The 25 Greatest Cereal Prizes of All Time

Image via Complex Original

A tiny garden of weeds alongside your bowl of cereal seems like a legit pairing, right? Not that any kid really wanted their cereal to come with a toy they could actually play with or anything. The demand for botanists must have been quite high back then. As odd as the prize may have seemed, the kids loved 'em.

The only person you were writing letters to as a kid was Santa, so you didn't really need stamps for anything. But every great collector has to start somewhere. Jack Hanna could only provide you with so much animal education, these stamps schooled you on all of the wildlife facts you didn't know you needed. Granted you only got about 5 stamps for free, but that was enough. You just used the book as a place mat a week later anyway.

The hard plastic 3D glasses at the movie theaters have nothing on the two-tone, paper and cellophane 3D eye wear that came in cereal boxes. You could spend hours staring at the back of a cereal box looking at the strange holographic 3D images pop out at you. The image was always a little blurry, but 3D on a box sometimes beats the boring 3D of the real world. 

Have you seen those dudes with the NY Yankees tattoos? Well, Frosted Flakes may have planted that seed back in '94. The free sheet of MLB temporary tattoos was too cool and if you didn't plaster every one of those to create a half sleeve, you were wasting perfectly good body art. 

Okay, so what if they were essentially coffins on wheels? Your Hot Wheels needed some competition, these were free, and they got the job done. And you got to put them together yourself, so you got to develop some engineering skills, too. Pretty damn cool. 

The only problem with this prize is that it's made to share. After you held it down at the breakfast table every morning having spoonfuls upon spoonfuls of Alpha-Bits, you deserved your prize to yourself. You worked hard for that pitcher of free Kool-Aid and hoped to enjoy the fruits of your labor solo, but no such luck. Your mom wasn't hearing any of your shit. At least you didn't have to share your point collection bank.

You had three choices with this prize: Super Mario, Link from The Legend of Zelda, and Little Mac from Mike Tyson's Punch Out! Even though there wasn't really much you could do with this "magic" cards, Mike Tyson was affiliated, so these cards get automatic and irrevocable cool points.

In all honestly, this prize was a result of extreme frugality. A paper cut-out eye mask and we were supposed to be thrilled and grateful? Well, we were. Any opportunity to bring us closer to Michelangelo, Donatello, and Leonardo worked for us. 

You probably didn't understand the difference between baking soda and baking powder if you couldn't get this thing to work, but you were just a kid. Blame your mom. Kudos to you if you were able to snag the buoyant Navy Frogmen to create an entire military operation using just the free prizes in your cereal.

Okay, so you had to work for this joint which takes a little bit of the fun out of it. Two proofs of purchase and then you needed to break them off with 50 cents? If it wasn't for the promise of turning enemies into friends, the Cosmic Clouder wouldn't have seemed worth the trouble. The puff of "white cosmic cloud" was pretty freaking awesome, too, though, so yeah—it was worth the half a buck.

Born from the super short movies the Cap'n Crunch folks passed off as commercials, the Crunchbot's job was to devour the "soggies" in your bowl, so that you could enjoy a truly crunchy experience. Not sure how functional this toy was, but robots are the shit, so Cap'n Crunch rocks for this treat.

Your mother would have never let you eat those gummies for breakfast if she realized that they came in the box, so you had to be slick with it. Carefully pulling out the bag of fruit snacks when your mother wasn't looking, you wolfed them down while she looked away. When she finally noticed that some candy was supposed to accompany your cereal and asked you where it was, you lied and said nothing was in the box. You don't like lying to your mom, but if you seem sad enough, she might write a nasty letter to the customer service department and get them to send you more free snacks.

When Frosted Flakes are on the shelf, no kid is going to sneak a box of Corn Flakes into his parents' shopping cart. Unless, of course, that kid is observant and smart, and sees that he can get a free fanny pack to store all of his other cool prizes.

General Mills sure did know the way to a growing kid's heart. The only way you were getting a preadolescent kid to drink milk was if it was left in the bowl after sugary cereal had been swimming in it for 15 minutes, or it had chocolate in it. Instead of breaking us off with a random plastic gadget, General Mills was just trying to ensure we didn't have any bone issues, so they blessed us with a free pack of Nesquik. Good looking out.

Before graphic tee shirts cost $60, cereal companies were putting us on the cool fashion wave by dropping a couple of iron-on patches in our breakfast cereal. The risk of forearm burns were well worth it. If we weren't ironing on some dope design to our old white tees or light denim jeans, the thought of ironing clothes seemed pointless before age 18.

Super Mario was a big part of most kids' lives and when you weren't in front of the gaming console, he was always on your mind. No Game Boy? No problem. The little maze in the Applejacks box would suffice.

A great way to piss your mom off was sticking these glass decals on any and everything you thought needed a touch of that Disney magic. Car window looking a little dull? Throw some decals on that! Bathroom mirror too boring for your taste? Stick some decals on it. Mom's wine glasses not suitable for a party? You knew how to fix that.

Before you were able to trick out your first car, you had to make do with making your bike look good. Finding Garfield bike reflectors in a box of cereal was always a good move. Snap a few of those bad boys on your two-wheels and you'd be the flashiest kid in the neighborhood.

It seems like Ralston was really reaching for a gift to seal with its Batman cereal when they included a huge coin back, but they may have been on to something. If Batman was good enough to save your life in the midst of villains and criminals, he was definitely a guy whom you'd entrust to help you save your coins. Lest we forget that Bruce Wayne was a billionaire and knew a thing or two about money.

The cereal was addictive enough—Post really didn't have to enable our habit by giving us a free color changing dinosaur, too. Only the lame kids didn't spazz out over a triceratops that changes from green to yellow.

Ralston knew no one was going to buy their Addams Family cereal if a cool prize wasn't used as an incentive—the cereal looked incredibly creepy and inedible. But for a chance to collect a whole series of flashlights of the iconic family, you could mix a few pours of the cereal with your Froot Loops. Ralston even shrink wrapped the flashlights with the box of cereal to prove that it was there and not just some hoax to get you to by their bland cereal. 

The folks over at Cap'n Crunch just thought they were giving out fun little trinkets when they placed little bo'sun whistles inside their cereal boxes. What they were really dishing out were free long distance calls. Covering up one of whistle's holes would give the toy a frequency of 2600 HZ when blown and the prize could be used to hack the phone system. Imagine how many bo'sun whistles were thrown out in the 70s by parents who couldn't stand the noise. If only they knew the Cap'n was trying to cut their calling costs in half.

When the prize in your cereal box has you looking fly, there's no doubt that it's a winner. Honeycombs knew what time it was in the 80s when they added a digital watch inside boxes of their tasty cereal. It came in three color ways, so if you found them all you could change up your look and be the envy of all the non-stylish kids on the playground.

General Mills wasn't messing around with their prizes in 1986. They had that "C.R.E.A.M." philosophy way before Wu-Tang started rapping about it. Placing a cellophane wrapped dollar bill in a million boxes of cereal was a clever way to get kids to beg for Cheerios instead of the better tasting sugary options. The plan was to get people to repeatedly purchase boxes of the cereal, but let's be real. Any kid who found a dollar in their cereal box was hiding it from their parents and buying candy.

Before the plastic wrapped toy guns and temporary tattoos, Kellogg's went the "reading is fundamental" route with the Funny Jungleland Moving Picture Book. It was the prize that started it all. Go to the grocery store, buy a box of Corn Flakes and send in the attached mail-in offer, and folks received a comic book featuring dancing animals that could be metamorphosed into strange hybrids all for the low cost of $0.10. Paying for cereal prizes? It was 1910. this was the highlight of a kid's year back then and it was well worth it.