Quipu

KABOOM

Overall Rating: 21

An early-morning disaster combining the colour sense of a Shriners parade with the delicate sweetness and good taste of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Feed this to children you really don’t like.

Image from the Institute collection

Appearance

At last: a cereal that looks worse than Teenage Mutant Ninja Cereal. Oddly though, Kaboom makes the same mistake as TMNT does, attempting to form an oat-based cereal into what it purports are clown heads. These have the same unfortunate resemblance to cadavers as the mock-Turtles do, with the added disadvantage of a colour palette that seems to have been borrowed from an Iraqi army surplus store. Where the Turtles were satisfied with just a bilious green, Kaboom explodes in a whole bunch of muddy, murky colours that an extremely generous (or half-blind) consumer might mistake for purple, green, orange, yellow, etc. These colours appear to have been mixed with diesel oil to achieve that hard-to-get dull, appetite-suppressing finish.

Texture and Taste, Dry

Eurgh. There’s crunch galore here, but so what? You can get great resistance chewing a mouthful of raw oats. This stuff has all the excitement of cat-kibble (with none of the health benefits). And there’s no sweetness to distract you from the banality of the taste and texture, either. This is the least-sweetened breakfast cereal we’ve encountered since we stopped eating Corn Flakes. No, take that back: Corn Flakes are sweeter.

Texture and Taste, With Milk

Even worse. There’s no heightening of the bland flavour, and the absence of sugar is only made all the more obvious. The stuff just sits there, and since it’s made of oats and then apparently kiln-dried, it doesn’t even have the decency to sog once the milk goes on. Instead, these dead-and-rotting clown heads just float there, brainlessly grinning their rictus grin and making you wonder why you don’t just chuck it and go out for bacon and eggs.

Conclusion

General Mills has always been the Chrysler (FIAT-Chrysler? American Motors? Studebaker?) of the kids cereal business, but this stuff marks a nadir even for their halfhearted attempts. You’d be better off eating muesli―no, you’d be better off eating gravel. [August 1992]