The Hulk Shills for Honey-Comb

Cereal commercials tend to follow certain patterns.  Either kids have the cereal and the mascot tries to take it or the mascot has the cereal and the kids try to take it.  Sometimes these patterns are broken up with certain groups sharing cereal or tricking each other out of cereal.  The main point usually tend to be that the cereal is the greatest commodity in the world and everybody wants it.

One variation on the theme is that cereal has the power to solve various problems.  For instance, it can soothe the savage beast.  So when the Hulk finally decided to publicly endorse a cereal this was the obvious theme they ran with.

It was a beautiful 1970's day at the Honey-Comb Hideout.  But trouble soon started when the Hulk showed up enraged from hunger.  His main snack requirement was regarding size so the Honey-Comb Kids had to explain things to him:

It didn't take long for him to get on board and help himself to a heaping bowl:

So after enjoining his fair share of a complete breakfast he goes back from whence he came without so much as a "thank you."  (Although he didn't kill anybody so I guess that's a plus.)

They are are left to do the dishes and change their crap-filled pants.  You can witness the bizarre encounter for yourself:

It would be a few decades later before the Hulk would get his very own cereal.  The 2003 Hulk movie produced an insane amount of promotional tie-ins, the best of which was Hulk Cereal:

It's safe to say that it was the best part of the movie.

eBay Find: Dutch Batman Drink

I just found this sweet Batman bottle on eBay:

The description says that it is Dutch and from 1976.  I'm not sure "Blits" means.  It could be a brand name or a flavor.  Whatever it means, the label seems to indicate that the drink itself was some kind of lemonade:

Treats

Super heroes and Halloween - they go hand in hand. Add in some candy and you've got October's holy trinity. A few years ago the concept was expressed succinctly at the end-cap of my local grocery store. Imagine the look on this beleaguered documentarian's face when I turned down the candy aisle and saw this:

Looks like we've got not one but three separate kinds of bags of branded Marvel Comics candy to give out this year (there's actually 4 types of bags but one was just "candy sticks" and anyone that knows me knows I HATE candy sticks). How will you choose? I think you know the answer to that (spoiler: get them all).

As usual, our featured players include the Marvel Movie Gang™ (minus Wolverine...super cameo in "First Class" though, big guy!). The first bag, like all good bags, is the lollipop bag.

Next up is "Dig'n Dips" a.k.a. "Fun Dip" a.k.a. the greatest candy in the world! Yes, it's essentially just flavored sugar and yes it goes great on/with everything! After a couple of bags of these you'll be able to take on Thor by yourself.

And we end with the grab bag. The secret identities of these various candies may be "Sugar Daddy", Tootsie Rolls and Smarties but they've come dressed up as your favorite super heroes to bring a little extra awesomeness to the Halloween season.

A friend of mine gives out comic books every Halloween. If you can't do that then I recommend giving out these guys.

Superman Returns

A new year calls for a new fruit snack and these seem to make me slightly giddier than the average super hero fruit snack. Yeah, I know I've said that before but, believe it or not, you don't see a lot of Superman food products these days. The Man of Steel's grocery heyday seems to have peaked in the 1980's. Not even the heavily merchandised "Superman Returns" could muster more than a few candies and a half-assed attempt at cereal.

So it's with great enthusiasm that we celebrate the real return of Superman...in candy form!


You may notice he's wearing his pre-New 52 costume (also known as his real costume). That's not terribly surprising since you would think that Betty Crocker wants people to look at this box and say, "Hey I want some Superman Fruit Snacks!" instead of, "Where are Superman's outer-under pants?"


That old school mentality continues with some of the shapes they picked. Sure, you've got the standard "Superman Standing," "Superman Flying" and "Superman's Face" but take a look at that Lois Lane design:


Is that a Noel Neill-style pillbox hat she's sporting? Well, doesn't that just make the fruit snacks taste that much sweeter? You also get the top of the Daily Planet building for your trouble which I'm all for but I can't help but notice a lack of villains in this selection.

I guess you can't have everything. But, personally, I'm hoping that this meager box of fruit snacks is a harbinger of a new wave of great things to come...and I'm not talking about the new movie, I'm talking about the new edible merchandise!

Commercial Break: X-Men Pasta

World's Finest Gummie Pops

With all this talk of Avengers and Spider-Man and various Marvel brouhaha, it's easy to forget about their Distinguished Competition.  Sure there was also a Batman movie this year but it was woefully underrepresented at the grocery store.  That Dark Knight themed Mountain Dew just didn't cut it for me.  Every morning I would toss a beleaguered look toward its location in the soda cooler at 7-Eleven as I got my coffee but its siren song fell on deaf (or possibly lazy) ears.

A happier tune was sung by these squishy feeling Batman and Superman Gummie Pops...because...my God, they're squishy!  I thought they were marshmallow pops at first since apparently those are the types of things that exist but no, these are fruity, HFCS filled squishtastic wonders firmly planted on a stick (and, as we all know, everything tastes better on a stick).

            

They with Fun Fact Cards for you to read as you chew.  The ones I got weren't breaking new ground but you never know.  They say every comic book is someone's first comic so maybe more candy should lay the foundation of knowledge for these franchises and include helpful tidbits about Jimmy Olsen and Ace the Bat-Hound.

Temporary tattoos are also included making these pops a bona fide multimedia experience.  They're your standard Batman and Superman logos and I learned that they are difficult to applied to a wiggly one year old.

But how do they taste, you ask?  Horrible.  To be fair, I don't eat a lot of candy and I'm probably not the target audience but the one bite of each that I had was enough to convince me that they weren't marshmallows.  I got an artificially fruity type flavor and and artificial existence type of texture.  Kind of like calamari but a thousand times more disturbing.

So I bit both of their faces off and never looked back.

Snack Time: Pizza & Punch

Sometimes I'll come across some super hero related food that is interesting but not quite interesting for its own blog entry. When that happen they get combined into a "Snack Time" entry.

When the Avengers movie was released on DVD, Walmart celebrated with a line of Avengers themed pizzas.  But other than having a character slapped on the box there was nothing particularly interesting about these (no flavor name changes, no Captain America shield pepperoni placement, etc.):

They did the same thing when The Amazing Spider-Man was released on DVD. Only Spidey and the Lizard showed up but you got multiple spider-poses:

This is been sitting on my desk for awhile now.  The the graphics on the Power Punch Freezer Pops box come on strong and it's great to see the Thing joining the party but when you open up the box you just get bland, unbranded sugar water:

Oh well.  Better luck next time I guess...