taste test: quisp cereal

every now and again some weird product comes by the trixareforkids offices that we just aren’t sure what to do with besides eat. i’ve reviewed quite a few odd products but i have to say that i was surprised by this one. for those of you who don’t know, a group which included me up until about an hour ago, quisp is the ‘quazy energy cereal’ from quaker oats company (read: loaded with sugar). originally introduced in 1965, he had a brother named quake (get it?, quisp and quake) who had his own cereal. after 5 years of sibling rivalry the feud had to end. in 1970 quaker held a contest to see which was the more popular cereal and quisp won.

in a bit of what we would now call bad marketing, the quisp character was a pink alien with a ray gun, or at least back then had a ray gun. you can find more deets about this whole saga online somewhere. all in all the cereal is in very, very limited distribution and you really can’t find it anywhere. i was most apprehensive because the box looked as though not much changed since the 1970 introduction so i was worried this was a really old box. alas, it was not and thus began my tasting journey.

is the commercial jingle dead?

you know the jingle; it told you what name your bologna had and it helped you realize that if you were a wiener, what kind of wiener you would like to be. these days i’m noticing a trend: the death of the jingle. let’s start first to define what i believe the jingle to be, “a short song encapsulated in a commercial that defines a product, what a product offers, or whom the product is tailored for”. it also has a sticking-factor that embedded it into your brain and bugged you when you were trying to sleep. you might have other ideas of what a jingle is, but i don’t care. well i do, but for consistency-sake we’ll just stick with my definition.

when growing up the jingle was a staple of the advertising world. it made me want to buy, no, need to buy something. it made me need something so bad that i would nag my mother incessantly until i got said product. nowadays the jingle seems to have gone the way of the dodo in advertising, with the exception of a few ‘old world’ products from conglomerate companies.