From the Cereal Aisle: S'mores Crunch

S'mores Crunch Cereal
Company: General Mills
Years: 1982-1988

Photo by Greg Koenig

Of all the cereals from my childhood, S'mores Crunch has to be in my top 5 cereals I'd bring back if I ever ran for President of the United States and won. Which in this day and age, with all the money floating around the elections, is pretty tough to do. I mean, sure, maybe if some of you chipped in and started a Super PAC for me and were able to donate a few million dollars each, then maybe. But as it sits right now, it's a long shot at best, so you can probably just count on S'mores Crunch remaining discontinued, and that's a damn shame. Because it was delicious.

Launched in 1982, S'mores Crunch was, to put it simply, Golden Grahams with marshmallows.
But when you cut down to the core of what made it great, it was more then that......it was truly special. It was grahams. It was chocolate. It was marshmallow. It was rainbows. It was unicorns. It was love.

It was all those things in a bowl (but mostly just the first 3).

You might remember the commercials for S'mores, which not unlike every kids cereal commercial made from the dawn of man, involved some kids trying to get some cereal. Then they run into a problem (someone steals their cereal / someone traps them in a cage and keeps them from getting their cereal / they get hit by a bus). Luckily, they have some help getting them to their beloved cereal. In this case, they are helped by The S'morecerer. He takes them out of the horrible situation they are in (trapped in a room with a Nickleback album playing over and over and over again) and drops them right smack dab in front of a big bowl of S'mores, and after finishing their cereal, one of the kids cleverly says "Can I have S'more?"
HAHAHAHAhahahahahahahahahahahaHAHAHAHAhahahahahahahaaaaaa...........you stupid kid, no you can't have any more, it's been discontinued.

In the late 80's Smores Crunch tried to rebrand itself as S'mores Grahams, and it lasted a few more years into the early 90's, but it was finally discontinued for good after the great marshmallow famine of 1992. Or it just wasn't selling as well as it had been. It was one of those two things I think.

Photo by Jason Liebig

In 2003, Kelloggs ripped off the idea and came out with a cereal called Smorz which was a @%*#*!$ travesty to all things holy. It wasn't the same at all. It was a cheap knockoff of a cheap knockoff of a once great cereal. So I just pretend it never happened. Kind of like The Hangover 2.

Finally, an observation: Is anyone else kind of creeped out by the cartoon marshmallow on the box? I mean, on the S'mores Crunch box, it looks like him, Chocolate and Graham Cracker are all buds, just hanging out, smiling......waiting for you to take them home and love them. But then, on the S'mores Grahams box, Marshmallow has decided to eat his friends, like some sort of Marshzombie.
Just an observation I had. Probably means nothing.

Or does it? (note to self - load guns for impending zombie marshmallow apocalypse.)

From the "Not Really a Grocery Store Product but Still Something You'd shove in your Piehole" Dept.

I'm going to break from my standard post format for this one, because it's not an item that you would have bought in a Grocery store, so it sort of disqualifies it from Gone But Not Forgotten Groceries, but it still falls in the "Foods of Days Past" and "Hey, I remember eating those" category. Not to mention it certainly falls into the "What the $#@%" and "You're gonna die if you eat that" category as well.

So Maybe you've already heard about this news story.

A man named Mort Bank from Bismarck N.D. was cleaning out his basement one day and came across an item from his days of owning/operating a McDonalds restaurant. The item? A gallon jug of McDonalds special McJordon BBQ Sauce, circa 1992.

You see, 20 years ago, McDonalds was selling (for a limited time only!) a burger called the "McJordon" in honor of Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordon. The burger was a quarter-pound hamburger with smoked bacon, cheese, McJordan barbecue sauce, onions, mustard and pickle, which I guess, were all of Michael Jordan's favorite ingredients on a burger. The "McJordon" was sold only in limited markets in the United States, but later that year was sold nationwide with it's name changed to the "Big 33".

So Mort did what he does with all his old McDonalds items he has lying around: He put it up on ebay.
Because hey, you never know. But Mort really did know one thing: There are idiots on ebay with a LOT of money just burning a hole in their pockets/purses/old timey sacks with "$" stamped on the front, and he found that person. The winning bid came from an undisclosed person from Chicago, and it was exactly what you would expect any rational human being to pay for a pretty plain looking bottle of expired 20 year old BBQ sauce celebrating a retired NBA star: $9,995.

I'm not kidding. Someone paid just shy of 10 grand for this now lethal burger topping.

Which leads me to believe one of 2 things: The buyer was either a HUGE Bulls/Jordon fan with way too much money, or it was someone who has figured out how to successfully time travel. They take the bottle in their DeLorean (or phonebooth if the buyer was either Bill or Ted) back to about 1991. They get in touch with the owner of McDonalds, and they tell that clown "Hey, we've got a great idea for a burger, and we've concocted this special BBQ sauce for it! Now give us 5 million dollars!"

Which forces me to ask the bigger question here: If you take expired food products back though time before the expiration date, do they become edible again?

Someone needs to do some research, and it may as well be me. Quick, find me a box of Fruit Brute and a Tardis......

From the Candy Aisle: Summit Bars

Product: Summit Cookie Bars
Company: Mars
Years: 1977-1984

Image by Petes_Old_Food on Flickr

Remember Summit Bars? I mean, do you really REALLY remember them? Because I can't say I without a shadow of a doubt remember them, but when looking at the wrapper, it seems vaguely familiar to me. Like when you're out drinking with your friends, and you see a girl at the bar that you swear you know...you're not sure how or why, but you know her. Maybe she was in your 5th hour Algebra class in Highschool, or maybe you hooked up with her in college after a night of consuming too many Irish Car Bombs. You were never one to say no to free drinks, so when Tony "The Tank" kept buying round after round of shots for everyone, it was bound to take it's toll, and by god, it did.
Maybe you stumbled up to her and offered to buy her a drink, and she too, in her inebriated state, took the drink. You began to talk about whatever.....how cute she was....how awesome the Dave Matthews concert was that you were at.....that your dad works for NASA (he really doesn't)....and you hit it off. You stumble to a few more bars with her before eventually making it back to your place. You remember kissing her at the door and stumbling to your room, but then BOOM, lights out, power down...you passed out cold. When the sun came up, she was leaving. You barely mumbled "Hey, what's your name again?" before she bolted through the door, leaving you confused and a bit curious if anything happened at all. But the faint image of her has always stuck with you.

And now, as you are staring at this girl at the bar, some 15 years later, you are trying to pry that image from the mental files of your mind. Is it her? Isn't it her? God, I don't know.....what was her name? Lisa? Rhonda? Do I really remember her at all? Or do I just think I do?

Yeah, that's pretty much what the Summit Bar is to me. It looks familiar. But I don't know if I ever hooked up with it.

I meant ate it.

From what I've read (my memory isn't so great, remember?), the Summit bar was 2 waffers covered in peanuts, then drenched in chocolate. Doesn't sound like a candy bar I could pick out of a lineup or taste test. Guess that's why Mars discontinued it.

Who out there remembers these? Help me fill in the blanks, as in my brain, they are sketchy at best.

From the Beverage Aisle: Zany Zoo Drink Aid

Product: Zany Zoo Drink-Aid
Company: Kroger
Years: 1966-?

Sorry for the lack of posts lately - between work and me and my family moving into a new house, been pretty busy, so this is gonna be another quick one. Today I'd like to bring up Zany Zoo Drink Aid.

I gravitate towards packages for different reasons, and this product sticks out simply because the packaging is so unbelievably awesome. It's before my time, but I can picture this sitting on a shelf at the supermarket, me begging my mom to skip the Kool-Aid for once, and forget about the Funny Face Mix (don't worry, I'll get to it), but instead grab a few colorful packs of various fruity flavored animals.

Behold: Rhino Raspberry, Lion Lime, Turtle Tangerine, Cougar Punch, Ape Grape, Cheetah Cherry, and Ostrich Orange. These should be in my collection, but aren't. So they are moving to the top of my list.

Image by rasharoo

Image from traci*s retro

From the Beverage Aisle: Crystal Pepsi

Product: Crystal Pepsi
Company: PepsiCo
Years: 1992-1993

Marketed as a "Caffeine Free alternative to Normal colas", Crystal Pepsi stormed the market in the early 90's with Mega-Rock Star status. It was hyped for weeks before it's release, with it's world premier commercials shown during Super Bowl XXVII (that's 27 for you non-Romans out there). Unfortunately, it turned out to be just another one hit wonder in the era of Fad Foods. It was the soda that everyone had to have........once.
I tried it, and though it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough to try again either. I sort of had one of those mind/mouth reflexes where your brain thinks it knows the taste before you taste it, then you taste it and your mouth says to your brain "How about that, bitch? Not what you thought it was going to taste like at all, is it?", which for me, usually sends my brain into shut-down mode so it can regroup itself from the mouths insults. I believe I was in a coma for 6 days after trying Crystal Pepsi.

I'm pretty sure that people who remember Crystal Pepsi had a similar experience (Only trying it once, that is, not the whole week long coma thing....), which is why sales for CP (Crystal Pepsi, not Cerebral palsy) were way up, for exactly one year. After everyone tried it and never bought it again, sales plunged and they pulled the plug. Crystal Pepsi was dead. They should have seen this coming....I mean, it seemed pretty "Clear" to me. HA! see what I did there?

2 Little known facts (ok, little known facts to me):
- After the success of Crystal Pepsi, Pepsico actually had Crystal Tab on the market for a short time. I don't remember seeing this at all.
- Pepsi returned several months later with a reformulated citrus drink titled "Crystal From Pepsi", which was even more short lived then Crystal Pepsi

And the worst part of all was it forever chained everyones memory of Crystal Pepsi with this Van Halen song, which I'm pretty sure is the reason you never hear it anymore: