Freakies V Waffelos

The Golden Age of Freakies

Found at Adam Gorightly's Untamed Dimensions on 10-31-07 http://gorightly.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/the-golden-age-of-freakies/

http://www.mysteryisland.net/freakiesarticle

What's that you say? Not enough cereal in the Cartoons & Cornflakes archives? All right, well, my absolute favorite childhood cereal was FREAKIES, not so much for its generic "crunchy, sugary" breakfast cereal goodness, but for its overall A+ packaging and cereal treasure delivery.

Freakies had the best commercials, best cereal icons (the Freakies family themselves), and the absolute best cereal prizes, again, the Freakies themselves!

The first prizes were the best, hard plastic (PVC) figures of the Freakies.


Seven Freakies existed: Boss Moss (the leader), Cowmumble, Gargle, Hamhose, Grumble, Goody-Goody, and Snorkeldorf (my favorite for unknown reasons).

They just looked really cool, small monsters you could carry inside your pocket. Hey, the original "pokemon" so to speak. Pocket monsters.

After the PVC figures, rubber versions showed up in the boxes, then Freakies in cars ...

then boats, then magnets, and the budget seemed to dissolve into mushy cereal nothingness from there.

Freakies, a unique brand of cereal, a terrific gimmick, only lasted three years: (1973-1975), but a very magical time period from my perspective, my key comic book buying days, skateboard and bicycle riding, and living in a perpetual world of imagination inside my 9 to 11-year old head.
I wrote a poem about the Freakies a few years back. The strange tribute was published in Robert Berry's pop culture book: Frankenberry Uber Alles and can now be found at retroCRUSH, featured in the TOP 100 Monsters list.

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Robalini's Reply:

Thanks for the piece on Freakies, Adam, but personally my favorite cereal from yesteryear, hands down, was Waffelos. The koolest thing about Waffelos: you could collect the boxes, as there were nine different buildings which made up the Old West town of Waffeloville!

Here's more on Waffelos:

http://neatocoolville.blogspot.com/2006/11/waffelos-cereal-howdy-pardners-to-start.html

Friday, November 17, 2006
WAFFELOS CEREAL

“Howdy Pardners! To start the day right you need the right kind of breakfast. So here’s one breakfast that fills the bill.

First. You get yourself a bowl, fill it with Waffelos cereal, and pour on some milk.

Second. Have some fruit or juice.

Third. Try a little warm toast with butter or margarine.

Fourth. Wash it all down with a glass of milk.

My horse reminded me to tell you that Waffelos with 1/2-cup of milk give you 25% of the recommended daily allowance of 8 essential vitamins plus iron.

There’s a lot more to Waffelos than great Taste!”

Waffelo Bill

This good advise from the one and only Waffelo Bill was found on the side of each cereal box of Waffelos.
Introduced in 1979 by Ralston, this cereal was mighty tasty and a real hoot to boot! Waffelos came in two flavors Maple or Blueberry. Waffelo Bill rode into the sunset with his guitar playing horse in 1982, but luckily he left behind some nifty premiums.


Reminiscent to the 1948 Lone Ranger Frontier Town cut-out buildings on the backs of Cheerios boxes was Waffelos own version called Waffeloville. (You know, that’s just down the road from Neato Coolville)

You had the opportunity to collect all nine buildings off of the backs of Waffelos cereal. To have the complete town you needed Bill’s Milk Bar, Waffeloville School, General Store, Waffeloville Bank, Railroad Station, Blacksmith, Livery Stable, Waffeloville Hotel, and the Stage Coach Office.


Also as a bonus, each box came with one of five Waffeloville stand-up characters!


Some of the other premiums that were made available was a maze game, a belt buckle, Wacky Packages stickers, and two Wacky Packages posters (box panels). You can see those and a scan of the Blueberry Waffelos box over at Wacky-Packages

Also there were these three glass decals for drinking glasses, windows or mirrors.

Now I think I’ll go an fix me up some waffles then break off the squares into a bowl, pour in some maple syrup and milk and relive a childhood memory.

Hmm... You know that sounds like a bad idea. I’ll just go buy some of that new Eggo cereal instead.

Posted by Mayor Todd Franklin

Neato Labels: 1970's, cerealville

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Oddly, X-Entertainment.com, that hip repository for retro-cool pop kulture, pretty much rips the cereal in it's review:

http://www.x-entertainment.com/messages/200.html

Waffelos -- Mmmmm! Waffelos! Now, cereal designers, a question for you. Does this tagline suggest a premium product? 'A Sweetened Cereal With Artificial Maple Flavor'. I'd be more inclined to think this cereal was good for me if they wrote 'Cereal is Made Entirely From Sugar & Evil Glucose Concentrate'. We also run into a bit of a problem with the choice of mascot - this ugly cowboy dude. I'm sure I speak for all of us - who would want to look at that while eating the most important meal of the day? See the horse in the background? Tell me he doesn't look guilty for supporting such an inferior product.

Waffelos was one of many in a string of cereal brands which felt the best way to go was to simply pour sugar syrup over unflavored toasted corn. It's a simple formula, actually, and it'd work if you'd make even the slightest effort to promote it as anything but that. Waffelos didn't do that, and when you compile that in with the ridiculous cowboy idiot on the box, you've got a real loser.

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Perhaps the final word of Waffelos, though, comes from the great author Don DeLillo, who, in his 1985 novel White Noise includes it on his riff on modern korporate kuisine: "the junk food still in shopping bags -- onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut crème patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints."

Kaboom (or more properly, Kaboom!) got a greater claim of pop culture fame in 2003, when Vivica A. Fox used a box of the breakfast treat to conceal a gun she was using in a attempt to blow away Uma Thurman. That was the problem with Waffelos, unlike Kaboom: it was just too intellectual to be appreciated by someone like Quentin Tarantino...