Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinersaurs Cereal

I'm going to admit something that I'm not proud of. As a kid, I was not into cereal. It seems sacrilegious to me. Eating heaping spoonfuls of sugary cereal seems like a quintessential part of being a suburban American kid. But the thought of little chunks, flakes, nuggets, and rings floating in milk, steadily getting soggier and soggier until all that was left was sweet mush repulsed me. I've since gotten over this madness, and now often indulge in the stuff. I can't help but think that I might have avoided years of shame had I been introduced to this staple breakfast food with this week's dip into the history of dinosaur pop culture, Dinersaurs cereal.

As Mr. Breakfast writes, it was a "fruit-flavored dinosaur-shaped cereal with five friendly dinosaurs on the box - four in chef's hats and one poor guy - who still managed to flash a smile - whose body was hollowed-out and converted into a diner." Sure, I was 11 when it was introduced in 1988, and my aversion to cereal was deeply embedded in my psyche by then, but I think the presence of my favorite extinct archosaurs would have been the nudge I needed. And I might have won a Nintendo Entertainment System, for crying out loud. Winning an NES from a box of Dinersaurs would have been a childhood accomplisment so undeniably badass that it would deserve a prominent place on my CV.

Here's what the box looked like, thanks to Flickr user Jason Liebig. Put on your 3-D glasses for a trippy experience!


Here's another photo of a Dinersaurs box from John Gavula. It's low res, but I'm intrigued by the offer of 12 trading cards. I want them. You know how badly Stallone wanted custody of his son in Over the Top? That's how bad I want those trading cards, and I'd go to even further lengths. After the arm-wrestling tournament, I would have done a badminton tournament.



Here's a set of promotional stickers for the cereal, courtesy Waffle Whiffer, who contributed the Grimace trading card featured yesterday. It's been a week of hard science here! I apologize to NASA if I stole the thunder from their arsenic-loving bacteria.



Also worth checking out is this page, which features artwork from a Dinersaurs commercial with a short description from an artist who worked on it. In looking at more than three sites with information about Dinersaurs cereal, I think I just accidentally became the world's foremost expert on the subject.

You're welcome, mom and dad!