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AISLE 3 · CEREAL
Morning Funnies
by Ralston
Gone — poor sales and testers who found it far too sweet ended it in 1989, barely a year in. Ralston spent that stretch renting other people's characters for cereal, and this was the run's strangest license: not a cartoon, but the comics page itself.
The back of the box unfolded into a comics section — Beetle Bailey, Hägar, The Family Circus — so breakfast came with the funnies whether or not the paper landed on the porch. Inside was a very sweet cereal shaped like little smiling faces.
🧾 One more thingThe flap won Ralston an award for innovative packaging in 1988 and sank the product anyway: a kid could read every strip on a box in about five minutes, then face the same jokes every morning for the two weeks it took to finish the cereal.
🕯️ Shoppers also mourned