Christmas specials

and early Peanuts stuff, so very reputable animators. These went over great. The deal, kind of, Chocula and Frankenberry are enemies, but their common thing is that they're scared by everything, much like good boys. And then a third character introduced is kind of a common, if not enemy, then just pest to both of them. Yeah, the annoying neighbor, the Cousin Oliver.

Yeah. But he lasted longer than Cousin Oliver. Which I probably liked. I mean, I feel like Peter and Laurie, especially in the Looney Tunes universe, a regular reference point. Yeah, there's always cartoon Peter and Laurie. Hearing that voice on Looney Tunes and Animaniacs,

when I first saw Casablanca, I was like, well, I know this guy. Yeah. I know this guy. And Ren and Stimpy. And Ren and Stimpy. Yeah, that's true. Totally. Right, well, I know this guy. I know this guy. And Ren and Stimpy. And Ren and Stimpy. Yeah, that's true. Totally.

Right, right, right. He might be, Boo Berry might be my favorite, just purely off of, I like the Peter Lorre thing, and then I love the half eyes. I love just the glazed over. He just looks like somebody who's trying to smile in his head he's like beaming but he's just so sedate that all he can do is kind of like flat mouth flat eyelids i just love his like kind of doofy glaze i can see that yeah boo berry is oh he's i could see him being like if

these were first introduced to me now I think him or Fruit Brute would be my favorites yeah yeah yeah well and again like getting a little off of the main protagonists it's fun to like the side people he's also got the back story that I'm most interested in like I get how

Frankenberry came to be how did Blueberry die wait well how did Frankenberry come to be in your estimation he's Frankenberry's to be. Yeah. How did Blueberry die? Wait. Well, how did Frankenberry come to be in your estimation? Because he's Frankenberry's monster. Someone constructed him, right? Oh, to be like, we're going to build a monster who likes strawberries. Instead of a taste for killing and might. It's a taste for strawberries.

But Blueberry, yeah, wait. So is it a dead blueberry enthusiast well is it well is it like it's the casper-esque yeah right like where like his parents were ghosts were here so he was born a ghost is that what happened to casper is that it was cat catherine was movie was a child who got sick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then he just keeps asking Christina Ricci as a ghost.

Can I keep you? Can I keep you? This is unfinished business. That's stuck in Jason's head. That's haunted me for you. That's something. That's the blueberry that haunts my mind. Jason said.

Now, Jason says that quote once an episode, I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a 10-timers club. Or if you get free samples of sweets and cereals, can I keep you? Yeah, I say it to Truffles, the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory there. I don't blame you for that. Boomer, he also has a little hat.

He has a little bow tie. But I feel like one of the articles, there's an oral history in mel magazine about this and it might have been pointed out there that in blueberry's first appearance he's got a chain similar to jacob marley oh yeah the chains he forged in life so he's evil then he was keeping all the blueberries for himself in a way jacob marley was keeping a lot of homes i think if they don't have anywhere to go they could go to the debtor's prison all the blueberries for himself in a way Jacob Marley was. Yeah. Keeping people out of their homes, I think. If they don't have anywhere to go, they could go to the debtor's prison. They definitely took away Boo Berry's edge as well. You know, we've talked about this in many characters.

Mickey Mouse, you know, they had edge to start with, and then they softened it. And Boo Berry certainly had that crazy Peter Lorre voice, and he had the chains. And then they did make him very Casper in the 90s when he was cross-promoting the Casper movies, the direct-to-DVD sequels or direct-to-VHS sequels. Oh, Casper meets Wendy with Hilary Dove. Casper was on the box, which I hate to get – I saw a picture. I sent this to you guys. Tony the Tiger Avatar Serial. Oh, this is related. Go for it. Supp sent this to you guys. Tony the Tiger Avatar cereal.

Oh, this is related. Go for it. Supposedly exists right now, and I've been looking for it, and I can't find it in the Southern California area. So if I haven't by this time, if somebody can tweet at me locations in Southern California where I can get this, I need it. Wait, and the box art is like Tony the Tiger as a Na'vi? Yes, dressed up. Yeah, wait. His physical makeup has not changed

remind us right right he has not gone into the tony the tiger has not gone into the avatar program he's not in the machine okay although should be one of these sequels like why not yeah sure uh let me see i just want to see a picture of the the box here because this this isn't even like a Google search. I saw this on one, unless somebody is really screwing with me or screwing with the public. Our audience noticed it. I know that.

Yeah. Our audience is aware. But wait, are the flakes blue? How else does the Avatar theme manifest? There's sweeties. Aren't there blue sweeties? I'm not looking. I'm looking, I'm looking, I'm looking.

Mighty sweeties. Okay, this is, unless somebody made this up, it says family size avatar with the avatar logo. Tony the Tiger is there. He's got a blue avatar bandana, and it says over the frosted flakes, it says Pandora Flakes.

Did you cross it out? This could be completely fake, and God bless them if it is. It doesn't start. It's not alliterative. It doesn't rhyme. Got nothing there. I really hope that I could be getting fooled, and I love being fooled. So kudos if you fooled me. Is this a big prank?

Is it a commentary on how it would be a little weird if there was a lot of like food avatar? We don't know what the avatar promotional effort is going to be really. If there is much. Hmm. We'll see. Well, look, I've fallen forkey rooney uh potato restaurant at least twice so you know that's we want to believe we want we're fox molders here we want to believe yeah yeah um let me bring something into the may this is sort of boo berry related um but it's kind

of the aftermath of the commercial. It's not really, but it's themed after him. Jordan, if you could pull up the clip, Boo Prize is the label. A lot of these commercials have that format of the animated part is a little rushed, and then there is the tail of it where there's the prize that you can get in the box. And this one is, this is so delightful to me. And look and listen to this. A boo hooter.

Boo your friends with crazy hoots. Four different colored boo hooters. So you can make a boo hooter band. One free and specially marked boxes of boo berry. Boo your friends. Boo your friends with crazy hoots. I was talking about this with my wife last night that like we got to do some like we got to do some like like breaking down of the roots of the you. Boo is the verb, but hoots is the net.

So hooting is what you do with a boo hooter. Except wait, no, you boo them with hoots. I'm not sure which is which. I'm lost in the magic of this. Mike, that might be what you're getting in the box in 10 weeks. If it's a boo hooter, I'll be thrilled. Boo my friends? Yeah.

The cause version of a Boo Hooter? She's got no pupils or something? Wait, Coz figured out a way to reinvent Boo Hooters. I never thought I could boo my friends with crazy hoots like this. Boo Hooters, that is the time where it's like, that is a type of prize where it's like broke and people got chunks of it in the cereal and they're like all right well we're putting it next to the bag now we're not putting it in the bag of

cereal it looks exactly like a broken piece of this is as fake looking as the sweeties so yeah you'd you'd chew a boo hooter yeah get stuck in your throat and then all you can all of your talking is booing and hooting. Yeah. They're also working overtime to make that a spooky prize. Like it's a kazoo. You should be like start a band with your friends. Start a monster.

Instead it's like scare the shit out of them with this boo hooter. Yeah. The scariest sound. And you get all ready for it. I'm going to fuck my mom up today. Just wait. I'm going to write at the top of the stairs. She's going to regret buying me this cereal. That's for sure. I'm going to fuck my mom up today. Just wait. I'm going to write at the top of the stairs. She's going to regret buying me this cereal.

That's for sure. Is that what happens in Garden State? With a dishwasher? He does a boo hooter? You need to let go of this, Dad. It happened, okay? I blew my boo hooter. You changed your life and it's just a boo hooter.

That's what the headphones play. Food! Food! The Shins are one of the most reputable boo hooter bands. They were just a bunch of friends who wanted the boo and hoot. All brought their boo hooters and started jamming and Sub Pop,

the head of Sub pop was walking by hoots too narrow the original there's that uh there's that tom and jerry movie where they're like watching the wizard of oz happen there should be a garden state animated version where just boo berry is watching all of it play out oh don't push her over the open dishwasher influencing everything that happens. That's the origin. Didn't he grow up in the early 70s? Isn't it possible that Boo-Berry is Zach Perf's dead mother?

I think it's more than possible. Very possible. Yeah, I think that's true. That's the next story. Great. I think that's right. Who knew these universes tied together so seamlessly? Oh, boy.

Okay, now we know. So we've tackled that one, now we know. So we've tackled that one. Now we know. But now we move on to number four, who is maybe the toughest nut to crack, and that is Fruit Brute. Fruit Brute is where, what monster comes next? Well, it's got to be Wolfman. That's the big one left. But he is a colorful, a fruit-oriented wolfman. Yes.

Brute, specifically. A brute who does not if you just heard the name, you might not picture a wolfman offhand and he's back in Mike's frame. He's a lot of fun. He's got sort of I mean, this is a Sid and Marty Kroft character and color

scheme. We're getting 70s psychedelic. He's great and that name is perfect like you're gonna go to wolfman regardless because that's like dracula dragonstein wolfman and fruit like someone's been thrilled when they realized that that rhymed it's pretty good yeah yeah because what else i don't know how else what other flavor you're gonna do and what other monster are you gonna do yeah yeah yeah um I mean, we ended up with Yummy Mummy. That's a clean rhyme, but it's less inventive than Fruit Brute. Yummy Mummy, this is a little crass, but I heard that as like a predecessor to MILF,

calling someone a Yummy Mummy. Oh. I remember like an adult saying that to me about a friend of my mom's when I was a child. I don't know. Even at 12, I was like, we shouldn't be having this conversation. No. That's a yummy mummy. But wait, this is about your mom?

A friend of my mom's, a female friend. And then an adult was like, that's a yummy mummy. Oh, my God. And if I'd be like, hell yeah, baby. If my son ever hears this about... That did not make it into Tarantino movies in the way that Fruit Brute is in the background, but you would think.

Oh yes. Hey, wait, I got the still of that. Let's pull that out. There's a couple stills. Tarantino. Yeah, two. Yeah, here we go. Circled.

In both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, there's a thing that ties them both together, a box of fruit brew. One in Tim Roth's apartment in Reservoir Dogs, and then it's Eric Stoltz in the place where the dreaded injection occurs, which maybe that, I don't know what's in the adrenaline exactly but maybe it's liquefied

fruit yeah yeah yeah i just need to stick you with a needle full of sweetie pure liquid sweetie um so that's yeah and which isn't that very you know what a time the 90s were this is just something that like gen x all decided was cereals are fun a big facet of seinfeld i feel and and tarantino evidently yeah then this was a good this was a good reference back then you know this was like oh wow this guy really knows his cereals unexplored at the time in films that are already full of a lot of nostalgia and food talk. And then there's there's little Easter eggs that I didn't know about these. I didn't know about Fruit Brute's presence. Yeah, I didn't realize that either.

I don't know. Tarantino's got a podcast now. He is. I don't think I have not heard every episode, but he is. I don't think he's addressed the Fruit Brute appearance. I mean, I know it's probably they're probably all like six hours long, right? They're longer. I think, yeah, are they longer than some Podcast the Ride episodes about a kiosk in a mall somewhere? I don't know. But they are pretty long and he obviously has a lot of thoughts. But I would

be interested in a three hour episode of him just rambling about Fruit Brute. Maybe we could get him on to just talk Fruit Brute. We don't make him do it. We're not going to talk about your movie. We're not going to pester you with questions. He was very aggressive. Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson

interviewed him and Roger Avery and he had a lot of thoughts about movie theater candy. Oh, I bet he does. The New Beverly, the Repertory Theater he bought has a very good concession stand oh yeah yes very good candy selection not expensive either very inexpensive but like you can still get snow caps there you can still get cherry coke there i think you can get white

castle hamburgers there you might be able to get a microwave White Castle hamburger. They have like real like diner coffee there too. Really? Yeah. Wow, just good old basic. Wow, this is sort of like, it's kind of a Tarantino restaurant or kind of a Tarantino themed experience in a way. Like the clothes, because there has not been like a pop-up. Have they ever done like the, you know,

some version of the restaurant from Pulp Fiction that like nostalgia? I feel like somebody unofficially has done it and it's always you can like smell the not authenticity on it i could be wrong but it's always like this tarantino bar and you're like yeah i think i'll say like i would be thrilled for you guys if you got tarantino to come on and talk about fruit it probably would not do much for my General Millsmusters episode. Yeah, suddenly, oh no.

Yeah, that's the last thing we want is to dwarf. We'll delete this episode if he comes on. If you can do it, do it. Doesn't apply anymore. It seems unlikely to me. As far as I'm concerned, this is the Fruit Brutes. I don't know.

He might be down. If we make it easy on him. No, no, no. Look, you are reigning supreme in the Fruit Brute episode as far as I'm concerned. What else about Fruit? I don't know whether to call him Fruit or Brute. I mean, he suffers from not having a specific flavor identity. This is the issue.

The fruit, fruit name is too good to lose, but it's just, it's so general. And again, the flavor itself is not fruity pebbles level. So he just, he's always going to, uh, flounder, I think, uh, because of that. I think, I don't know what to do because fruit, fruit is too good of a name to let go, but they either have to make it just taste like Fruity Pebbles or figure out a way where each year he cycles to a different fruit or something. This year he's Apricot. Fruit Brute is Apricot. They've got to do something to give him a good gimmick.

I agree that it would be great if it tasted like Fruity Pebbles, but Fruit Loops and Fruity Pebbles are just as vague a description as Fruit Brute is. Yes, absolutely. I don't know what to do here. I'm trying to help my guy out. He's an underdog. Yeah, kind of. Underdog, yeah.

So, yeah, I think that's a big thing. Because, like, Count Chocula, Boo Berry, Frankenberry, flavors. You know the flavors. Oh, Frankenberry I'll say not necessarily. Hmm. Yeah, I didn't know. Okay, that's true. You're right. You know the flavors. Oh, Frankenberry I'll say not necessarily. Hmm. Yeah, I didn't know. Okay, that's true. You're right. You're right in the name.

But the flavor itself is distinctly strawberry. For sure. Yeah. And we're early. I think was Count Chocula saw the first chocolate cereal on the market? Maybe. Wow. And I think Frankenberry kind of an early like strawberry

cereal and blueberry definitely the first blueberry yes yeah but then yeah fruit and yummy mummy after like they the characters are fun the designs are good but they just don't hit like they don't have the cereal backing them up you know yeah it's the flavor. It's the flavor. It's all the flavor, I think. I like the choice of like, all right, this one's cherry now. It's like, okay, well, that's at least a little more clear. I don't know how good it is. Oh, yeah, I do have clarity on the change that happened. Fruit Brut was lime, now is cherry.

Fruity Yummy Mummy. They had to kind of insert fruity unofficially. Yeah, yeah yeah too many but otherwise yummy mummy tells you nothing so but but wait a minute but when it was called fruity yummy mummy it was vanilla so that doesn't work this is it doesn't work yeah for lots of was that just the marshmallows were vanilla uh were the sweet? I do not have information on whether it was Marbets or sweeties. Now it is orange cream,

which is also not a fruit. Orange is, but not orange cream. So it's confused identity. Something that Count Chocula certainly does not have. You know exactly what it is. Can we talk about the unmade? Did you come across the

story of one of the uh uh artists or designers in the late 90s they were considering adding another uh monster and one artist was like really pitching peter bregman really had some pitches jordan can you bring up that picture i sent here we go um some pitches of like who some of the other monsters could be and kind of shows how like they had some difficulty after you got past the first few guys like okay what's the next uh monster how do we how do we do this uh okay great oh okay good though yeah so these are i mean the the drawings are nice but the names start to uh fall apart you've got barry patra which is supposed to be cleopatra wait a minute but we're looking at like this is a mummy cleopatra is not a mummy get out of here

mummified kind of egyptian thing i yeah cleopatra is dead i'll give you that yeah uh next to her dr jekyll berry all right uh he's got a cool design i think the design will be carrying him um the other two i think are stronger phantom berry phantom berry though just looks exactly like darkwing duck with no duck that's right oh that's scared or something yeah yeah and then bride of frankenberry so sure you know that might be the clearest sequel but she's not really pinkish in the way that frankenberry is pink she has a strawberry head like he has strawberry fingernails but i don't know what does everyone think do you have favorites i mean i it would be nice to get a female monster i don't get it yes was bride of

frankenberry also gonna be strawberry that seems like a wasted opportunity i think it was gonna be like mixed berry oh okay or like oh you know they gotta change your strawberry head then yeah yes i was about to say maybe it's a it's a bunch of grapes stacked up. That gets you the height of Bride of Frankenstein. You maybe start looking like Marge Simpson a little, so that's tricky. But grapes not berries. That's a good point. So a bunch of raspberries stacked up?

Then the color's not so Marge. But then that looks like something's like she has a disease, I think. Something looks wrong. I mean, I guess it all looks a little weird. But like, I don't know. Raspberries are like, I guess strawberries are furry too. I guess you don't have to draw the fur on the raspberries. I'm thinking of very specific, realistic raspberries on a woman's head.

I can't imagine they would be. There's a way. So we're thinking Bride of Frankenberry is salvageable. Well, it just makes the most sense. I mean, we're not taking any major swings on this one, but that's the one that makes at least thematic sense. I like the design of Dr. Jekyll Berry, but aren't we kind of just attaching Berry to Dr. Jekyll?

Yeah, I'm not impressed with a lot of these. Remember the Nintendo cereal that was like half the box was Mario and half the box was Legend of Zelda? Oh, really? A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde needs to have like two separate chambers for two separate series. Great idea.

Perfect. Or like a milk turns a different color. Yeah, exactly. Like a container of nerds. Yeah, Dr. Jekyll Berry, we need to see what Mr hyde berry looks that's right yes that's the yeah yeah and he also his design looks closer to victor frankenstein than dr jekyll so oh true yeah a lot of a lot of confusion now if they made him look like um

russell crowe's dr jekyll from the dark universe i i'd like that the head of the secret organization as there always is this is also becoming i feel like you are a little attached yeah i think you like the dark universe i i'm very curious i cannot remember what i think you like the mummy is but i am very intrigued by how much legwork they did with the dark universe is this gonna become he loves the mummy movies the bren fraser mummy movies those are his favorite movies and i think him coming out recently and going like that tom cruise mummy didn't seem very fun you know ours were fun that's what i can say about them and it's like well he's you got him he's got you there you know know. The key to mummies, I guess. We've talked a lot about flavor profiles and berry identities and, you know, who has a clear one and who doesn't.

And Frankenberry, well, Mike, you said maybe not so clear because we don't know what. But, you know, if you look at them, you can figure out it's strawberry. But this had a dark side, basically. I think we maybe all landed on a benign dark side, as the study calls it. Ultimately, yes. But I was excited, Mike, when you DMed about this finding because I hadn't stumbled on this yet. Maybe I'll just read what you sent me. It's kind of the plain statement, which is,

In February 1972, Frankenberry cereal included an indigestible pigment that turned some children's feces pink, a symptom sometimes referred to as Frankenberry stool. Yikes. Christ almighty. Frankenberry stool. Yikes. Christ almighty. Frankenberry. Pink poop.

Oh, my God. It seems like it was very bright, too. I think it has to be to cut through the murky color of poop and turn it all the way pink. I will say this. This is still happening because I ate Trix to get that Trix toy I showed you, and I swear to you, my poop was green. Oh, no.

Oh, yeah. I ate that purple and green Halloween cake at Disneyland. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's some colors. I said this on the show before. There was a Burger King, like, icy, like a special icy they were doing like maybe 20 years ago and it was like black the black icy you would get and i had it and i shit neon blue well black icy it was insane it was either neon green or neon blue and i remember not like putting two and two together for like it

felt like forever like just looking down and going what is wrong but also it was like a really it was here i wanted it was a fun color for your shit to be so it wasn't alarming in the way of like you know this cannot be something something out exterior like it has to be from outside of your body because your body does not make the color that's in the bowl right now when I'm looking at it. Right. Like neon anything. Yeah. No,

your body. You have to like shield your eyes from the toilet because it's so bright. I don't, I don't know if I would find that fun. Your liver is not. Yeah. Your liver. They're never like,

Oh no, your liver is producing like neon bile or whatever your liver does. Like that's so, yeah. So I was like, what is going on and then i remembered oh you had a like you had a special icy from burger king oh yeah but i'm impressed you you put that together because it was a black slushy and you're like oh well that's why my

shit's neon blue oh yeah color wheel yeah that that adds up oh okay black plus the color of your intestines equals neon blue um i have a quote here from jordan v pain the pediatrician and author of the study benign red pigmentation of stool resulting from food coloring in a new breakfast cereal the frankenberry stool one of my favorites yeah it's a great study yeah it, he went off. He snapped when he wrote this study. But he said, I forget the name of the cereal, frankincense or Frankenstein stew. This is just something like that.

But it turned the boy's stool red. And then I wrote a small entry on it in the Journal of American Academy of Pediatrics. No, this is just him talking to Mel Magazine but i i just love his contempt of like i don't know what do kids eat frankenstein stew yeah this little asshole was eating frankincense and uh turned his shit red they have a tendency to do that it's kids and their colorful stews. They can't stay away. You need to eat a nutritious breakfast. You can't have pink stew. I mean, it's a bummer for General Mills because I did not search for that information. It's on their

very sparse Wikipedia page. There's not a ton of other information other than a paragraph. It gets a lot of space. It's front and center. The thing is, kind of like Mike was saying, if you know it's coming, it could almost be be a feature not a bug like it's kind of fun yeah if if you know that that's going to happen one of the ways that blood like why is it pink

that's if you're like like uh what does this happen with like beats sometimes right turn your i guess and i know that's coming if i have a lot of beats or like eats icing like um uh uh like grocery store if you buy a birthday cake there that icing might do it like blue or green icing uh uh well some of this happens because of its dyes i mean that's the common element in all of this if If you eat a bunch of dye. But, okay, wait, let me go through this in order a little bit. This might have been the doctor who you were referring. Oh, yes, this is Dr. Payne. Okay, we're back to Dr. Payne.

Children love being taken to a pediatrician. Well, is he nice? Well, yeah, General Mills Consider was like, Dr. Payne, we'd like you to help us. We'd like you to help us with a new endeavor. Bring in nurse sharp tools. We've got a licorice flavored cereal that kids are just going to revile. So they did. This was this.

This started with a 12 year old boy in Maryland and people didn't know what was happening. The parents didn't know what was happening. They were very alarmed. And then they figured out, oh, wait, what did he eat? Huh. Well, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to clear out his system, and then we're going to give him, Dr. Payne will feed him four entire bowls of Frankenberry. That is all he will have. And then said Dr. Payne, the stool had no abnormal odor, but it looked like strawberry ice cream.

God. Which kind of like, isn't there a thing in South Park where there's a taco that poops ice cream? Like they see a figure for like a imaginary figure. So that's kind of nice. Like say if you could poop strawberry ice cream. He also gained the system where it's like, okay, you can only eat Frankenberry for the next three days. I would love to tell my mom,

I think I have Frankenberry stool. I can only eat Frankenberry for science. I have no choice. They need me. It's my scientific duty. I also love that you said people couldn't figure it out as if it was the whole town's problem. My son's shit is pink.

They like go door to door showing it. What do you think it is? Yeah, a Simpsons town hall style meeting where like everyone comes out. Did you hear about the Murphy boy? Oh, no. Yes, Frankenberry Stool. Frankenberry Stool is the talk of the town. I just want to update everyone.

It's 12.03. I did enter. Oh. I did enter with one hand, with a dog on my lap. Garfield has joined the conversation. A shivering dog in the other hand. He's shivering. Sometimes he does this for attention.

He's got a flannel shirt on and was on a blanket. So I don't think he's actually cold. Well, Jason, if you're anything like me, refresh your email at 1210 and you'll be aware. That's exciting. Oh my god. Seven minutes away for listeners. I gotta do this too.

I gotta submit this. Any sentence, just say whoever's talking, hey, fuck off for a second. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. And maybe by then we'll be done with dyes and children's stool. Yeah, we'll be on to the blood libel section. Oh, yeah. I did see that.

Let's cap that one. Oh, God. Wait, so Frankenberry's stool does not happen anymore, though, right? It doesn't because they narrowed it down to there's two dyes in this cereal, where Frankenberry's Strawberry Hue came from, so this is from Atlas Obscura, red dyes numbers two and three. Number two was banned in the U.S. in 1976, not long after all of this happened,

after it was tenuously linked to cancer and rats. But for decades, you could find it in everything, from ice cream to hot dog casings the giving you cancer seems like the bigger problem than yeah than the poop and the pink yeah yeah yeah that's pretty bad well then so yeah if that sounds like a calm reaction actually it was a extremely strong reaction because it was a soviet scientists who figured this. But wait, although in 1971, Soviet scientists figured out that red number two caused cancer.

1971, also the year that Frankenberry launched and just ran long enough to turn kids stool pink. So the Soviet, the message did not come all the way from the Soviet Union. Yeah, who are you going to trust? Our fine American cereal manufacturers or Nikita Khrushchev?

You know? 1971. Fine boys at General Mills every day. Yeah. That's right. I'm not betraying my country. I'm eating this big cereal, damn it. But so then once the word got out, then there was a bit of an overreaction against the dye

because then red dye was just verboten for a long time. And such that red M&Ms were not around for like a decade. And they didn't even have red number two. But just something about the most famous red dyed item maybe. Like that just feels too weird. So I guess in the 70s you could not get red M&M's kind of weird that's weird yeah

I mean I look this up just now and it's like oops all berries Captain Crunch gives you green poop now okay I think Boo Berry might still because not all that this was the dye that took the hit the other one I mentioned red red number three, still around, still in cake decorating gels.

It's apparently a little dose of it is not going to do anything to your poop. But if you ate only red number three, you would have purely pink poop. I want to see, I wish there was a photo of it. because I just want to see how much like ice cream it looked. I wanted to see if it was just like people never. Could we do gender reveals with these? Like really foul. Eat a bunch of blueberry. Eat a bunch of Frankenberry.

Every guest at the party. Wait. Okay. How do you do it without. Oh, wait. No, it can't be the guests because then they would know because they know what they ate. Yeah. So another party.

Like a doctor would need to say like, don't tell your husband, but like eat a bunch of Frankenberry tonight. Oh, I got an idea. I got an idea. You get a great. Okay. You get a Great Dane and you feed it one of the cereals. A dog.

That's an incredible idea. And then you have it like time it. the great dane does it on the lawn in front of all the guests this is an incredible idea and that's how you say which gender the bird is so animals now have to be involved they have to be can you trust there's no other way no other way but is it or I guess you could do it. Okay, okay. Plus it up. You rent a stork.

Oh. Rent? Okay. Feed a stork a bunch of Boo-Berry? You feed a stork whichever Frank-a-Berry or Boo-Berry, and then the stork shits on the lawn in front of all the guests. That is how we know storks deliver babies is by shitting them out. Exactly. They don't just deliver storks poop the bait squat the crap shit out a baby plops out covered in the fluid representing the then gender um oh god i like that the

the beginning was you know it was shitting out black for a couple days and i thought i had accidentally fed it uh an icy from but it was just amniotic fluid it's normal okay okay yeah everything's everything's fine now until you until uh she gets a hold of the frankenberry yeah were you concerned she had frankenberry stool? Yes, to be honest, I was. It wasn't pink, though. That'd be the... Not pink, yeah. The first...

A baby's poop, as Scott, I think, said on this podcast, is like tar. It's just like they poop tar for a few days. Yeah, the initial... And it was also strange because you were mostly exclusively feeding her Boo-Berry, so why would she have Frankenberry stool? Boo-Berry and tar.

No breast milk, no formula, just solid boo berry. Just feeding a baby pieces of... She's got to get a sense of what house she landed in. You need to know this now. Learn everything about your dad right now. A similar thing happened in the 80s with the cereal Smurf berry crunch which if you can imagine turned people's poop blue then they changed the formula and released it as magic berry

cereal i guess maybe smurfs wanted out of the breakfast game after that incident um dear god anyway we still have plenty of dyes because apparently there's like on the flip side europe won't you can still get red number two in europe so you can do all the pink pooping you want in europe but they banned something called red number 40 that we still have plenty here so you every kids you can find a way to shit strawberry ice cream if you want it bad enough jason you got to go to europe you've been saying it i well i i don't know because i there was a news story like an oddly enough news story a while back about a bakery getting in trouble for importing sprinkles from america and they're like the sprinkles we have here are bullshit so that might be enough

to cross out the entire continent for you. Yeah, that'll cross out the continent. So I don't know what fucked up sprinkles they're dealing with there. I need some good, wholesome American sprinkles. Until I know I can get sprinkles of decent quality, Europe is dead to me. It's 1210. It's 1210.

I'll just interrupt myself. Yeah, yeah. What's going on? Oh, let me refresh my email email i don't think there has been okay um here well while you do that um jordan can i ask for i think live action count is the can i ask for not yeah that's fair that's fair here let's just get a quick flash like bloody oh man what i'm what i'm showing everyone right now is the one instance in 1991 of a live action Count Chocula. I don't think there were live actions of any of these characters.

And this is why. This is the most Duracell family frightening prosthetic. And does everyone, well, anyone jump in and say what you think of his chin? What does his chin resemble to anyone? He looks, hmm. Make that chin clap, King. Yeah. That chin's going to shit out some blueberry stool.

It does look like a seat, I will agree. Big seat. But it also looks like balls. Like truck nuts. Yeah, like truck nuts. You guys went to butts. Over-ex looks like balls. Like truck nuts. Yeah, like truck nuts. You guys went to butts. Over-exaggerated balls. You went to seats.

I went to big droopy balls. He's a ball face. This is not. Chocula has droopy balls hanging off his chin. So not good. This was not a good – these characters were meant to be animated and stay animated, I think. Any updates, Jason? No updates so far.

Oh, boy. Okay. You want me to try? We know Mike's got the magic touch. He was back up, yeah. Okay, what else is... Well, maybe... Let's see.

I can talk a little bit about like, because the kind of the Holy Grail with characters like this is if there's any other media of them outside of just them smiling on a box. And there's the commercials and the commercials are fun. So I was trying to figure out, is there like other other multimedia ways to experience these characters? I'm a little disappointed in my results relating to the to any music made by these characters there have been a few things in the 70s you could get in your box maybe a assuming you didn't swallow it and choke on it a monster's adventure record um one of them is called monster adventures in outer space one of them is called count shakula goes to hollywood one of them is called the monsters go disco and and this is i'm

i'll tell you why i'm disappointed because in the monsters go disco the the original three are all surrounding a record player and there's musical notes coming out and they're all kind of dancing. And see any, even just a still iteration of Boo Berry dancing is wonderful. It's very cute. But these were like spoken words. These were skits. They were like sketches, right? Yeah. So you're not getting,

you know, I want to hear him sing obviously. Did anyone listen to these enough to know what happened? I listened to all of them, yeah. Anything notable? I think think monster adventures in outer space is probably the strongest i think so too yeah um what is the uh what are the highlights does that what's their adventure like well frankenberry wants to rescue his teddy bear and they go to the planet of teddy bears okay but mike do you have anything? It's kind of a twist at the end.

I'm sorry. I don't even remember the twist. But they go to space kind of accidentally, right? Accidentally. They ride a marshmallow. Oh, he's floated away. Yeah. They ride a marshmallow rocket.

And it all turns out to be a dream. All turns out to be a dream. Yeah. The teddy bear. That's a cop out. Yeah. It's kind of a cop out. It's a Saint Elsewhere ending.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember liking. I just don't understand i'm surprised it took them so long to get to just monster mash cereal which they did a couple years ago like when you have harmless monsters the fun to do is they have a party and they sing a song like sing rock and roll music yes and they did record they did cover a version of monster mash yeah and they did a fake like behind the music thing is that still around was that is that viewable i was on a site where it okay okay yeah i could i it was produced by a friend i used to work with a funnier guy and i looked for it yesterday um and it was private they made the

video private who's that what's the name if you don't mind, they'll be outed. Rob Hatchmiller. Oh, yeah. Oh, we know Rob. Yeah, Rob came to our live show recently. Oh, that's not an out. I think it's a feather in his cap. Oh, yeah.

I was kind of bummed I wasn't asked to work on it. Right. Oh, yeah, to put words. That's right. You love the characters to put words in their mouth. That's how I kind of knew

who all the extended General Mills family was because a lot of them show up in it oh they make little this sounds fun there's another and then there's another commercial where all the boxes are lined up it might have been when you got those beanie beep but like you could see all the guys you could get okay okay um well so i mean the the album the little albums don't really give you what you want necessarily.

They're also, throughout the years, in the 2000s, there was also a CD included called 13 Days of Halloween Rhythm and Booze. And it has an intro from Count Chocula, but then a lot of it is just spooky Halloween sounds to, like, play at your house for when trick-or-treaters come out, which is a good thing to put in this cereal for sure. But I was disappointed that none of the songs are by the Monsters. And in fact, what you get instead

is a track by the Baja Men called It's Spooky in Here and another track by the Baja Men called It's Spooky in Here, bonus Junkanoo mix. I don't know what differentiates the Junkanoo mix from the original. Was this one you sent away for or in the box there was a CD? That seems like a generous, even if it's not exactly what you were hoping for, that's a nice prize. Ooh, that I'm not sure of. I guess, yeah, if it's just in the box, that is pretty big.

I don't know. Yeah, might have had to get lucky. Step up from the hoot blower whatever those were i'd say so yeah because that requires you to make all your to boo your own hoots but the baham and boo boo hoots for you um so disappointed by that but then there is a little bit of basically, hey, the thing that we're after in the show is ostensibly about theme parks. There was a theme park way to meet just Count Chocula. And for this, there's a little bit of repeated material because we go back now to the episode we did about Opryland, an episode with Jesse Farrar. And audience, I'm so sorry, we have to even talk about this again.

The most villainous guest in the history of the show because he briefly said he didn't like theme parks and then was otherwise great and funny. Loved the reaction to it. Thanks, everyone. Appreciated it. So anyways, maybe someday i won't be annoyed but you think they'll ever be is this just me or mike and jason how do you feel oh well i think it's

funny i don't know yeah we were we were all insane around that time the episode came out yeah bad do you think that's it was an election stress is that what you're saying election stress i also think it's funny because i think when we were talking about originally doing this podcast five years ago, I think we were like, and then we'll often have people that don't like it, and we'll talk to them and what they don't like about theme parks, and that's the closest we've ever come to it, and it was so mild. And there was a revolt. Anybody being like, this guy.

I have never, never heard the boys have crossed the line for the last time. So anyway, it's possible that you did not finish the episode because you vomited all over your your phone uh i then i don't mind saying that where you could meet the breakfast buddies and when i was quizzing you guys at the beginning part of that was because uh you know like let's establish who all is together uh uh you could meet like the big five at disneyland and uh jordan if they're i think there's a photo this one there we go the big g breakfast buddies there they are so this lineup oh i i apologize i i did not include frankenberry you could meet frankenberry this is some great 70s schoolhouse rock kind of art that indicates that

you can meet frankenberry count chocula and non-spooky mascots the tricks rabbit and honey nut b um who think i today is known as buzz but at the time i guess they had not given him that name um my takeaway from this photo that we're looking at is they made a choice with Honey Nut B, which is to make him like Ralph Wiggum. He does look like, yeah, I was thinking that, too. He looks like a Simpsons character. He's yellow, first of all. He's got the tongue out, which makes him seem like he's thinking hard, I guess. But he's dumb.

He looks dumb, and he looks much chubbier than any depiction. Yeah. I like him, I'll say. He looks the most like a much chubbier than any depiction. Yeah. I like him, I'll say. He looks the most like a walk-around character, though. I bet if you saw him in person, that is the closest to what he actually looks like as opposed to the other ones. He might be just hungry, honestly. He might not be dumb. He might be hungry.

It's funny now because I feel like the marketing for the last 20, 25 years of Honey Nut Cheerios or any Cheerios, it's like, hey, pretty good, right? Tastes good and healthy. Pretty healthy. I still think Honey Nut Cheerios, that was like the default in my house. Same. Always in the house. Always like if my parents were like, I don't, it's so late.

I don't, just feed the kids. I'll just have a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. Honey Nut Cheerios was like a good compromise. Yeah. Because you got a little sugar, but parents still like Cheerios read to them as healthier, which it is to some degree. But you still got a cartoon.

Of the cartoon character cereals, maybe the healthiest or at least feels that way? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I would still be shocked to see. Yeah. Plain Cheerios is just like

this is good for your heart. This will help you. Heart healthy. Heart healthy. Is what I think at least it used to say on the box. I don't know if it does it right now. So if your grandfather had a heart attack, make sure you have the aspirin he can put under his tongue and keep a massive box of Cheerios around yes that's what the american medical association

says um let me now ask for a clip and this was played fully in the the dreaded let's never speak of it again jesse farrar episode uh so this is what did i call it like i don't know there's not a lot of clips left i don't't remember. I'm sorry, Jordan. It's, you know, it's called Serial Dudes or something. There we go. Opryland Gang. Of course, that's what I called it. This we definitely played this before.

But Mike, you probably haven't seen this. This is from an Opryland TV. So Opryland's in Tennessee, by the way, next to the Grand Ole Opry. And this was just this is a long special. It was a ton of country music, but then Frankie Avalon briefly nods to rock. Like we gotta, let's put in rock for like 20 seconds and then we're out.

That's the most willing to acknowledge rock music. So just try to make heads or tails of this little sequence in which our serial friends appear. We're Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We hope you will enjoy the show. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sit back and let the evening go. Sergeant Pepper's Lon Sargent Pepper's lonely

Sargent Pepper's lonely Hotscrap band Does he have a wig on? I think, I guess it's supposed to be a beetle wig. Yes. I don't know who this is. I don't know who is leading this Sargent Pepper performance. To narrate it for the listeners,

beetle wig, old man, and then three unnamed females. I'll start with their heads and cutouts of the cereal mascots. So now we know they have that. What it's Lucky, Bee, Trix Rabbit. Why any of this with Sgt. Pepper, I don't know. Because they're colorful characters, like the cereal people. I don't know. Because they're colorful characters, like the cereal people. I don't know. And then you see Count Chocula.

They come out and dance with mascots. So these were the walk-arounds. So you could hang out with Count Chocula at Opryland. And what we were saying about maybe the mascots, that photo that Buzz kind of looked like, they made the same choice here. Buzz the Honey Nut Cheerios bee is chubby, which he didn't have to be because, look, Lucky Charms guy is not. They're capable of making skinny suits, but they added a bunch of pounds to Buzz.

I guess what they were thinking is, here, I'm just, this is guessing. I'm thinking that they thought, okay, we're going to blow the bee up. The bee is actually smaller on the boxes. But we can't do it. They didn't have the baby Groot technology or whatever to make the bee small. So they said, okay, what would happen if we

blew the bee up to be human size? And that's where they landed on. That's my guess. Also, Buzz is... Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, a svelte bee, it doesn't make sense. Oh, did they get the type wrong? I'm sorry if I interrupted.

No, no, no. But there's a different type of bee that's kind of fat. A bumblebee, kind of. Is that a bumblebee? It's got a big thorax. it's an insect thing and i feel like they maybe got it right that's what i'm maybe leaning toward now that he hmm interesting i just don't i picture him like i he's felt to me now i let would i give this guy a hug absolutely because i i think maybe they were thinking he has to be our Winnie the Pooh.

He's our most huggable character. And he's got similar coloration to Winnie. So I would love to hug this character. That I will say. That's not in question. I just think that there's a curious choice made here. I think he looks, if you look up like 70s Cheerios B, he looks a little more like this. You're thinking of like 90s cool, exercising a lot Cheerios B. You're thinking of like the new hip version.

I think the old one looks a little bit more like this. Well, the Buzz the B that's the strongest to me, if you're on the second gate, then you just met our good friend Andrew Grissom who was on the show. And he, for many years years has been obsessed with this there was a branded there was a commercial with but that paired up buzz the bee and Nelly way after the Nelly hits and it had all the only thing I know about is something Andrew says a lot all the time still which is good morning Nelly I mean just the concept of greeting uh Nelly with good morning is just very funny. What situation have you ended? Besides if you're someone who has slept with Nellie.

In what situation is like one of us saying good morning to Nellie? If he's got an early recording session and you're just setting up. It's like 1130. I guess I can say good morning. Yeah. He's after us at Forever Dog. We got to get out of here. Nellie's coming in.

Good morning, Nellie. I'll refresh the K-cups in case you want a cup of coffee yeah after podcast the ride leaves nelly comes in and cuts some tracks just seated you didn't know that at a table studio with a bunch of unused microphones studio he prefers to sit rick Rubin goes in the other room. Works the boards. Anyways, so. Great photo. There it is. That is a thin B. Thank you, Jordan, or Rick Rubin.

Jordan. Yeah, Scott's thinking of this new, like, spelt B. Yes, and the most iconic one to me is, good morning, Yelly. Look how confused Yelly is. The most iconic one is when he's with Ebenezer Scrooge, and I feel like he's a little bigger. Oh, right. With a real Dickensian screw. That adds like Shotwell

is what I recall. Yeah, that one's like a Christmas special. Scott, because this is the same thing with Chuck E. Cheese, where he's like a cool, young, more svelte Chuck, I feel like. And the old one, he was definitely not watching what he ate as much probably

in the 70s and diets were different or 80s I guess by that point I guess let me is there anything I can get out of the Sopryland thing other than like you guys like these characters you like Frank well if we know

Count Chocula was there do you feel sad you maybe missed an opportunity to like give him a hug or a high five i absolutely do yeah wow yeah yeah yeah yeah these characters i've i'm sure i've said this before they've they like i'm surprised that they haven't done more i'm surprised there's no show about them i i like the i feel like people have such affection for these characters and want to hug them and want to see them more and i'm surprised that it hasn't happened in some way i feel like it it's tough now that it's like glorifying eating unhealthy like the same way

like they've kind of phased out mcdonald's characters as much as i would love to hug the grimace i think they're just like well we don't use them anymore it's a different time but the i guess the i guess the solution is get cause involved. Yes. Get cactus plant flea market involved. But that's more of like a cool retro thing for adults. Exactly. Than like get an eight-year-old excited about sugar cereal.

Yeah. So maybe you could do an adult show. I would love an adult Count Chocula show. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Something a little more mature. An article I came across like reading about this stuff

is like, why aren't there toys in cereal anymore? And it was just like, oh, kids play with toys less. They just want tablets. And it's like, well, that's sad.

That seems discouraging. Yeah. Also might not be true. Yeah, also might not be true. Yeah, not my little, but my kid's little though. I, you know, south of three, I think be true. Not my little, but my kid's little, though. South of three, I think, toys are still in vogue.

But we will see. If you offer a kid a tablet or a Boo Hoot, we know what they're going to pick. You can't boo your friends with a tablet. Of course. Maybe there's an app for it, though. But it's not the same. A Boo Hooter is so tactile. There is, when you say adult versions of these characters,

I did everyone the favor of not putting this on the main. But with these characters, I have to do the R34 search. I have to know if there's any pornographic presence. And there is a little bit. And this is a very amateur black and white sketch. But I feel like done with love. And I will show you. Mike Carlson, you'll miss this. But you guys will see. That's OK. Oh, my God. very amateur black and white sketch but i feel like done with love and i will show mike carlson

you'll miss this but you guys will see that's okay but oh my god what you're seeing is count shockula basically count shockula is very happily pleasuring himself here i'll come i'll censor it even for the video i'll put it behind our logo and wait he's describe it somebody's jason describe it for me oh yeah somebody yeah okay is he he's shooting out boober he's nutting boober yes boobery is the cum boobery's cum oh wow okay so he's he's pleasuring himself with his hand yes yeah and let's let's be let's give him due credit he is. And there was a thing in the 70s called Boo-Berry-Com where it was turn your cum blue for a while. Bright blue.

Electric blue. So, I mean, this is a creative. This is a great way to get the characters together to marry the universe. To turn one into the ejaculate of another. This is less extreme than that, but one of the Google fill-ins for Count Chocula, this is a very vexing question. It's just like, where can you get Count Chocula?

What were the monster cereals? And then, is Count Chocula a girlfriend? Not, does he have one? Now, is he a girlfriend? Not does he have one? No, is he a girlfriend? I don't know how to answer that question. Yeah, did anyone answer that online? I don't think. The answer that you get is not related to it.

Like Google gave up. They didn't know how to tackle this, the great mystery. So anyway, I mean, we've done a lot of tackling of the mystery. Are there any final thoughts about this gang? I've loved talking about them for a while. Yeah, it's it's I'm always surprised at because I think a lot of people perk up at these care. These specific characters, people love cereal from their childhood and all the mascots in general, but these characters specifically, I think, really spark something. Just real quick, I don't have the clip. I don't even know if we could ever play it,

but Jason and I shot a thing about a decade ago with some professional wrestlers, and Jason and professional wrestler Rob Van Dam ended up in an improvised scene about monster cereal because Jason, in the middle of an improv with some other professional wrestlers, started talking about monster cereals. And Rob Van Dam perked up like I've never seen a human being before and got so excited. And then we added it in where Jason and Rob Van Dam discussed monster cereals because he was so excited about it. So I'm always impressed with the reach of these characters and how much affection people have for them. Who would have thought that monster cereals would appeal to a stoner like Rob Van Dam?

It's a very good point. Who could have thought the monster cereals would appeal to a stoner like Rob Van Dam? It's a very good point. Who could have seen that coming? He's high 24-7, so you're correct. Maybe that wasn't a big reach that he would have affection for that. That's what I, when I saw the fruit brute in those Tarantino movies, I feel like I clocked it the first or second time I saw those movies. And I was like, is this trying to that like adults who eat these cereals are dirtbags? Because like Eric Stoltz is a dirtbag.

Tim Roth is undercover but he's kind of sleazy. I think any like adult eating cereal in media is meant to be like well they don't have their shit together. Yes. That's a good shorthand. Are you guys offended by that? No. It's efficient and filling,

and sometimes you just need to get the job done. Yeah, show, don't tell. I get it. Yeah. Yeah, fine. Economy of storytelling. Here's a question. We talked at the beginning.

This was in the show, not before the show, right? About the monster, the universal maze where one monster wins and takes the head off the other. Mike, if you had to pick one to defeat the others and hold up their bloody heads triumphantly. I'm going to go with Boo-Berry because Franken-Berry and Count Chocula are scared of Boo of boo berry in a way that he's not scared of them uh-huh uh-huh so it makes the most sense that yeah yeah he is he's fearless uh impervious and and you can like you can kill a vampire i don't know if you can kill a ghost oh that's true yeah yeah yeah he might have yeah he's already dead so what else do you do wow well so boo berry triumphant um but look they're all

winners except maybe the we didn't talk about the mummy a lot i feel like we don't like the mummy that much okay all right all right so kind of late to the party you know yeah yeah yeah you're nice to him but uh yeah cool design but i i truly have no i think i remember one or two of the commercials but like gone pretty fast. Sure. You know? Yeah. They do a lot of other products.

They make yogurt, which sounds gross, fruit roll-ups. And you guys can try them or not. I did bake some monster cookies. Well, saying bake is very generous because they're like the pre-made. You just put them in the oven. But if you want to try them after this, I have some. Wow. Oh, wow.

Thank you. Oh, my God. Absolutely. Oh, geez. Okay. Well, then let Thank you. Oh, my God. Absolutely. Oh, geez. Okay. Well, then let's wind it down so we can have these cookies. Everyone except for Carl Suter is not in the room. I'll go buy some.

In the spirit of, yeah. Well, and let's – I can't believe we didn't try. I feel like maybe I got to, like, separately buy one of these. Can I ask – Scott, you've never tried any of these? No. Wow. Maybe I need to do a little, little like what if i do a little social media content and let's just spitballing maybe i call it like snack or whack i don't know um

and just to see what oh here's the lineup oh oh thank you well i think this this year it's four right it's the original yummy mummy's not around yummy mummy is not back this year they keep saying the return of for the other two. So yeah, maybe they keep shifting. These were the years. On the bottom were the years I got all five, if I remember. Okay. What are you the most curious to have me try?

I don't know. Is it the one I would like the most or the one I would like the least? The underdog. Hmm. I mean, I'll just buy whatever I can find. Oh, God. I think, I'll just buy whatever I can find, but. Oh, God. I think you should try probably Boo-Berry.

I think so. Okay. Okay. Well, that's another thing that Boo-Berry won. Boo-Berry's coming out on top. And you know what? I like it. I'll be rooting for liking it. I'll be booing and hooting if I like it.

Came out of this really liking Boo-Berry. So Boo-Berry berry i think the winner of in 2016 they did to tie in with the presidential election they did an election of president of monsters and boob berry lost count shock to the one oh yeah well just name like broke down like by state really yeah three parties doesn't work Boobie only won three states. Right. And Frankenberry, I think, only took Montana. Is that true? He only had one, yeah. That's pretty funny.

But I think we can all agree in 2016, dear God, I wish one of them had won for real. Absolutely. We'd be in much better shape. But the true winner of the episode and the current unless something happens with Tarantino the reigning

champion for the cereals and for fruit brewed on the show Mike Scullins you survived podcast the Hauntcast the Fright you survived Hauntcast the Fright let's exit through the

we don't know the spooky gift shop is there anything you'd like to plug? not really you can watch late night I perform on it quite a bit I was recently a Disney adult the spooky gift shop. Is there anything you'd like to plug? Not really. You can watch late night. I perform on it quite a bit.

I was recently a Disney adult in an episode. So maybe that's particularly relevant. Interesting. I played a Disney adult upset that the park had gotten too woke. Oh, wow. Dude, this is an extremely real thing in the world. There is totally this. I can plug that and be like, oh, maybe I actually would watch that.

And based on your real views. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't so much a sketch as just like a treatise. If I got to put on a different shirt or something to make this work. It's weird that Seth Meyers

stepped away and let you just do a soliloquy. He bumped Ariana Grande oh well she's from Jersey she can come over the bridge you know she can come back she'll be back

so happy to meet you thanks for making time while you're in town and let's do it again sometime please as for us you can find us on all the socials at podcast the ride merch is available in our TeePublic store and for three bonus episodes every month, check out Hauntcast The Fright The Cemetery Gate or get one more

bonus episode on our new tier, Crypt 3. You'll find all of that at patreon.com slash Podcast The Ride. Thanks to Jordan Black Cats at Forever... What was it? What was the Forever Fruit Brute, I guess, is the podcast company for now. Thanks Forever Fruit Brute? I guess is the podcast company for now.

Thanks, Forever Fruit Brute Studios, for letting us record. And thanks, all of you, for listening. So long. Forever Dog. This has been a Forever Dog production. Executive produced by Mike Carlson, Jason Sheridan, Scott Gairdner, Brett Boehm, Joe Cilio, and Alex Ramsey. For more original podcasts, please visit foreverdogpodcasts.com

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