Quipu

The Jetsons Cereal

Overall Rating: 46

A very half-hearted attempt to exploit what I would have thought a thoroughly un-exploitable TV series. Unremarkable in the extreme.

Image from the Institute collection

Appearance

This one explodes on the launch pad. Once again Ralston Purina (the Cat Chow people!) try to get cute in a medium that really resists complicated cleverness. Not even the simple crescent and star shapes this product attempts come out well. And the package Sucrophile sampled contained several great horking lumps of dessicated sugar-corn syrup-apple mixture in which deformed bits of cereal were embedded like roaches in amber. How’d you like a big lump of that as part of your Balanced Breakfast, kiddies?

Texture and Taste, Dry

In trying to be all things to all people, this product is made of wheat, oat, corn and rice flours. The result is something that might have been light enough to make innocuous snacking material―except the pieces are too small to be easily picked up. There’s little in the way of crunch, and the mouthfeel is like Stein’s Oakland: there’s no there there. It’s gone almost before you realize you’ve bitten down.

Texture and Taste, With Milk

What taste? The ingredients list claims there are real dried apple bits with cinnamon in this product, but you’d have to have a gas chromatograph to detect any. What little flavour there is when milk is added seems to be coming from malt. Since many sweetened cereals contain malt, there’s absolutely no reason to eat this instead of just about any other product. The crunch (what there is of it) holds up reasonably well in milk, but that alone is not enough to recommend this product for anything save possibly an emergency substitute for cat-litter.

Conclusion

I never liked “The Jetsons” as a TV series. The spin-off cereal is exactly like the animation that inspired it: endlessly repetitive, with neither character nor a single original moment to justify your spending any time at all with it. When all you can say about a cereal is that at least it’s sweeter than Kaboom!, then you’ve got problems. Pass the Dino Pebbles, please. [November 1992]