Big news for fans of video games, cereal, and amiibo figures (that describes me pretty well).  Super Mario Cereal is out in stores and even has amiibo functionality on the box!  Thanks to my family, I was able to get a box of it, so let’s take a look at it in more detail!

Here a bigger picture of the front of the box.  It’s weird that the logo is just at the top of the box, usually cereal box logos take up a good third of the package.  You can really tell this cereal is there to promote the Super Mario Odyssey game mostly.  Mario’s wearing his Cappy hat from the game, the background has the map from Odyssey, and even the airship is on the top right corner.  On the bottom they tell you that the cereal box is an amiibo you can use in Odyssey as well.

The back of the box has instructions on how and where to scan the amiibo, as well as some Mario related activities like a pipe maze, a trail to see what Yoshi will eat, and some super easy trivia questions.  Seriously, one of them is “Who is Mario’s brother?”  I think the hardest question is “What was Mario’s original name?”

Here is what the cereal looks like inside the bowl.  It has a slight fruity smell and taste, and the box even says it’s a berry flavored cereal.  Unfortunately, it has marshmallows in it as well.  I do not like marshmallows, I never have really.  Even as a kid, if I was at my friend’s house and we had Lucky Charms for breakfast, I’d take all my marshmallows out and put them in my friend’s bowl.  And then his mom would wonder why he was bouncing off the walls for the rest of the morning!

Here are all the pieces in the cereal.  You have star shaped oat bits and three different “power up marshmallows” as the box calls them.  Yeah they’ll power up you all right.  Power you up with sugar and you’ll be bouncing around like Mario!  I am impressed with the shapes.  I guess marshmallow technology has improved since I was a kid.  You have green 1up mushrooms and a yellow question block.  I thought the red marshmallow was a regular Super Mushroom at first, but every piece I took out was all misshapen.  I was like, “What’s the deal, are these supposed to be sirloin steak shaped marshmallows?”  But then when I turned one a certain way, it dawned on me.  “Oh, it’s Mario’s HAT!”

So what does the amiibo box do?  Well, if you scan it into Super Mario Odyssey, you can get some coins, and if you scan it when talking to the Roomba robot, you can get one Power Moon hint.  So nothing special.  Although they do call it a “Delicious amiibo” in the game.  I wonder if people will just bring their Switch to the grocery store and just scan it from there?

And that’s the Mario cereal!  It’s pretty cool, but I hear it’s also hard to find.  It came out at the beginning of December, and yet my family wasn’t able to get it at a store until after Christmas!  I’ve even heard that Target has already stopped selling them.  So I’m glad I was able to get a box when I did.  I just wish it didn’t have marshmallows, though.  Like I said, I hate marshmallows.  If I were making the Mario cereal, I’d make it be all red berry flavored M shapes with NO marshmallows.  Kind of like the Mr. T cereal.  Yeah, when I was a kid, there was a Mr. T cereal during the height of his popularity.  I think it was just the T shaped pieces from Alpha Bits cereal.  Don’t believe me?  Look it up on YouTube!  Or watch the first Pee Wee Herman movie if you want to punish yourself.  And then after the Mario cereal that I imagined was out for a while, they could add apple flavored green L shaped pieces and call it Mario and Luigi cereal!

I think it would be cool if other game characters got their own cereal as well.  I would like to see a pink strawberry flavored Kirby cereal or a Blueberry Bomber Mega Man cereal!  In the comments section, let me know what you think of the new Mario cereal, give me your ideas for other video game cereals, and share with me your cereal memories as a kid!

A Brief History of Video Game Cereals

This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten a video game related cereal.  So since I’ve always loved cereals and video games and have a good memory of them, I thought I’d run down some other video game cereals I remember when I was a kid.

Donkey Kong

When I was a kid, I didn’t like Donkey Kong that much.  I have more respect for it now, but when it first came out, I was only like, five years old and it was just a little too hard for me.  For some reason, I was able to wrap Pac-Man around my little head much better.  But Donkey Kong was still very popular and got a cereal.  They said it was barrel shaped pieces, but even as a kid, I was just like, “This is just Cap’n Crunch.”  While I do like the Cap’n Crunch characters, as they were made by the same folks who did Rocky and Bullwinkle (Jay Ward Studios), I never really liked the taste of the cereal that much.  So I didn’t eat Donkey Kong cereal that often as a kid.

Donkey Kong Junior

When I first saw DK Junior in arcades, I was excited because I thought it was a Donkey Kong game for little kids and it would be easier.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, but they did have DK Junior cereal and it turned out much better than the original DK breakfast.  DK Junior cereal had red round berry and yellow banana shaped pieces and reminded me of Trix.  I liked it a lot better, but I don’t remember seeing it in stores as long.

Pac-Man

Remember when I said I hated marshmallows?  Well I was so mad when Pac-Man cereal came out because it was basically a Lucky Charms knockoff.  Here was a cereal with my favorite video game character of all time, and they put marshmallows in it?  Yuck!  The marshmallows were originally yellow Pac-Man shaped pieces and red, orange, blue, and pink ghost shaped pieces.  I remember Pac-Man cereal being around a long time, well into the late 80s.  I think its longevity stems from the fact that they updated the cereal a few times during its run to coincide with whatever new Pac-Man game was out.  When Super Pac-Man came out, to add insult to injury they added Super Pac-Man shaped pieces that were twice as big as the regular marshmallows!  And then later they added pink and white Ms. Pac-Man marshmallows that looked really gross.

Nintendo Cereal System

At the height of the NES’ popularity, when Nintendo had a firm grip on all us kids, they had this cereal.  It had two smaller bags of cereal in the box.  One side was Super Mario and the other side was Zelda.  They were both fruit flavored, with the Mario side claiming to be citrus and Zelda berry, but they both tasted like Froot Loops to me.  They claimed the shapes were from the game, but they just looked like multicolored cat turds to me.  I did eat this cereal quite a bit as a kid because it had NO MARSHMALLOWS!  Yay!

Pokémon

By the time Pokémon cereal came out, I was already in college so I wasn’t as interested in eating a kids cereal then.  Plus it was also a Lucky Charms ripoff so I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway.

Yu-Gi-Oh

I don’t know if this counts since Yu-Gi-Oh was originally a card game, but they did have lots of video games about it, too, and it was made by game maker Konami.  And no the cereal was not called Yu-Gi-O’s.  I got it for my brother Jeff one time during the height of its popularity.  I don’t remember much about it except it was yellow pyramid shaped pieces for some reason.  And that’s all the video game themed cereals I know!  –Cary

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