Everyone knows the famous Captain Crunch cereal, but one consumer paid more attention to the cereal box than others and discovered that the captain’s sleeves only sported three yellow strips instead of four, which made him a commander and not a captain. The Cap’n immediately responded on Twitter: “Of course I’m a Cap’n! It’s the Crunch—not the clothes—that make a man.”

Kellog was trained as a doctor and promoted a vegetarian lifestyle according to his Seventh Day Adventist beliefs, but he threw out the window all the restrictive Victorian conventions. He founded the company Kellog which enjoyed great success with products like Frosted Flakes and Pop Tarts.

In 2009, a woman from California filed a suit against PepsiCo, claiming she had been misled by false advertising that the Crunch Berry cereals were real fruit. The judge dismissed the suit claiming that: “As far as this court has been made aware, there is no such fruit (Crunch Berries) growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.”

General Mills debuted two monster-themed cereal: Count Chocula and Franken Berry in the 70s. Although the line proved to be very successful, at some point it faced a huge public relations disaster. Because of the fact that the dye used for the cereal was not absorbed by the digestive system, parents found their children’s poop stained in a pink color and rushed to the emergency room. The use of this dye has been long since discontinued.

It would seem that cereal would be a perfect food for vegans. However, many contain marshmallows which use gelatin that comes from the bone, cartilage and tendons of pigs. Also many cereals contain vitamin D3 which is derived from the lanolin of sheep.

There were so many breakfast cereal produced and advertised according to the characters which attracted children the most years ago, that many of them became extinct.

John Draper enlisted in the USAF in 1964 and promptly put his tehcnical skills to work by hacking into a telephone switchboard and allowing his friends to make free phone calls. Later, he learned that the whistle given away in a box of Cap’n Crunch would make a tone that would give him operator’s control over phone lines.

While other cereals were distributing lame toys, Kix cereal had the idea of rewarding its customers with a silver bullet Lone Ranger ring. It contained trace amounts of radioactive polonium which would glow when struck a screen made of zinc sulfide.

In the 1950s CBS’s hit show Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was sponsored by Quaker Oats. An executive from Chicago came with the idea of giving a deed for one square inch of Yukon Territory in exchange for a box top of their cereal. This campaign had a huge success, but the land purchased by Quaker was given back to the Canadian government in 1965.

Cereal mascots fall into one of two categories. They are either potrayed as traditional salesmen espusing the quality of the products (Cap’n Crunch, Sugar Bear or Tony the Tiger) or they seem to be desperately addicted to cereal (Barney Rubble, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird or the Trix Rabbit).