I know this is pretty close to old news by now, but in case you haven't heard, Trix cereal has a brand new shape...that isn't brand new at all.
Yes, after a fifteen year mistake, General Mills has finally caved into the demands of old school Trix-lovers and switched back to the familiar ball-shaped cereal bits of the year-before-yesteryear. At least, that's how I'd like to think it went down. I never voiced my disgust when Trix swapped to marbly fruit shapes in the early '90s, but surely someone did.
Okay, so it's a stretch to imagine that General Mills was catering to a market of people in their late 20s and 30s with the switch back to ball shapes, but if not that, then why? Cost-cutting measure? Product of a focus group where demographically diverse children aged 5-7 unanimously agreed that making grape-flavored cereal bits grape-shaped was overkill?
Whatever...the cause isn't as important as the effect: We've got our Trix back! To celebrate, here's a look back at one of the few times in history that the Trix Rabbit was actually allowed...to eat Trix cereal.
I won't say that it was the only time, because that's not true. But you could count the number of times that the Trix Rabbit got to eat Trix cereal on one hand, and you'd still have enough fingers leftover to violate someone three different ways. I don't remember the exact specifics of this promotion, but it involved our bunny pal racing a couple of kids for the right to eat a bowl of Trix. There was some kind of viewer vote aspect to the promotion, and of course, everyone watching at home thought that those cartoon kids were assholes -- of course we voted for the Trix Rabbit to have his Trix.
And so, in this commercial -- the big finale for the months-spanning promotion -- we finally got our wish. The Trix Rabbit wins the vote, wins the bike race and wins a big, beautiful bowl of ball-shaped Trix cereal. Gotta be honest...it's pretty anticlimactic. The heroic hare (pardon the lame nicknames -- I'm just trying to avoid using the word "Trix" a hundred times per paragraph) doesn't show much more excitement in eating Trix as he did just thinking about eating Trix. With years of bittersweet near-successes under his belt, you'd think he be a little more orgasmic about this. Oh, sure, he still floods the screen in various shades of fruit colors with excitement, but it's just not what I expected. I needed a little more. I needed him to rocket up into the sky and write "I LOVE TRIX" with ass-made cloud letters. Then again, this wasn't my moment...it was his.
Click here to watch the commercial, which aired sometime in the early '90s. Note how they cut the rabbit's celebration short to talk up the free packs of Life Savers found in every box of Trix cereal. General Mills was so hoping we'd vote the other way.
Posted by Matt on 04/05/2007. E-mail me!
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I also want to point out how hungry I am for Trix, now. I think I’ll grab a box on my way home from work. Matt, you are like a cool man’s Oprah. Anything you feature on your site, I suddenly want to purchase. Do you recommend any particular religion or brand of automobile?
On another note, does anyone else want to start some kind of retro-food company? We can buy the old recipes from various snack food companies and make classic cereals the way they were supposed to be made. We could make fruit roll-ups that taste like they actually have a small amount of real fruit in them! We could also make Ninja Turtle pies. I would start this company myself, but I’m out of money, and also work ethic. If everyone else wants to pitch in and get things going, I will agree to only take 10% of the profits.