Captain Obvious Cereal
“Now here's a brand of cereal that, when you eat it, tastes exactly like Kelloggs cornflakes!”
“This cereal... is my cereal.”
“I just said a quote on my cereal above.”
“Tastiest thing ever.”
“Theres nothing GRRRREAT about this crap!”
“This cereal is the only reason I'm still in business.”
Captain Obvious's Captain Obvious Cereal®™ is a cereal- that is, a carbohydrate based food usually eaten with milk in the mornings- promoted with the name and image of Captain Obvious, the superhero who points out things that you probably know already. Captain Obvious Cereal®™ is manufactured by Wilde Mills (a division of Uncyclopedia Corporation), makers of Uncyclopedios®™. The cereal is usually said to mark the beginning of Captain Obvious' shameless sell-out to Corporate America, and Captain Obvious is often the first to point this out.
History[edit]
Following the failure of their National Socialist-themed HitlerBits in 1945, Wilde Mills decided a superhero-themed cereal would nicely complement their existing product lineup, and help the public forget that they had tried to cash in on Nazism during the 1930s.
Wilde Mills intended to create a Captain Oblivious themed cereal, but had trouble getting Captain Oblivious to understand the commercial opportunity. Captain Oblivious probably summed it up best when he said, "Huh? Someone wanted to give me my own cereal?" Superman and Batman were also options. They had no endorsement deals at the time, and it would have been good business to hire one of them, but Wilde Mills was known for being a bunch of cheapskates (the board reasoned that the money spent hiring a first-class superhero would have require cutting back the executive board's six-week retreat to Maui to only five weeks). Spider-Man endorsed products for very reasonable rates (being a struggling college student) but at the time he was being held prisoner by an evil clone of the Silver Surfer. And so, Wilde Mills contacted Captain Obvious.
| “ | Let me get this straight, so that I can understand what you are saying to me with the words coming from your mouth. You want me, being Captain Obvious, to put my name and photograph on a cereal, which is a food which is eaten in the morning, after waking up, but before work.” Wilde Mills assured Captain Obvious that this was exactly what they had in mind, and complemented him on his keen grasp of the obvious. “Pointing out the obvious is what I do,” said Captain Obvious, that's probably why they call me Captain Obvious. | ” |
The Cereal[edit]
The cereal itself consisted of little round O's made of puffed corn and glazed with a thick coating of sugar. The O shape is used because it is the symbol for Captain Obvious, since "Obvious" starts with an "O". For a while, little grey Captain Obvious marshmallows were included. However, they were quickly removed from the cereal. This is because, as Captain Obvious said, "Lumpy grey marshmallows do not help to sell a cereal. Also, they tasted like sweetened chalk. That was probably not a good thing."
Nutritional Value[edit]
A bowl of the cereal (served with whole milk) contains 9000% of the daily recommendation of sugar. It is also fortified with 0 essential vitamins, and 0 non-essential. This makes the O's have roughly the nutritional value of very heavily sugared, shredded newspaper.
Problems[edit]
From the outset, there were problems. In order to sign the Captain, Wilde Mills had ceded creative control of marketing to Captain Obvious. The first conflict came over the name of the cereal: Captain Obvious’s Captain Obvious Cereal was originally to be named “Obvi-Os”, but the Captain decided against this decision, because, in his words:
| “ | while ’Obvi-Os’ is not subtle, it is not as obvious as it could be, either. It forces the cereal purchaser to combine two concepts: me, Captain Obvious (being a superhero who points out what you should know) and an O-shaped cereal similar to Cheerios in shape. | ” |
Wilde Mills therefore went with the name Captain Obvious's Captain Obvious Cereal. The next problem arose, unsurprisingly (indeed, one might even say, obviously) from Captain Obvious' tendency to place extremely obvious and redundant pieces of information on the box. Statements such as "this will rot your teeth out", "it tastes like styrofoam packing peanuts with sugar on top" and soforth tended to hurt sales of the cereal, but Captain Obvious insisted on including them, against the advice of Wilde Mill's marketing division.
| “ | I think Wilde Mills was unhappy because I made facts too obvious. While the marketing division's job is to make the fact that your product is bad and overpriced less obvious to people. This is because they want to sell things. These different philosophies caused a conflict. But I stand by my principle of making things obvious. Otherwise I could not be Captain Obvious. | ” |
Eventually, Wilde Mills had to pull the cereal from the shelves. This led the Captain to remark, "It would appear that this product has failed. But I'm 2 million dollars richer. So I have succeeded. Many people think that selling out is bad. But people who criticize people who sell out rarely have faced the choice of selling out."
Captain Obvious Luminous Cereal®™[edit]
Captain Obvious Luminous Cereal®™ was a now discontinued variant of the Captain Obvious Cereal®™ that was notable for its extreme colorfulness; in fact, they were so colorful that they glowed in the dark! It was reasoned by Wilde Mills that kids love colorful cereals, and therefore the cereals should be made even more colorful to be even more popular with the wee ones. Wilde Mills wanted a cereal so colorful that it would glow in the dark, and decided to add several highly experimental food coloring substances to the cereals. "Bigger, better, brighter" became the official slogan for the brand. Captain Obvious Luminous Cereal®™ was discontinued in 1995, after it was revealed that the apparent fluorescence was due to the presence of several highly radioactive isotopes of numerous elements in the food colors, such as potassium-40, barium-133, strontium-90 Polonium-210 and other rather unhealthy substances that Wilde Mills obviously had no idea was in the coloring substances. The cereals turned out to be just as radioactive as the vicinity of the defunct nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Russia!
No people were harmed, but there were some rumors of horrific mutations, although this could not be tied to the cereals despite heavy investigations. Captain Obvious went out with a public apology, where he explained that Captain Oblivious had been in charge of the product development, and therefore it had "some" rather dubious qualities about it, as Captain Oblivious knows nada about cereal manufacturing (or anything else for that matter). Captain Understatement, Captain Obvious' lesser known cousin, stated in the New York Times that the whole thing had been "a small miscalculation from Wilde Mills, only slightly serious.".
Other Wilde Mills products[edit]
“Theyyyyyyyy're food!”
Ways to Win the Game[edit]
Click on this link: [1]
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