Mascot Hall of Fame #1: Count Chocula & Franken Berry
A few years before advertising mascot classic Boo Berry and Fruit Brute (to say nothing of Fruity Yummy Mummy) entered the pantheon of Monster Cereal mascots, there was the original duo of Count Chocula and Franken Berry.
General Mills introduced the pair — legal names Count Alfred Chocula and Franken Berry — in 1971. They were notable not just for their delicious breakfast cereals but for their utter cowardice in TV ads.
I’m not sure if they ever really left the shelves for any length of time (Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy came back briefly but are discontinued as of 2020) but for the past decade they’ve only been available around the Halloween season. The current iterations of the Count and his pink nemesis are computer-generated abominations, so let’s remember them here as they should always be.
Tut
Pretty much all cereal mascots were turned into over-shaded, over-3D’d piles of puke a few decades ago. I was eating Cap’n Crunch a couple weeks ago and found I had to turn the box around, not to read the stuff on the back, but to simply get that psychotic looking atrocity out of my face. And this weekend I tried Lucky Charms Honey Clovers (not great – stick to the odd oaty original) and had to look at the far too young looking 3D face of the creep they call Lucky these days.