“I have supped full on horrors.” William Shakespeare, Macbeth

While doing my grocery shopping last night I was stopped cold (as I am quite often) at the sight of a new line of Kellogg’s fruit snacks commemorating Universal’s classic monsters. You've got to know that inessential item went right into the shopping cart, as I am unable to resist any monster related food items, especially when they bear the official imprimatur of Universal Studios, “Home of the Original Monsters.”
Kellogg’s Monsters offers bite-sized fruity snacks in the shape of the heads of the Frankenstein Monster (lime), Count Dracula (cherry), the Mummy (lemon) and the Wolfman (orange). Well, those are the colors and you’d have to intuit the flavors. The listing of ingredients does include apple puree and hydrogenated coconut, but after that it’s a beaker full of chemicals, from sodium citrate to Yellow #5 and Red #40.

Those laboratory-created chromatics bring back memories of many a malnutritious childhood breakfast. Remember Frankenberry? The General Mills strawberry (in theory) flavored monster cereal hit the shelves in 1971 in the horrific company of Count Chocula. A couple of years later, the terrible twosome was joined by the phantasmic Booberry and all three cereals enjoyed a long run, despite initial hiccups. The first batches of Frankenberry contained a dye that the human body couldn’t process fully, which meant that kids who ate the cereal excreted pink shortly thereafter. (I wonder if this was the inspiration for a nasty bit of business in Stephen King’s Cujo.) A fourth monster, the werewolfic Fruit Brute, was added to the mix in 1975 and hung in there until 1988. Quentin Tarantino seems to have been a big fan, as boxes of Fruit Brute turn up in the background in both Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). Fruit Brute was replaced somewhat belatedly in 1988 by Yummy Mummy. I know very little about this particular spinoff but I can tell you that Googling “yummy mummy” puts you into a lot of websites for single under 30 moms looking to hook up. Proceed at your own risk.

One cereal I was big on as a kid was Freakies, which tasted awful, as I recall, but came with a free Freaky toy inside each box. “Collect ‘em all,” the packaging suggested… and I nearly put myself into renal failure to comply. I was and remain to this day that committed to MonsterKid-dom, willing to risk life and limb to go the extra mile and the extra cereal bowl. Freakies seems to have retained a kind of fan base over the past thirty years and the toys surprises are collectible items these days, as are Freakies tee shirts, etc. I’m over the Freakies but the MonsterKid in me is happy someone is carrying the torch.

I’m too health conscious these days to actually eat Count Chocula or Frankenberry but I’ll get around to my Kellogg’s Monsters Artificially and Naturally Flavored Fruit Snacks this Halloween season. And anything I can’t stomach I’ll just give away to the children who ring my doorbell on October 31^st. Hey, Trick or Treat cuts both ways, kids.