I remember liking everything about Post Crispy Critters cereal except the cereal. Liked the name, liked the commercials, liked the mascot, liked his voice and his cartoons. But the cereal? It was like styrofoam peanuts dipped in sugar. No wonder they stopped making it.
I went through that phase where I had to try every new cereal when it came out…and the phase usually never lasted much longer than a box. Sometimes, half a box…and then it would be back to one of my two all-time faves, Cheerios or Rice Chex. The simple, basic stuff always won out in the end. (Before I drastically altered my diet last May, I ate a lot of my favorite adult cereal, which was Barbara's Shredded Oats. And it just dawned on me that it's kind of like Cheerios and Rice Chex rolled into one.)
Apparently, Crispy Critters is ancient history but before it went away, it had a last hurrah. In '87, Post tried to bring it back in what I believe was a lower sugar version. At least, they call it "low sugar" in the commercial you're about to see, whereas the commercials for the earlier version (like the one in yesterday's link) emphasized sugar as a selling point. I never tried the 1987 version of Crispy Critters but since the sugar was the only reason to eat the sixties incarnation, I'm guessing I didn't miss much. More significant is the new spokescritter who sounds like Jimmy Durante as done by someone who doesn't do a real good Jimmy Durante.
His name was Crispy and he was a…well, I'm not sure what he was or why they selected an unidentifiable animal as their mascot. The appeal of Crispy Critters — and admittedly, this isn't much — was that you could identify each piece of your breakfast cereal as a camel or a monkey or a lion or an orange moose…or something. So why characterize the product with an animal who can't be characterized?
Even great commercials probably wouldn't have saved this product. But they didn't have to be this bad…