Cereal Obsessions
Jeff
Okay let me be clear about how I want to set this up
Despite Leonard's yeoman work matching cereal mascots to greater arcana Mitch's system is way simpler. He goes to a grocery store cereal isle and he grabs as many cereal boxes as have sufficiently eye-catching box art, then repeats the process at a different grocery store to get other manufacturers' box art. We're talking Sir Grapefellow et al as shown in the general chat the other night. No attempt to match particular Waite-Rider images, no suits, not even much concern for getting the sizes consistent. Once he has the boxes, take them home and take scissors to them, cutting out the fronts of the boxes to made ersatz oversized cards.
The Sugar Smacks frog will have to be included in the mix.
Bill
The Sugar Smacks frog will have to be included in the mix.
One must give the Devil his due.
Michael
About a quarter of the way through Mitch's cutting up boxes, Mary-Lynn comes in from a day's work at SCANATE. She moseys over to the kitchen and the kitchen table and sees what Mitch is up to, noting with interest the waxy bags of sugary cereal tossed aside as he cuts away the box fronts. "Is... this what we're havin' for dinner?" she says holding up a bag of Cap'n Crunch. "Because I was honestly thinkin' Mexican."
Jeff
"There's a lot more waste product than I'd visualized," Mitch admits. "We could make some kind of, like, Rice Krispie Squares and bring them in for Pat and everybody. But anyway, no, Mexican sounds great and this all is me trying something different. The thing about the tarot cards is there's so much baggage. A given card means X and Y and Z, you can't have the X and the Y without the Z, you know? So you're reading into it. You're imputing. Sometimes that's good but I feel like I get better results when I try to do it more directly. Less of a filter between me and..." He trails off, gesturing.
"So anyway, I'm making a new deck. You think thirty is enough? I didn't think I was going to be able to find so many, not without going to, uh, a cereal specialty store or something... there's a lot, here. Vampires and airplanes and spacemen and wizards and chesty blonde cartoon ladies making bedroom eyes."
Michael
"Yeah, it's all... a little much. I grew up eating Cream of Wheat." She looks down at the various free plastic toys scattered on the table and picks up one of the already-cut box fronts, Crazy Cow from the game-inspiration thread. "Wild," she says, smiling dubiously and chuckling. Jibing more with what Mitch is after now, she seems to be digging the idea of a Cereal Tarot. "So yeah, less baggage with these for sure, but they kind of... bring their own baggage, a vibe. She holds up the Trix rabbit to look at him, then holds the box front like a Zener card to her forehead. "Feels right, though. I mean, Renaissance Europe had masons and explorers and kings and knights and grails and whatever in their Tarot. This kind of stuff does feel like America, right now. Colorful, crazy characters, who are prob'ly hopped up on all that sugar."
"What's the reading for?"
Jeff
"We're doing the cereal thing." Mitch shrugs. "We as in my main job, you know." He struggles to recall whether Mary-Lynn has heard 'SANDMAN' or 'URIEL,' maybe no to the former and yes to the latter? But right now that isn't relevant.
"There's a health food company that's maybe in league with, you know, the forces of darkness. Just came up, we were talking about it today. Beale Farm, you know anything? It's fine. I'm casting a wide net, to start with."
"Pick a card, any card."
Michael
Mary-Lynn cocks an eyebrow at all this, but it's mostly for show. Mitch senses some sort of... new energy level, some kind of equilibrium, has settled in with Mary-Lynn. Unfazed by the capital-w Weirdness of this past weekend, going to her 3-or-4-day a week job trying to do psychic tricks for Hal and Russ, and having seen an astral projection of the immortal Comte de St.-Germain on the top of Mount Shasta: she's seen it all at this point. Wondering more about oblique references to evil health food companies isn't worth the time it would take to do it. The world is Weird, and so is Mitch and his "main job." She pulls a "card" from the deck. (How do we want to do this, @Dr. Cronk? Do you have a spread in mind and/or some assigned querents? Once I know that, I'll roll the Oracle and then we can get to work.)
Jeff
Using the cardboard Mary-Lynn pulled as the "what it is" foundation for one of Mitch's usual four-card spreads: what it is, where it's from, where it's going, what it means.
Michael
What it is.
Frosted Mini-Wheats are marketed in several ways. There was a short stint of television advertisements featuring a Frosted Mini-Wheat biscuit with "split personalities;" the sweet (frosted) side and wheat (shredded grain) side, who argued over who was more popular. When the new MyPyramid debuted, launching the whole grain craze, Frosted Mini Wheats enjoyed another short-lived advertising stint as a fiber-conscious cereal. These advertisements involved a man walking around, asking "Have you had your fiber today?", then handing unsuspecting, confused people a bowl of the cereal.
Where it’s from.
The cartoon spokesman for Quake was a large (nearly menacing), muscular, broad-jawed man who wore a miner's helmet and a cape. It was implied that Quake the character and Quake the cereal both came from the center of the earth, which explains the miner's equipment and references to earthquakes. Early advertising distinctly showed that Quake had the ability to fly. That aspect of the character was later downplayed in favor of Quake's clever use of unconventional transportation such as whales or swimming horses.
— Quake Cereal, Mr. Breakfast
Where it's going.
Kellogg's cereal Honey Smacks, known for its cool frog mascot and its sweet, puffed wheat flavor, has long been a popular breakfast option for kids and adults alike (via World History Project). But did you know that Honey Smacks has not always been sold by the same name and that international markets still know it by another moniker? (via Characters of Advertising). Or how about the fact that this cereal tried out nearly a dozen other mascots before settling on the well-known Dig'em Frog?
— “The Untold Truth of Honey Smacks,” Mashed
What it means.
The name, immediately, was a bit curious, and its origins, perhaps fittingly, remain apocryphal. According to one story, it was so named because the end product was the 19th iteration of the cereal they were developing. Others say it was simply the 19th product Kellogg’s developed that year. Either way, Product 19 stuck, a workmanlike name that echoed what the cereal promised to do: provide a base of nutrition, nothing more or less.
— “The Long Death of Product 19, the Beloved Cereal You’ve Never Heard Of,” Atlas Obscura
(As usual, if Mitch wants to muse out loud as Sherlock to Mary-Lynn's Watson, I'm down. I can slip in intepretative details as you do.)
Jeff
"It seemed like it was worth trying." Mitch tries to hide his disappointment in the murkiness of the message. "Don't know how that Product 19 got in there. Uh, the Frosted Mini-Wheats, okay, I figured, you need something that's the baseline. Something that represents the most generic version of breakfast cereal there is. Something foundational, little bricks you could build into a pyramid or a ziggurat. So that one makes sense. I guess. We're talking about the whole big muddled thing, zoomed out to the point where all the fine detail is lost. There's a scope to this one, it's bigger than what went down in Colorado or at the convention, in Oakland or even up on Shasta; this isn't so geographically restricted.
"Where it's from: Quake, with cowboy power. 'Quake' has a double meaning in our line of work. It can mean the effects, or the aftereffects, of the Enemy's actions. They shake things up… the brains call them temblor events, sometimes." Mitch shrugs diffidently. "So maybe this is saying that it's all coming out of work the Enemy started. But I dunno, I don't like that reading. There's too much other stuff in the mix." He gestures to the Sugar Smacks before turning back to Quake.
"So I look instead at the cowboy. A real historical figure, the cowboy. From a certain place and time, and that place and time was the place and time that spawned the Pruist movement that resulted in Beale Farms that is somehow the center of the current set of problems. So maybe this card is just reminding me of that, that the vegetable-fat sugar-substitute weird advertising situation grew out of a 19th-century health food nut bar… But the thing that I actually think, looking at this box, is that it's all about the free toy inside. I dunno what that thing is, a mini movie viewer? Was there one in the box?" He glances at the little pile of plastic junk that was retrieved from the boxes as he cut them up.
"Yeah. So maybe the focus here should be on the ad campaigns. Messaging and propaganda and convincing people without them realizing they've been convinced of something. The Enemy is really into that stuff. Maybe the real concern is the marketing, and what's getting marketed is just the first thing that the marketers had handy to market." He frowns.
"That's three different reads on Quake. I like the last one most but maybe it's one of the others. "Or something I didn't see. Lord knows there's plenty of that." Mitch shakes his head and turns his attention to the Sugar Smacks. "This is Dig Em, the Sugar Smacks frog. He represents the Enemy. That one's unambiguous, at least. If there's one thing I'm sure of with all this cereal symbolism, it's that Dig Em is the Enemy. Putting him in the where-it's-going slot, that suggests that the cereal crisis is going to trigger… I dunno, quakes I guess. Bad things, down the line. The Enemy moving in from their little shithole outside the universe. Unless I'm really mistaken, this card is clear…
"Project 19. I never had Project 19… sorry, Product 19. It's cereal health food, right? Like Total and Special K? I tried Total once. Didn't seem very special. But it's pointing us back to the cereal industry, right? Food science, research and development, the Green Revolution, hybrid rice and shit like that. I dunno what that means in a big-picture way. Suggests that my it's-all-about-the-plastic-toy read on Quake was wrong, maybe.
"So… the food science, nutritional labs, hybrid rice industry came out of romantic 19th-century ideals about health food and is going to send the world into a downward spiral, a well with Dig 'Em at the bottom. Kind of grim."
Michael
Mitch's "oracle sense" feels like his first impressions are near 75%, 80% accurate. The overall trajectory looks bad. The Enemy is involved. But there are some finer nuances that Mitch ruminates on while Mary-Lynn has a deeper look. She points at the Frosted Mini-Wheats "card" and goes looking for the bag of shredded wheat biscuits.
She opens it up and takes out a half-sugary, half-plain biscuit. "'What it is,'" she says. "Two-sided. Sweet on one side, 'nutritious' on the other. Like a coin, both sides are part of the same... thing. 'What it is' makes me think it is, yeah, a basic building block, but there's two sides to it. Working towards the same goal. Very good-'n'-evil." She takes a bite out of the mini-wheat.
Mary-Lynn then looks at the Quake box. "I remember this one! It came out when I was in high school, along with the alien one, Quisp. My little brother loved Quisp. Wait, didn't this guy used to be a miner?" She points at the cowboy. "I don't remember him being a cowboy. He definitely had a miner's helmet. With a little flashlight on it, like Jo and Roger and Charley were wearing yesterday after they did that spelunking." Mitch thinks back... did he see any of those commercials before he left for Vietnam? Probably not. He's pretty sure he doesn't remember anything but the Quake cowboy. This annoys Mitch, considering he did remember Emperor Norton when no one else did. The little oracle voice tells Mitch to maybe put a pin in the Quake Effect, to investigate more about this... discrepancy in history and memory later. It's definitely giving Mitch.... uh, "quake" related vibes. This all doesn't necessarily conflict with the Beale Farms origins theory or the marketing theory of "where it's from" either, considering we're talking about a campaign only Mary-Lynn seems to remember, but the inclusion of a miner after all the hollow Earth stuff this weekend... again, annoying.
"What's the matter with the little frog? I think he's cute!" Mary-Lynn says. "Why is he the Enemy?" Well, even Mary-Lynn's reaction fits in with what Mitch knows about the kulullû: they can make themselves look innocent, harmless, and even lovable... and going back to that Sugar Smacks conversation, Archie called the animal-forms of the Irruptors "memetic residue," meaning maybe on a more profound level, "where it's going" is heading towards a resolution where something is not as it seems: something that looks innocent will end up being of the Enemy, or vice versa.
And the what it all means, Product 19. "I don't have a lot of strong opinions on this kind of cereal; you know, the Total, health food corn flakes thing," Mary-Lynn offers. "Kind of boring. I mean, they must have thought it sounded scientific, you're right, but what a drag at the breakfast table. Even the stenciled nineteen reminds me of, like, army surplus." Mitch feels pretty secure about his sorta-technocratic read of this one, which makes him wonder... if things are going to the Frog, but it all means a technocratic future where we're all numbers... well, that dialectic contains a whole 'nother interesting set of implications.
Jeff
Mitch stares at her for a few seconds. "Sorry," he says suddenly. "I was...my mind was elsewhere. Dig Em is the Enemy because, uh, I had this talk with Archie one time, it was kind of memorable, cereal was...not really involved, but present...anyway, Dig Em is the Enemy. Sometimes the Enemy looks like cute cartoon frogs. The Enemy is weird. The Enemy is a set of images and pictures and theme songs, wrapped up in a coat like... uh, you know, three kids in a trenchcoat, Vincent Adultman?" He sees that she doesn't get it.
"The Enemy acts like it's a thing, but it's not solid enough, which makes it hard to beat. God, I'm kind of all over the place, here. It's not important. I mean, it is, obviously, but... ugh." Before she can respond he changes the subject. "Quake's mascot being a miner instead of a cowboy makes sense. Like, a miner, he's in the earth, he's digging, he could encounter earthquakes, that'd be on-brand for him. Cowboy, I dunno, that's more tenuous. California and earthquakes, California and the west. Tenuous. Jeez."
Michael
Mary-Lynn looks at the Quake Cowboy "card" some more. "Where would you even go to find out which particular cartoon mascot appeared in old commercials from 1960-whatever? It's not like you can go look up old TV commercials at the library. They're so... disposable." Mary-Lynn thinks, "Hmm, maybe there's some trace of him in old print advertising, right? Or in the trade papers or something." Mary-Lynn looks troubled now, her brow furrowed in that way Mitch can tell happens when even her sense of the Weird is overwhelmed. Mary-Lynn catches Mitch looking at her with vague concern, then smiles, the brow-furrow disappearing. "You're gonna have to excuse me hon. It is bugging me that I'm pretty sure I remember things differently, but I've also got no way to prove it."
As for the first part of what Mitch said, about cute cartoon frogs and catchy jingles, Mary-Lynn does let it lie but Mitch can't help but think about what he said on first seeing Quake: the mini-movie-viewer, and "Messaging and propaganda and convincing people without them realizing they've been convinced of something. The Enemy is really into that stuff." The effortless replacement of one thing that's "always" been there for another. Cowboy for miner. And how much it's annoying Mary-Lynn, who is psychically aware and active and at least somewhat informed as to the reality war now, that things aren't as she remembers them. We know that if you get enough people to remember (or forget) a certain way, the power of belief can cause reality to change. Could you do that through a cereal box? Even with a brand that has no history and only appears to have a simple glyph that says essentially "eat more cereal"? Why is it important for Beale Farms (and for whomever owns them) to invoke Beale Downer, when it seems no one outside this little shitkicker town in the Central Valley remembers the Pruists? This is probably gonna be one of those oracles whose signs only seem clear once we're done with all this, Mitch thinks to himself.
Jeff
"Archie is the guy to ask about old ad campaigns."