Upsetting Day: Apple Jacks Mascots (Patreon)

At some point, Western society decided that children needed to consume industrially extruded grain puffs liberally coated in corn syrup for breakfast. Then the "mad men" of advertising got to work, directing enormous amounts of time and human effort which could have been spent on literally any other pursuit towards developing means of convincing children to pester their parents for one of these nutritionally-bankrupt, industrially-produced "foods" over its peers. Early efforts were…

… not great. But eventually, these speed and alcohol-abusing heroes figured out what worked. Kids love talking toucans, cartoon pirates, and enormous tigers with daddy dom energy. Most brands settled on one or two enduring mascots as the cereal wars of the '80s and '90s cooled and the great superpowers coalesced into their recognizable forms. But some never really found their Tony. Cookie Crisp had a gnome, then a cop and robber, then a dog, then a wolf. Honeycomb had a cowboy, then a hell monster, then a feral child. Still, no stalwart of the cereal aisle has had a longer running or more upsetting identity crisis than Apple Jacks.

As a child of the [decade redacted], I wasn't even aware Apple Jacks had a mascot. The commercials I grew up with eschewed animated characters in favor of edgy youth appeal a la Bubble Tape. They set their cereal-loving, floppy-haired protagonists against authority figures who questioned their love for the product given its conspicuous lack of apple flavor.

I'm trying to get better. I'm spending more time offline. I'm taking walks in the park. But God help me, all I can think when I look at that still from a 1996 ad spot for pre-diabetes is "this is what they took from you." We used to just sit in our suburban garage eating Apple Jacks with our multiethnic friend group. Now, no cereal could hope to activate our long-dormant dopamine receptors and we would be glad to pay $500 a month to live in that garage if it came with a space heater and a father's explicit verbal approval. Woke has taken everything from us.

But Apple Jacks did have a mascot back when they first hit store shelves — a grinning, hat-wearing first draft of an idea who claimed that his mineral-fortified o's would help children defend themselves against aggressors. Seriously, the tagline was "a bowl a day keeps the bullies away" and the commercials portrayed kids getting juiced up on the stuff and flying into a sugar-fueled battle frenzy against their rivals.

I know what you're thinking: "but what if bullies get a hold of their own supply of performance-enhancing cereal?" Rest easy, friend. The spot ends with Apple Jack assuring viewers that the product will not be sold to bullies. Presumably, the retailing grocer is responsible for running a visual assessment of each family's children, with an eye towards poor dental structure, nonstandard hat positioning, and general slovenliness.

Sorry, chubby rural non-bully Jugheads. But in all honesty, you're getting the better end of the bargain here. It's unlikely that Apple Jacks ever gave anyone the mental or physical fortitude to resist oppression, and even if it did, would it be worth staring at this grim mask of death every morning as you reached for the milk?

Someone got paid for coming up with that in the 1960s. He cut a smile into an apple and stuck two pieces of cereal on it and made enough money to buy a multi-story house with a garage in a nice neighborhood. After he retired and moved to Florida, his child would inherit that house. And then his grandchild would rent a basement apartment for $1500 a month because the family sold the goddamn Apple Jacks house during a historic market low and now some guy lives there who filled it with pinball machines you can see through the window every time you pass by.

Deep breath.

I should probably point out that the Wikipedia page for Apple Jacks has the magical combination of copious missing citations and being way too long for an article describing a breakfast cereal that's mostly sawdust.

But we've already seen Apple Jack. We can confirm his existence. And the Apple Car?

Well, I'm glad that the maniac who wrote the Apple Jacks Wikipedia page pointedly didn't describe this as a mascot, because there's no universe in which it is. This is some Busytown shit minus the cute little worm driver. The more I look at it the more pissed off I get.

It's a car with cereal for wheels, but it's also a bowl full of cereal and milk with a steering wheel emerging from the depths. Is the driver meant to slosh around in the bowl like a pervert? No, wait, there are motion lines on the wheels — which again, are cereal. If we're taking the metaphor seriously, then the only possibility is that this is meant to be a self-driving car full of tires and I guess gasoline careening down the road until it crashes into a school bus, destroying countless children. Which, hey, I guess is a pretty good characterization of Apple Jacks after all.

Fuck the Apple Car. I'm glad it's dead.

Who's next?

I like that whoever wrote this implied that the Apple Jacks Kids were violently deposed in 1992.

No. These are barely mascots. If my five year old drew them I'd say, "honey, where did you come from? Is this a Buffy season five type situation? Because I cannot afford to support a child, much less one who draws like a bonobo trying to sketch the Bonobo Knife Killers for a crime-solving zookeeper before it bleeds out from its knife wounds."

So to recap: Apple Jacks was first promoted by a living nightmare who promised vengeance against those who wronged its consumers, then a car, then two unspeaking child-shaped smears, and then, finally, nobody. But our story doesn't end there. In the early 2000s, Apple Jacks went back to the anthropomorphic well and hauled up a big sloshin' bucket of broad racial caricature.

Say hello to CinnaMon! Yes, he talks exactly how you'd expect. But there's a twist. A foil. A Moriarty to CinnaMon's Ras Trent-ass Sherlock Holmes.

See, whenever someone pours a bowl of Apple Jacks, CinnaMon and Bad Apple race to leap into the milk first. Bad Apple resorts to traps and tricks, but always comes up short. And that, children, is why Apple Jacks don't taste like apples.

Even after spending most of the '90s running ads about the taste of their cereal, Kellogg's was evidently still pretty insecure about the subject. Instead of just changing the name or flavor of the cereal, or just, I don't know, ignoring the ludonarrative dissonance because nobody actually seemed to care outside of the universe of their own advertisements, they invented a whole fucking Rudyard Kipling-esque just-so story to explain it. And before you ask, yes, Bad Apple did CinnaMonface one time.

He also once imprisoned CinnaMon and left him for dead, but that turned out to be a dream sequence so it isn't Apple Jacks canon.

Still, this state of affairs obviously wouldn't fly even in the early 2000s. And so, in response to complaints, Kellogg's once again modified the Apple Jacks mascots…

…by erasing Bad Apple from the timeline. Why? Because non-profit organizations claimed that by depicting their apple character as malicious, Kellogg's was discouraging children from eating fruit. And so CinnaMon continued on solo for a time until Apple returned, now purged of his wicked ways. Then this happened.

CinnaMon and Apple were fused during a skydiving accident, presumably because Kellogg's couldn't get the rights to Cronenberg's back catalog. They made a new shape of cereal to commemorate this atrocity, which, fittingly, is identical to the logo of the Phyrexians, the Hellraiser-esque monsters in Magic: The Gathering who want to assimilate all life in the universe into hideous yet sensual golems of flesh and steel.

This wasn't a one-off deal, either. Kellogg's made several commercials in what the YouTube video I found compiling all Apple Jacks ads refers to as "Season 2A (Fusion Arc)." Apple and CinnaMon deal with their situation pretty well actually, racing to the bowl in their chimeric, anguished form. It's like that movie Together, except they didn't edit out a gay couple for the Chinese market.

They eventually separate themselves in an extremely unsatisfying, handwavey way — they order a machine online, then jump into the cardboard box it arrives in and leapt out as distinct entities. It's on the same level as Poochie returning to his home planet. Some executive obviously loathed the direction the creative team had taken the narrative of their cereal ads in, fired everyone, and started writing them himself.

Because after this, we enter the "Friendly Rivalry" era, in which both CinnaMon and Apple make it into the bowl at the end of the ads.

This has all of the hallmarks of an unskilled writer. The first thing you learn in writing school is that you don't have Wile E. Coyote make friends with the Roadrunner. To do so would be to throw off the balance of the universe, resulting in serious ramifications.

Thus, Apple and CinnaMon were catapulted into our reality. Nothing much really changed for them, except that they now existed in a universe with other, non-sentient fruit, and Apple tried to fuck them.

What is it we're doing here, again? Trying to sell cereal? I feel like we've lost our way. But hey, what if we abandoned the concept of apples entirely and just made a cereal called Cinnamon Jacks? There's no God here to stop us anymore.

Sadly, as JustPhillips170's video notes, woke took this from us.

And Kellogg's wasn't done. They finally stripped both Apple and Cinnamon of their identities, converting them into eternally smiling cereal drones and banishing them from our screens. They now appear only on boxes of Apple Jacks, though whether any trace of their original selves still resides within the depths of these grinning homunculi is an open question.

So ends the saga of the Apple Jacks mascots. Apples to apples, mon to mon. Due to the passage of linear time, the children who grew up with the earliest incarnations of Bad Apple and CinnaMon are now aged enough to be the butt of the joke in the '90s ad campaign, which one spot made explicit.

In the inestimable millennia of the future, all possible Apple Jacks mascots shall be born, live, and die. Such mascots as we have dared not dream of will flit across the stars. And through it all, a voice resounding across history, echoing at the very edges of the collective unconscious: "have we tried an Apple Car yet?"

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