A Monster Hunt (Okay, a Cereal Monster Hunt)

It's October, and our thoughts may turn to monsters. 

Or cereal. Or even monster cereals, since those are a thing each fall. You know the ones: Count Chocula, Franken Berry, Boo-Berry. For decades, these monsters have prowled our cupboards, our store end caps, our commercial breaks. We live in a world chock-full of cereal monster tee shirts, board games, and Funko Pop!. 

But what do we know about them? Who are they besides grinning cartoons and sweet, marshmallow crunch? October is a season for exploring questions.

For answers, we start where such things must. 

With a leprechaun.

AFTER ME LUCKY CHARMS

1963. Golden Valley, Minnesota. The top brass at General Mills had a problem. They were cranking out Wheaties and Cheerios to market demand, but the processing plants still had capacity. The top brass sent a challenge to their design teams: Bring us something new. 

It was ace product developer John Holahan who rose to the moment. Holahan was grocery shopping when he saw Cheerios, and he saw Brach's Circus Peanuts, and he had an idea. Imagine the conference room as Holahan pitched chopped-up candy dumped into oats. The pitch got a green light, and the ad whizzes came up with L.E. Leprechaun to front the box, and by 1964, Lucky Charms was on the shelves--and not selling. General Mills had to sweeten the oats before the cereal blockbuster was born.

The top brass didn't score a primo Minnesota view by misreading their market. In the kid cereal game, characters moved boxes. Quaker had Cap'n Crunch, Kellogg had Tony the Tiger, and now General Mills had their leprechaun. And there was this: If kids would eat unflavored marshmallows and cereal, they sure as hell would eat the stuff flavored. 

General Mills knew the very flavors. Nestlé Quik powder had burst on the scene, chocolate and strawberry both, and kids were slurping it up. If the Swiss could pull off flavored milk, then by God, so could Golden Valley. All they needed were their headliners. 

I VANT TO DRINK YOUR MILK

The Sixties were a horror film heyday. Old hands like Universal and newcomers like Hammer Films had revived the genre, making Gothic mainstays Dracula and Frankenstein back into box office staples. The Munsters and The Addams Family brought kid-friendly versions into the home. The ad whizzes had their bankable craze.

General Mills needed two years to hone playful riffs on Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's Monster. This would be a double product launch, and so the top brass wanted chocolate and strawberry characters that played off each other with real on-screen chemistry. Surviving the all-important Saturday morning commercial wars demanded nothing less.

Bringing the monsters to animation life was Bill Melendez, the Disney and Warner Bros. alum and creative force behind the Peanuts specials. Melendez had made his bones on Pinocchio, Bambi, Daffy Duck, and Snoopy. Now he had Count Alfred Chocula and Franken Berry. With Melendez was the Trix Rabbit creative team and the voice talents of James Dukas (Chocula/Legosi) and Bob McFadden (Franken Berry/Karloff). Dukas had done mostly bit acting parts, McFadden cartoons. The stage was set.

In 1971, the top brass pulled the trigger. Lines hummed. Trucks rolled. On Saturday mornings, Chocula and Franken Berry wrangled over flavor superiority until scared witless by the slightest damn thing.  

They were a hit.

IN EVERY HOUSE, A GHOST

No one had seen anything like these new cereals. General Mills unleashed their full souvenir arsenal: stickers, toy rings, miniatures. The monsters sold so well that, when kids' poop started turning up pink, researchers diagnosed Franken Berry as the cause. Adjustments were made, and the boxes kept selling. 

And, as is human nature with possible litigation off the table, the top brass went again to the monster well. Test concepts abounded, but the winning idea was the most obvious. A ghost. 

Problem: Dracula might've differentiated himself among vampires, but no such ghost had managed the trick. Ghosts and ghost lore are everywhere, so the marketing whizzes set about concocting their own. The hook would be America's first blueberry-centric cereal, and hookishly Golden Valley created a front character of Boo-Berry, a stylishly rumpled homage to horror icon Peter Lorre.

The voice job went to a pro's pro, Paul Frees. He'd done Tom and Jerry (Jerry), The Wonderful World of Disney (Ludwig Von Drake), Rocky and Bullwinkle (Boris Badenov), Frosty the Snowman (Santa), and Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (Burgermeister Meisterburger), among many other roles. One Saturday in 1972, Frees' chill Boo-Berry/Lorre came a-knocking at the Count's and Franken's door and, yes, scared the bejeezus out of them. 

A BRUTE TOO FAR

General Mills was on a cereal-slinging roll. By 1974, they had their next monster: Fruit Brute, a werewolf in striped overalls. The design teams, so meticulous in crafting Chocula and Frank, didn't go the Lon Chaney route. Fruit Brute was basically a friendly German Shepherd. The design team couldn't even land on a flavor blend to market a la Froot Loops. This was just fruit generally. One choice the product team did make was lime marshmallows. 

Surely the ad whizzes knew the magic wasn't happening. Fruit Brute was still on the shelves when in 1979 General Mills released the infamous Monsters Go Disco promo EP. Fruit Brute didn't make the cut and was soon off the market. In 1988, the product folks tried again with Yummy Mummy, re-partnering the omni-fruit taste with vanilla marshmallows. Yummy Mummy wasn't out of the product crypt long.

Ah, the Brute. A star-cross'd cereal. Fruit Brute's highest honor came after its retirement, when Quentin Tarantino used the cereal as an easter egg in both Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). 

YEP, UNDEAD

In case you wondered, you read Monsters Go Disco correctly. It's a mini-musical in which a bored Chocula, Frank, and Boo-Berry hit a club and compete in a disco contest. The monsters also went to outer space and Hollywood. They were splashed on yogurt cups, special edition ice cream, cake mixes, fruit roll-ups. They did cross-promotion with the Goosebumps and Scooby-Doo franchises. Things were good.

Time, though, catches up to us all. In 2009, General Mills announced that the monster trio would be available only around Halloween. "To inspire nostalgic joy," the announcement read. One might guess that spreadsheets and focus groups were involved. Nostalgia might be read as saying parents, not their Gen Z kids, were driving sales. 

Smart call, nostalgia, all those snappy commercials and colored-milk memories. And the licensing opportunities abound, Fifty years in, the monsters had gone pop culture, famous for being famous. Monsters Go Disco is running $25 - $30 on Ebay. 

Some years, the release ties in with a collaboration or even resurrects a lost monster. Frute Brute--note the spelling change, likely a signal of the actual fruit content--has returned a few times and having at last found cherry for a flavor. Yummy Mummy has gone orange.

There is even a new monster in the Cerealverse: Carmella Creeper, a goth-girl DJ zombie laying down caramel apple taste and mad beats. Her backstory goes that she is Franken Berry's cousin. How that is supposed to work is best left to mystery. One imagines those focus groups again and the kids asking why all the monsters were dudes. 

THE OCTOBER RITE

There you have it, a half-century cereal tale of tales. Oat surplus, Circus Peanuts-fueled inspiration, Hammer Studios, Snoopy's animator, Burgermeister Meisterburger, medical mysteries, Tarantino, and thousands of sugar-hyped fans. 

And the monsters are back this October. Nostalgically, I scored a box.