A Completely Awful Breakfast
As many of you may know, I'm a big neo-revolutionary breakfast cereal mentality supporter, following in the footsteps of such philosophers as Professor Baron Von Mancock and Dr. Karl Malone. I feel that our society, as a whole, has embraced antiquated and outdated ideas of what breakfast "should be" for far too long now. Let's face it; we're living in a fast-paced, exciting, nonstop new world which includes high-tech things like the Internet, electric scooters, and battered women. Shouldn't our breakfast cereal mature and advance with our culture as well? Why should we be standing by and encouraging the old ideals of breakfast cereals which date back to the 1940s when we can instead advance forward in maturity, seamlessly progressing with technology? Let's put all those scientific microchips and floppy disks to use by creating wonderful new high-tech cereals which appeal to this generation of kids and old people who have the brain-damaged minds of kids. We need a cereal which doesn't only provide a fulfilling breakfast experience, but also takes the place of at least six other major meals throughout the day. Since I was unable to find any cereals which had both toasted oats and delightful chipped beef, I discovered the next best thing: three cereals which not only serve as a pseudo-complete breakfast, but could also take the place of each and every dessert required within a two-week radius. In this exciting episode of "A Completely Awful Breakfast," I will compare and contrast three winners of the "cereals which prove that chocolate should probably not be the crux of a well-balanced breakfast" award: Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! Choco Donuts, Kellogg's SMORZ, and Kellogg's Disney Chocolate Mud & Bugs.
Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! Choco Donuts
An Overview: The ol' Cap'n has been very busy in the last decade or so, pumping out hundreds of variations on his award-winning cereal which is not only shaped like a barrel, but tastes like one as well. His bouquet of bountiful flavors ranks somewhere in the millions now, and if grocery stores were to attempt to carry every permutation of the Cap'n Crunch brand, they'd probably go broke before the manager had a chance to call them fucking dumbasses for attempting to corner the market on shitty cereals. The local grocery store was selling the following brands of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereals:
Cap'n Crunch (original)
In addition to these fun and festive flavors, Quaker Oats is producing a limited-run series of "Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! Choco Donuts," which have cleverly substituted an image of a donut where the letter "O" in "DONUT" should be. That's one of those ingenious marketing strategies that we human beings couldn't even begin to possibly comprehend even if we used 100% of our total brainpower. However, the o-donut replacement works flawlessly, as can be seen in this dramatic reenactment of what happened in my brain when I was visiting the store:
ME: "Hmmm, I need to buy a chocolate cereal, but I don't know which one to purchase. What should I do?"
RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "Woooah there, looky at that! Choco Donuts! The 'O' is a graphical representation of the aforementioned chocolate donut! This appeals to me on many unique levels! Buy that! Buy that! Buy that!"
LEFT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "While that small chocolate donut drawing replacing the 'O' is indeed nice, I think we should instead take a big steaming dump right here in the middle of the store! It's the logical thing to do."
RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "No! No dumping! Choco Donuts! Choco Donuts!"
LEFT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "Shut up you! We're going to pull down our pants and just shit all over the place now. This is going to be great, you just watch. You'll thank me for this later, right side."
RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "No dumping! No dumping! Choco Donuts!"
ME: "I think I'll purchase these Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! Choco Donuts."
RIGHT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "HOORAY!!!"
ME: "Then I'll piss on the cashier."
LEFT SIDE OF MY BRAIN: "HOORAY!!!"
Description: As previously mentioned, Choco Donuts comes in a highly exciting package which features a donut in place of the letter "O". The Cap'n is displayed with his familiar vapid, insane, open-mouthed smile plastered across his face, pointing furiously at a bowl of Choco Donuts while two horrendously ugly children parade around in the background. According to the box, these creatures are supposedly from a show called "Rugrats Go Wild," which I assume is like those "Girls Gone Wild" videos that are sold during the commercials of "The Jerry Springer Show" and feature grown women getting naked and beating each other with rotary phones. There are two freakishly nauseating mutant spawn on the box, one of which looks like a 40-pound fetus undergoing chemotherapy and wearing an adult diaper, and the other resembling a monkey-human hybrid who has suffered buckshot wounds to her face and has Cthulu-esque tentacles protruding from her greasy orange eggplant skull. If that doesn't sell a breakfast cereal, I don't know what would. The box also demanded I "SEE THE MOVIE!", but I refused to do that on the grounds that it would require me to go out and possibly risk speaking to other human beings in public.
Exciting Nutritional Facts: There aren't any marshmallows or animal-shaped objects in this cereal. I assume this was an oversight on somebody's part at the Quaker Oats factory.
The Taste Experience: Choco Donuts taste like hundreds of tiny, crunchy cigarette butts marinated overnight in authentic New Jersey alleyway cardboard juices. I can't stress exactly how unremarkable this cereal tastes; it's like going to one of those local microbreweries and tasting a pale ale whose taste completely vanishes from your mouth the second you drink it. This lack of flavor makes you think you never had anything to drink in the first place, so you continually pound back beer after beer after beer until you reach a point where you've suddenly got flavor in your mouth, but it's rapidly coming up from your stomach and traveling in the wrong direction through your body. Choco Donuts probably won't make you throw up (unless you actually eat them), but they do taste like an absolutely boring compressed wad of unflavored, crunchy air. The tiny sprinkles on top are probably the most remarkable feature of this cereal, and that's not really saying much since they look like multicolored dandruff flakes which fell off some slackjawed, greasy blob of white trash manning the Choco Donuts assembly line while thinking about which of her 17 grubby kids is scheduled to buy her a carton of Marlboro Lights for the day.
The Good: The cereal only has 10 fat calories, as opposed to 10,000,000, which is an awful lot. Additionally, I did not find myself wanting to stab my throat after eating these, as the taste was completely gone in a matter of mere nanoseconds.
The Bad: Eating brown-colored paper and cardboard bits is probably much more economical and healthier for your digestive system, and it will additionally make those PETA people who dress up in furry costumes and pretend they're being killed by Uncle Sam happy. Also, I did not win the "Nickelodeon Rugrats Go Wild Island Getaway Sweepstakes" contest advertised on the back, which is probably for the better because if I saw those ass-ugly kids in the wild, I'd stab a spear through their heads and call a priest to exorcise the island.
Rating: 3 / 5
While I must congratulate all three cereals for tasting like utter ass, I must admit that my highly developed and picky taste buds have determined that modern science does not yet possess the technology to accurately produce a chocolate flavored cereal which does not make you pray for death upon tasting it. I guess my neo-revolutionary breakfast cereal mentality must stay at bay until Kellogg's finds a way to successfully turn "choco-beef" into a decent early morning treat.
HateHateGame!
Zack "Glizzle Edidizzle" Parsons here with a smoking new Hentai Game Review for a little torture device entitled "LoveLoveShow!". It's a wonderful game where you do puzzles to see banana rapes and then you try to slit your wrists with broken glass.
Go and sharemy suffering with this review!
This sounds deceptively non-horrible to those few of you in the audience who have endured as many "look and think" games as I have. Yet for all their stupid simplicity those games have never made me want to throw my computer monitor off of a cliff and then chase it down to my screaming, cursing death on the rocks below. "LoveLoveShow!" managed to accomplish this and so much more with the vast - I use the term with such venomous sarcasm that I'm actually pointing out I'm being sarcastic - number of enjoyable puzzles you can play to view cat women being raped with bananas.
An Overview: SMORZ! It has a "Z" at the end and is in all capital letters! SMORZ! The only possible way this cereal could be more hip was if they were to add a lowercase "e" before it and a ".com" to the end, making it "Kellogg's eSMORZ.com." SMORZ!!! Now that I look at the box, I'm not even sure if the correct title is actually "SMORZ," because a marshmallow is substituted for the "O" in SMORZ. See? Remember how I was talking about clever marketing pitches? Kellogg's knows the score! SMORZ!!! Some day in the distant future, after the Breakfast Wars of 2064, the letter "O" will become illegal and instead be substituted by a picture of a donut or marshmallow or wagon wheel or disturbingly large testicle. The front of the box is highly exciting and festive, displaying airborne cereal particles flying in every which direction and the word "SMORZ" being smashed in between two chocolate covered graham crackers. The blue background is not only soothing and highly calming, but additionally distracts me from the fact that there's some very disgusting white substance splashing up in the foreground, and it looks far too gooey to be milk. Eww.
Description: "Chocolatey, graham, and marshmallow cereal: S'mores with the family, S'mores with friends, S'mores around the campfire, S'mores in your backyard, S'mores at the beach, NOW SMORZ CEREAL ANYTIME!" Goddamn, that's a lot of fucking s'mores. I'm not exactly sure when the wonderful s'mores revival hit America or when the hell it's going to die down, but I'll be the first to applaud when it does. I've never been a raging s'mores fan, and the closest I've actually come to enjoying a s'mores was when I put a vanilla Moon Pie on the back of a filthy shovel and roasted it above a campfire over at my friend Dustin Raysek's house in junior high school. This cereal lacks any sort of viable advertising tie-in campaign, so there are no brightly colored naked animals parading around and demanding you watch their cartoon every weekday morning in between "The Highly Psychotic Dancing Children's' Show" and "Another Fucking Anime Robot Cartoon." This is probably one of the most unhip and boring cereals I've ever seen, as the back of the box features nothing but racially diverse children camping, holding sticks, and eating marshmallows. Now how out of touch are the people who designed this cereal? Who the hell goes camping these days? I've seen plenty of documentaries about the current generation of children, and I know for a fact there hasn't been a single kid camping since 1993. All kids do these days is play various Playstation 2 games and get arrested.
Exciting Nutritional Facts: SMORZ has 20 fat calories, nearly double that of the Choco Donuts, yet isn't twice as good. Also the ingredients are printed in a much smaller font size, perhaps indicating that Kellogg's is trying to cover up a dark and sinister secret of some kind. I think if you actually pick up a magnifying glass and read the ingredients, you'll discover that "The Ark of the Covenant" is the number 17 ingredient, which explains why my face proceeded to melt off after I opened the package.
The Taste Experience: Bad. Very bad. This could possibly pass as authentic s'mores if you live in an alternate reality where the word "s'mores" means "rectangular pouch of acid used to eat the paint off international oil rigs." After eating a mouthful of these brown dirtballs, the roof of my mouth began to taste like the time I licked the subway rail in Amsterdam. I didn't taste any chocolate, I didn't taste any graham, and I sure as hell didn't taste any marshmallow, even when I was chewing the individual marshmallow bits. Perhaps I was just spoiled growing up with glorious Pac-Man Cereal, but these marshmallows were just plain rotten. When I eat a marshmallow, I expect a few things. First of all, I expect it to be really sweet. I want to feel the sugars scraping against the enamel of my teeth and rubbing all the finish off them, preferably to the bone. I want to feel the pain and agony of the sugary sweetness; I do NOT want to feel the pain and agony of a million man-made chemicals burning millions of tiny holes through my gum line. I forgot what all the other things I expect out of a marshmallow are, but that's probably for the best at this point.
The Good: Nobody was forcing me to eat this crap, so after the third spoonful I threw it out my window and burned my house down and moved to a new house under a new assumed identity.
The Bad: The memories of this cereal will haunt me until the day I die.
Rating: 1 / 5. The only thing keeping it from being a 0 / 5 is the fact that the box is a really pretty shade of blue and reminds me of the YMCA bathroom where I lost my virginity to my basketball camp counselor, Ed.
An Overview: Kids love mud! Kids love bugs! Why not combine mud, bugs, and two misshapen cartoon mascots together to form the ultimate breakfast cereal? I'll tell you why not: because it's a dumb idea. The characters from the hit Disney movie "The Lion King" gracefully decorate the box, encouraging children of all ages to purchase this cereal and provide them with the home they never had. This cereal is one of the three Disney-brand Kellogg's crossovers, which include "Kellogg's Magix" and "Hunny B's." The Magix cereal revolves around what appears to be a black magic-weilding sorcerer Mickey Mouse reanimating a pile of deceased cereal particles, and Hunny B's is promoted by Winnie the Pooh, a cartoon character who has not appeared in anything since 1952. Maybe I'm ignorant to the ways of the marketing world, but I can't imagine Winnie the Pooh being the fulcrum which tips scales in the favor of purchasing a cereal. I did an informal poll of the children trapped in my guest bedroom and over 96% of them had never even heard of Winnie the Pooh before! Why did Disney waste time and money reviving an unknown, deceased spokesperson to pimp out their latest generic twist on "oats and marshmallows" cereal? If they're going to parade around unpopular and non-charismatic cartoon spokespeople to sell their shit, they might as well get the ugly characters from Doonesbury to sell some kind of rancid crap called "Liberal Cock N' Ball Bullshit Cereal."
Description: As you can probably guess from the name of the cereal, this breakfast treat adheres to a theme of both mud and bugs. You can tell this by the way the marshmallows are in the shape of what appears to be cars, a pregnant version of the letter "E," flaming automotive carriages, and an orange thing which resembles one of those Lightcycles from "Tron." Mud and bugs, folks! The non-marshmallow bits take the form of puffy brown balls which look exactly like mud if you come from a planet where mud looks like puffy brown balls. The box challenged me to "unscramble this nest of letters and spell out the two words that stand for Timon's no worries, problem-free philosophy," to which I replied "fuck you" and slammed the box shut. You know what Kellogg's and Disney? If I wanted to rack my brain and do some heavy-duty thinking in the morning, I'd do my goddamn taxes while eating. You've got one job and that job is to provide a wretch-free dining experience that should hopefully aid in curing a hangover. I'm not going to play your little mindgames and answer your fiendish riddles while trying to remember which hole I'm supposed to put the spoon in while eating. You can just go to hell, Disney. Also I never liked Winnie the Pooh, and if you look deep and hard into your heart, you'll discover that you never did either.
Exciting Nutritional Facts: This cereal is supposedly "made with whole grain and 11 vitamins and minerals," which is like 11 more than SMORZ, whose primary ingredient is actually bugs and dirt.
The Taste Experience: Below average. I know that I probably shouldn't expect that much from a cereal that features airbrushed jungle animals cramming sweaty insects into each others' mouths, but what can I say; I'm an eternal optimist at heart. Kellogg's Disney Chocolate Mud & Bugs lacked the soul-destroying pestilence of SMORZ, but the gross taste that it packed didn't dissipate as fast as Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! Choco Donuts. The marshmallows were less terrible than the bullshit the scientists at the SMORZ scraped off the bottom of their pickup trucks and crammed into a box, but they weren't nearly as good as the marshmallows which didn't exist in the Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch's OOPS! Choco Donuts. Maybe this was because the cereal is "naturally sweetened," which is secret code meaning "probably does not taste good."
The Good: This is probably the best "bugs and dirt"-themed breakfast cereal I have ever tasted.
The Bad: I think the big brown boar on the front of the box was giving me the panty-eyes.
Rating: 2 / 5
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