Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs

0% nutrition, 100% fun — guaranteed or your money back!

Peter: (reading a box of cereal) Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar... Flakes.

Jason: (holding up bowl) Now THAT'S a cereal!

— FoxTrot

In fiction, breakfast cereals marketed as "for kids" are invariably loaded with ridiculous amounts of sugar and contain virtually no nutritive value whatsoever. This stands in contrast to the cereals marketed for adults, which are depicted as being healthy — and about as tasty as eating the cardboard box they came in.

Common ingredients of these ridiculously-sugary kid cereals include:

• Sugar as its primary ingredient.
• Doing something when combined with milk (making popping noises, changing the milk's color, etc.).
• A box with loud, vibrant colors (reds, blues, yellows), designed to draw a child's attention faster than a television set on Saturday morning.
• A name that sounds exciting and action-packed (why settle for a box of "chocolate frosted flakes" when you can have "chocolate frosted sugar BOMBS!")?
• More sugar.
• A cartoon mascot (frequently a Talking Animal who's subject to a Cereal Vice Reward).
• Ads that depict said mascot engaged in exciting, wild adventures.
• Ads that claim the cereal is Crunchtastic or make similar unverifiable claims.
• Ads that make claims that are technically true, but irrelevant to the product's quality.
• Ads featuring the cereal Adjacent to This Complete Breakfast.
• Hidden toys or trinkets in the bottom of the bag, or mail-in offers for toys or trinkets.
• And even more sugar.

Given all this, it's a mystery why parents even buy these cereals for their children in the first place. Perhaps they're just capitulating to the kids' demands. They may have a nostalgic connection if they ate it, or a similar cereal, in their youth.

It was Truth in Television a few decades ago. It started rather innocuously — back then, you had to add sugar to your cereal yourself, and pre-sweetened cereals would proudly advertise that they already added the sugar for you (starting with Sugar Crisp in 1949). Then advertisers discovered kids' natural sweet tooth and started targeting them, giving us many many brands of proudly sugary cereals, some of which you might recognize today (e.g. Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Frosted Flakes, or Sugar Smacks) without the "sugar" bit. By The '70s, they were alarmingly sugary; a 1978 study of 78 different brands of cereal found that 11 had a sugar content over 50%^note The worst was Super Orange Crisp, with 70.8% sugar content. That led to health concerns and a push to make cereal healthier. The upshot is that while modern cereals certainly advertise themselves this way, and they're still pretty sugary, they also tend to be fortified with extra vitamins and minerals (although every cereal does that these days).

See also Tie-In Cereal and Unfortunate Ingredients.

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Examples

Advertising

• There's an ad for Fiber One cereal where a couple convinces their son that the product is one of these by covering the name and calling it "Number One".

Comic Books

• In one Sam & Max: Freelance Police strip, "The Beast from the Cereal Isle", all cereals are like this, with only one exception: In the oldest corner are brands so old that "they contain wheat" (and not as an allergen warning).
• The cereals Candy Coated Zips, Sugar Biffos, Chocolate Flakes, and Healthy Cereal return from the cartoon into Jem and the Holograms (IDW) comic. The Misfits prefer the sweet cereals while the Holograms prefer Healthy Cereal.

Fan Works

• The Bolt Chronicles: Penny's only professional acting experience prior to starring in the "Bolt" TV show is a couple of appearances in commercials for Choco-Honey Blasters cereal, where she utters the product's catchphrase, "Mmmmm — mud milk!" Referenced in "The Pilot."
• In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Little Sister Smurf Lost", Greedy introduces the Smurfs to a sweetened cereal concoction that he created with the help of one of Handy's inventions, calling it Smurfberry Crunchies (a nod to the real-life Smurfberry Crunch cereal marketed by Post in the early 1980s).

Films — Animated

• "Woody's Roundup", the Show Within a Show in Toy Story 2, is sponsored by Cowboy Crunchies, "the only cereal that's sugar-frosted and dipped in chocolate".
• Incredibles 2: Dash's favorite cereal is actually called Sugar Bombs, though his dad quickly replaces them with (presumably healthier but blander) Fiber-O's.

Literature

• Since the Goodkind family owns so much in the Whateley Universe, it's no surprise that Overclock's favorite cereal is Honey Nut Goodios. He's a bit obsessive about them. In "Ayla and the Great Shoulder angel Conspiracy" he decides to drive a girl insane and kill all of her friends because she ate the last of the Honey Nut Goodios in the school cafeteria.
• Dave Barry cited these as an important part of his childhood, citing a Long List that culminated with "Kellogg's Big Box O'Sugar With No Cereal In It".
• In Stephen King's Cujo, the Sharp Cereal Company puts out a product called Red Razberry Zingers, designed for kids who want something "halfway between cereal and candy." This being a Stephen King novel, the red dye leaves a toilet bowl full of what looks like blood.
• DC Super Hero Girls: Wonder Woman mentions that one of her weaknesses is her favorite colorful, sugary cereal.
• In ''Aunt Erma's Cope Book" by Erma Bombeck, her kids are arguing over which cereal to buy. One wanted 'Chock Full of Soggies' which turn your teeth purple, and another wanted 'Jungle Jollies' which had no nutrition whatsoever. This followed a purging of several other lingering, half-eaten cereals, including 'Fortified Blinkies', 'Captain Sugar', 'Heap of Honey', and 'Cavity Krispies'.^note  This was actually condensed from a mid-1976 installment of Bombeck's own syndicated newspaper column, "At Wit's End".
• In the picture book What Are You So Grumpy About?, one of the questions is "Did your mom and dad forget to buy your kind of cereal, so you had to eat 'grown-up' cereal?" In the illustration, the kid cereal is labeled "Chocolate Frosted Honey-Glazed Pre-Sweetened Marshmallow Nodules" (with a picture of a hyperactive kid on the front), and the grown-up cereal is labeled "100% Organic Whole Grain Wheat and Millet Food Substance: A Regular Food," from "Boring Acres" and with the labels "No Sugar, No Fat, No Fun."

Live-Action TV

• The Brothers García has the cereal 'Honey Frosted Bits & Pieces', though the gag is that it's the father who eats it.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawn is seen pouring from a box of the non-chocolate "Sugar Bombs".
• In Dinosaurs, the family's kid-friendly cereal is known as "Sugar Frosted Booboo Bears". Millions of years before bears existed.
• The Munsters Today episode "A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Cereal" had Herman being forced to endorse an unhealthy breakfast cereal called Licorice Puffs. Eventually, his family encourages him to reveal the truth to the public that the cereal has no nutritional value at all and shouldn't be eaten by anyone.
• In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Miles, a local conspiracy theorist, declines Sabrina's breakfast offer, citing government processing. He does, however, make exception for "the cereal that turns the milk purple".
• In a classic Saturday Night Live film short, John Belushi is unaccountably proving an Olympic track and field star, rather like a hippo being a gazelle. The punchline is a commercial where he endorses a Wheaties-like cereal, but the product is "Little Chocolate Doughnuts," Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  Belushi: I logged a lot of miles training for that day ... and I downed a lot of doughnuts. Little Chocolate Doughnuts.
• The Business Law episode of the educational television show Standard Deviants TV references coupons for the fictional "Honey-Coated Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Rockets".
• One reason Pawnee, Indiana of Parks and Recreation is the fourth fattest city in the nation is that the town is headquarters of the Sweetums company. In one episode they release "NutriYum Bars", which are marketed as a healthy snack...but contain so much sugar that a single bar is four servings, and the ingredients list high-fructose corn syrup and corn syrup separately. Eating them makes the entire cast hyperactive.
• The IT Crowd Maurice Moss states he had "Smarties Cereal" for breakfast. It turns out it wasn't actual cereal but just Smarties in a bowl with milk.

Music

• Gorillaz song Superfast Jellyfish focuses on one such fictional, chicken tasting, cereal;
  "Yo, pretty packages of frosted delights
  Look it comes with a toy I like that
  I wanna number four, number six, and throw in a plastic donut
  Just enjoy the gritty crunch that tastes just like chicken
  Wrappers of many bite sizes
  Man, are you freaking blind
  That's a rock
  All mixed in the potful
  Momma's homemade from scratch, well not quite"

Newspaper Comics

• The original "Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs" comes from Calvin and Hobbes, where the cereal is sweet enough to choke on, yet Calvin proudly eats multiple bowls a day and collects the box tops for prizes. Sometimes he even adds more sugar, thinking the cereal is "kinda bland" without it. One strip implies that "Buzzy the Hummingbird" is the cereal's mascot and also suggests that it's heavily caffeinated.^note Specifically, it's said to have "100% of the daily allowance of caffeine", which probably means there's about 400 milligrams worth, either in one box or one serving.
  • When he's trying to eat enough boxes (four) to send away for a CFSB propeller beanie, it proves too much even for him, and he tries to enlist help from Hobbes and his dad. Neither are willing, and one of the strips shows Calvin sitting with a bowl and box in front of him going "Man, I'm earning this."
  • There's also a variety with marshmallow bits too, but Calvin's mom won't let him eat it.
  • In one strip, Calvin eats so much of this cereal, he literally starts vibrating due to the sugar overload. Even worse/better, he's completely unaware of it, although in one strip he thinks that his mom was moving in slo-mo.
    Calvin's mom: Caaaaaaallllllvvinnnnn, thaaaaat's eeenouughhh.
    Calvin: (to Hobbes) M-mom s-sure was m-movingg st-strangellly t-today.
  • In one strip, Calvin reveals that he likes mixing the Sugar Bombs with soda instead of milk, presumably whenever his parents aren't watching.
• The subject comes up occasionally in FoxTrot, usually to contrast against Mom's own health-craziness Running Gag:
  • When out shopping, Jason tries to find a cereal that Mom will approve — one whose first ingredient is not sugar. Jason cites a box where the last ingredient is sugar — actually, sugar was its only ingredient.
  • Another strip had Peter reading from a cereal box, "Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar..." and so on, finishing with, "...Sugar, Sugar, Sugar... Flakes."
    Jason: [holding bowl up] Now that's a cereal!
  • A third has Jason admitting that while his "Sugar-Frosted Honey Flakes" are gross enough to turn his milk into purple ooze, he still eats six bowls every morning to collect the glow-in-the-dark dinosaur stickers that's in the boxes. Paige, reading the ingredients, remarks, "Actually, I'm a little surprised you don't glow in the dark by now." The choice of the color purple is likely a direct homage to Calvin and Hobbes, in which Calvin has said, "I won't eat any cereal that doesn't turn the milk purple."
  • In yet another series of strips, Jason's cereal itself glowed in the dark, and when Peter ate it (because they were out of Wheaties) it made him sick. At first, he was surprised that one bowl of cereal made him so sick; then he read the ingredients and was glad it only made him that sick.
  • In yet ANOTHER strip, the kids have nothing but a bowl of sugar for breakfast and claim it STILL doesn't have as much sugar as most cereals. There are certain plants that are actually sweeter than sugar cane (the source of sugar). But that's probably not what they were referring to.
  • In one strip that is posted the Monday after Easter, Paige is wondering what to take from her candy basket first. Andy holds up a box of cereal and suggests she have breakfast first, causing Paige to say, "Right, like that cereal has less sugar."
• Garfield:
  • One Professor Garfield skit features Nermal getting addicted to "Sugar Coated Sugar Blasts," courtesy of a deliberately misleading commercial about its supposed benefits hosted by so-called "Kool Kat Karl" (really the resident dogs in costume).
  • Garfield himself spazzes out on chocolate-covered coffee beans in one strip. Both chocolate and coffee are poisonous to cats.
  • In one comic, Jon admits to going overboard while grocery shopping and ended up buying a 40 lbs. bag of Sugar Blasters cereal, lamenting that there's no way they can get through it all before it goes stale. Garfield, however, takes this as a challenge.
• A Phoebe and Her Unicorn comic has Phoebe telling Marigold about a cereal originally called "Sugar Kabooms" when her mom was a child, before being changed to "Organic Kabooms" to make it sound healthier. Marigold is confused as to how a cereal with "Kabooms" in the name could possibly sound healthy.
• For Better or for Worse has contained a number of Bland Name Products over the years, including "Sugar Soggs", often seen at the breakfast table alongside several other cereal products.

Radio

• Our Miss Brooks: Mrs. Davis refers to the noisy crackling of such a cereal in one episode when she makes Miss Brooks a bowl of sugar-coated pine needles for breakfast.

Video Games

• The Fallout universe's kid cereal is called "Sugar Bombs", whose pieces are shaped like miniature nukes. A ghoul in Fallout 3 will buy them off you since they can apparently be used to double the potency of a particular drug (useful for ghouls who are much more resistant to them).
• The best food item in Twilight Heroes is called "Frosted cocoa-fruity marshmallow blasts", and in case the name didn't make the cereal's nature obvious, the description tells us it has "a powdery white coating of frosted goodness that instantly dissolves in milk, turning the liquid into something nearly as sweet as soda, because if it didn't the unsweetened milk would seem downright sour compared to the rest of the cereal".
• Broken Age has a plethora of cereals for Shay to choose from with increasingly odd names until you're finally forced into eating "Splargh!" The joke is that, despite the promises of the descriptive and varied boxes, every cereal is exactly the same.
• In Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Adam Jensen's apartment is littered with boxes of sugary cereal with cartoon mascots.
• Splatoon 2: The MakoMart level contains various sugary cereals with cartoon mascots on them in the background.
• The Outer Worlds has the Rizzo line of products, all of which involve copious amounts of sugar, including the cereal "Purpleberry Crunch", which reputedly turns stomachs purple.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner
  • Spoofed with the "Cheat Commandos...Os" Sugar Cereal, which includes an advertisement where the word 'nutritious' is crossed out and replaced with 'delicious' and is eventually described as a 'ridiculous brekafast'. It's also not shaped like Os.
  • In the Strong Bad Email "specially marked", Strong Bad explicitly points out several traits associated with kid cereals, like having names with sound effects in them (like 'pop', 'smack', 'puff', and 'gunshots in a crowded mall'), being loaded with cheap mini-marshmallows that taste like "sugared pieces of styrofoam", and offering a Free Prize at the Bottom if you're lucky.

Webcomics

• Litterbox Comics: Fran won't let her kids have candy for breakfast, but will give them Frosted Candy-Os, which is basically candy.
  Fran: It's fine, look... only 10g of sugar per serving!
  Dad Cat: Serving size... 1 piece.
• The Class Menagerie: Parodied with Fruity Puffs; due to slipping sales, the manufacturer decided to stop the prestenses with it's latest fun-shaped cereal piece - Sugar Cube White! And then there's Fruity Puffs sister product, Choco Charms, which contains five different kinds of chocolate goodness. With or without marshmallows!
  Mike: And that's why I wouldn't be caught dead eating that cereal!
  Tony: Well I don't care if Mikey doesn't like it!
• Questionable Content provides the ultimate inversion: Dr. Nature's Completely Unsweetened Reasonable Puffs.
• Robin's favoured breakfast in Shortpacked! is a bowl of Robo-Vac's Double-Chocolate Diabetes-Bits.

Western Animation

• 3-2-1 Penguins! exaggerates this trope with the Sugar Frosted Black Hole cereal from the episode "More is More". The Sugar Frosted Black Holes contain 1,005% of the recommended daily supply of gravitational sugar.
• The Amazing World of Gumball has Smashmallows, which cause a hallucinogenic sugar high if you eat them through your eyes.
• Animaniacs has “Totally Awesome ACME Snax” and later a “healthy” cereal called “Branimaniacs”. In "Slappy Goes Walnuts", Skippy is bouncing in place eating the Snax, and one piece sends Slappy literally flying across the room (to smack painfully into ceiling and walls). She promptly declares it brain-rotting food and tells Skippy she'll make him some of her walnut fig-dough surprise. It's brain food.
• In Darkwing Duck, Darkwing occasionally wonders whether Goslyn's favorite cereal (a ridiculously sugary brand) is responsible for her acting hyperactive. Not that DD himself is any mellower...
• Arthur featured such cereals including "Crunch" (whose mascot was a singing cereal nugget wearing sunglasses and a tuxedo, who sings the cereal's jingle) and "Golden Honey Squids."
• The Cramp Twins: In contrast to Lucien, who likes cereals that contains more grains and nuts, Wayne likes the Captain Power brand of cereal that contain more sugar. In the episode "Food Fight", Wayne buys a new brand of cereal that contain extra additives and have the ability to give anyone a sugar rush even in the smallest quantity. Lucien becomes addicted to them in the episode and he decides to switch his breakfast cereals with Wayne's without the latter being aware. This makes Lucien the hyperactive twin and Wayne the slowpoke one.
• In an episode of CatDog, our heroes get a job stuffing prizes into boxes of a sugary cereal called Kavity Krunch.
• In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: M.U.N.C.H.I.E.S.", Sector V has to fight nearly every villain in the show over a store's last box of Rainbow Munchies, a cereal like this that is so delicious that everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, love it (even Numbuh 4, who otherwise despises Rainbow Monkeys). Knightbrace proves to be the only exception, buying it simply so he can destroy it, which causes everyone else to have an Enemy Mine to take it back and share.
• In The Critic, there's a Barney knock-off character that has a cereal. Apparently it can turn your urine pink (after you eat six bowls of it, of course).
  Jay': Yes yes, and a gallon of chocolate milk, but that's not the point!
• Family Guy: Hilariously subverted in one episode when Peter briefly takes over Pewterschmidt Industries while Carter is in a coma; one of the products he comes up with is "Jeremy Irons Cereal", which is just as dour and bland as the actor.
  Irons: If you are looking for marshmallows, there are none.
• In the Futurama episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" they show the The Sugar-Blasted Purpleberry Puffs cereal associated with the Purpleberry Pond cartoon. They are triple-coated in maple-flavour syrup. The final commercial is for Sugar-Frosted Sugar-Blasted Purple and Orange Berry Puffs. It's available in "regular" and "type 2".
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Grim reads off a the ingredients of Sugar Spanks. "Sugar" is both the first and last ingredient, and every other ingredient is "sucrose", "glucose", "fructose", or some other artificial sugar.
• The "Sally's Comet" of Hey Arnold! had Arnold and Gerald trying to win a telescope so they can watch a comet that appears once every seventy years. They need fifty box-tops to win a telescope. The cereal they eat is named "Sugar Chunks".
• One episode of Jem had main characters choosing between various cereals: Candy Coated Zips, Sugar Biffos (which has a clown on the box), Chocolate Flakes, and Healthy Cereal. They buy Healthy Cereal.
• In King of the Hill, Bobby eats Grandma's Oatmeal Cookie Crunch cereal. Peggy lets him eat another bowl because she forgot to prepare him breakfast and then Hank lets him eat more resulting in Bobby in a sugar rush and diagnosed with ADD.
• Lloyd in Space - when Lloyd is babysitting his sister, he tries to stop her eating a cereal called 'Sugar-Frosted Junkoids' in favour of 'Cream of Nutrients'.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998) has Lucky Captain Rabbit King Nuggets ("For the Irish sea-faring nobleman in you!"), with a mascot who's some weird mash-up of Lucky the Lucky Charms leprechaun, Cap'n Crunch, the Trix rabbit, and King Vitaman.
  Repeated tag line: Ridiculous Lucky Captain Rabbit King ... Lucky Captain Rabbit King Nuggets are for the youth!
• Regular Show, Rigby is a fan of the cereal Sugar-Frosted Sugar Bombs.
• A parody of this is shown as a short in one episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show. The cereal is "Sugar-Frosted Milk" and it "stays lumpy, even in cereal!"
• Rugrats:
  • An episode in which Grandpa and Tommy go grocery shopping features Reptar Cereal: "They're round, They're mean. They turn milk green!" For adults, there's Corrugated Bran Puffs. The "Reptar on Ice" episode shows Stu reading the ingredients for Reptar Cereal on the side of the box (Including re-hydrogenated cardboard bits) and remarking, "Hey Deed, there's no actual food in here!" Didi tells him that Angelica (who's staying over) won't eat anything else.
    • Averted with the real Reptar Cereal that was sold at FYE record stores in 2018, which is just generic-brand Froot Loops.
  • And over at Chuckie's house, Chaz buys "Dummi Bear Sugar Lumps", which, based on the coloring, appears to be honey flavored. Despite the word "sugar" in the title, it's probably less sweet than the "Reptar Cereal" because Tommy considers it yucky.
• The Simpsons:
  • In one episode, Springfield is declared America's fattest town. Marge notes how unhealthy everyone's diet is, including the sugar-loaded cereal, "Frosting Gobs."
  • In many episodes of the show, both Bart and Lisa inhale "Frosty Krusty Flakes", one of Krusty the Clown's most well-known pieces of trademarked merchandise.
    • Also "Chocolate Frosted Frosty Krusty Flakes" ("Only Sugar Has More Sugar").
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil has the cereal "Captain Blanche's Sugar Seeds".
• In Teamo Supremo the governor talks about an old cereal called "Breakast Clubs", which was apparently pulled from the shelves when scientists discovered it contained more than 100% pure sugar.

Real Life

• Of course, this Trope is Truth in Television to a point (the "point" in question being as much as 63% sugar by weight in the case of Kellogg's Smacks), and as this article shows, such stuff used to be a lot more popular. In fact, up until the 1980s, it was a general rule for most children-marketed cereals to be named "Sugar X". It was only after the rise in rates of childhood obesity and the backlash from a more health-conscious public that many brands dropped "sugar" from their names (i.e, "Sugar Pops" became "Corn Pops", "Sugar Crisp" became "Golden Crisp", "Sugar Frosted Flakes" became simply "Frosted Flakes"/"Frosties", "Sugar Puffs" became "Honey Monster Puffs", "Sugar Smacks" became "Honey Smacks"...).
• MythBusters tested whether sugary cereal boxes contain more nutrients than the cereal itself. They found this to be false, but the fact that it was believable enough to test shows how well-known the unhealthiness of breakfast cereal is.

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