We Have A Halloween Cereal Problem

It's Halloween season, now, and if you've taken your keen consumer eye into certain participating supermarket chains, you may have noticed the (for a limited time only!) return of the familiar monster-themed General Mills cereals of yore: Count Chocula, Franken-Berry, and Boo-Berry.

On the whole, this is a pretty welcome annual development: If nothing else, it increases the seasonal atmosphere, which could be a drag if we were talking about pretty much any holiday except for Halloween, which absolutely cannot be overdone under any circumstances. Halloween pretty much is immune to over-commercialization, because it is just the silliest and dumbest and most fun thing: There is no nominally higher purpose for it than to be a garish, ridiculous, spooky blast, and by gum, if a vampire-themed breakfast cereal can make it more enjoyable, or more ridiculously enjoyable, that neither dilutes nor corrupts nor distracts from the reason for the season.

This is to say, the monster cereals are good. In aggregate. In specific terms, though, there is a problem. The problem is: Boo-Berry.

Listen. Boo-Berry tastes OK. As blueberry-flavored cereals go, it's ... actually, I think maybe it's the only blueberry-flavored cereal. Are there other blueberry-flavored cereals? And why? Blueberries aren't even all that good, even among the berries. In any case, Boo-Berry tastes reasonably and pleasantly blueberry-like, and it does not obliterate the roof of your mouth to any exceptional degree.

Also, as a play on words, Boo-Berry is pretty good—closer to the phonetic mark, anyway, than Franken-Berry, which sounds nothing like strawberry. The problem is, Franken-Berry came first. It debuted in 1971, along with Count Chocula; Boo-Berry arrived two years later (the since-discontinued Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy—the worst name in cereal history—followed along in '74 and '87, respectively), when the "-Berry"-based Halloween cereal name turf was already pretty damn well burnt up.

You see the problem here. We simply cannot allow two Halloween cereals with "-Berry" as the basis for their joke names. There are all kinds of things that cereals can taste like; if you are making a series of spooky Halloween cereals with punny names, and one of them already is called Franken-Berry, I'm very sorry, but you can't just make a blueberry-flavored cereal and call it Boo-Berry, even if that's a pretty good-ass ghost-and-fruit pun.

Well, here at Foodspin, we are nothing if not dedicated to solving the world's food challenges. And so, here are some suggestions for alternative spooky Halloween cereals to replace Boo-Berry. Try to keep an open mind as you review them.

Raisin Brrrraaaaains

Skel-Oat-ons

Un-Life

Brrrraaaaain-ola

Boo-slix

Grave Nuts

Sexy Puffed Wheat

Ghoul Lean

Werewheat

Alpha-Bats

Frosted Michael Myers

Shredded Brrrraaaaains

Honey Nut Brrrraaaaains

Milk & Honey Original Brrrraaaaains Mix

Cinnamon Ghost Munge

Art by Sam Woolley