Pirates of the Carribbean Cereal

Hey kids, wanna rape, pillage and plunder just like a real pirate? Well, make sure to eat a nutritious breakfast first!

In 2006 as part of the Pirates of the Caribbean merchandising frenzy, Kellogg's released a breakfast cereal. Disney's fairly notorious for letting their characters adorn and endorse a vast array of inappropriate products, but at least this isn't as traumatically tacky as when they put The Little Mermaid on a box of fish sticks (that's right kids, now you can snack on Ariel's closest friends!). If you wanna know what Pirates of the Caribbean Cereal tasted like, pull the marshmallows out of a box of Lucky Charms, toss them in with your Coco Puffs, and voilà! Now you have a disgustingly sugary breakfast treat fit for a pirate! (Like me... Zoinks! I'm suddenly having flashbacks of '80s National Enquirer commercials!)

This is hardly the first time a movie's transitioned to the breakfast table. E.T., Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Batman, Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Addams Family, Bill & Ted and, most recently, High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Star Trek are amongst those in a long line of titles with cereal tie-ins. And just like most of those cereals, it lasted less than a year before vanishing from the market. Unusually, however, there weren't any TV commercials (that I know of) and yet it somehow lasted long enough to get two different packages, both endorsed by Captain Sparrow. It would've been more interesting if Captain Barbosa or Davy Jones adorned the second box... but I guess they figured Johnny Depp would appeal more to children than Geoffrey Rush or a scary, CGI'd fishface. Though that doesn't quite explain why Orlando Bloom (who was cropped out of the picture on the front of the second box) and Keira Knightly are nowhere to be seen...

Unfortunately, I can't offer you stale Pirates cereal. Well, actually I could, but there's no way for you to download it until they devise some sort of a teleportation technology (but check back in a few years, at which point the cereal should be good and ripe!)... though if you really must have some, there appears to be a few sealed boxes on eBay. Not that I'd recommend consuming nearly 4 year old cereal -- but if you do, remember that Pirates of the Caribbean Cereal is "the only cereal you can eat with rum!"

Memo to food manufacturers: It's probably unwise to put pictures of people with bad teeth on packaging for foods with a high sugar content. I'm just saying.