I Was A Cereal Killler With One Goal - Collect Them All!

After writing yesterday's post, I found myself travelling down a rabbit hole which sent me back to the latter part of 1985 and through to 1987.

If you didn't read the aforementioned post, I'll give you a quick summary: yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of my visit to the cinema to see Back to the Future. I wrote about how invested I was in the film as a child and - as I was recalling a couple of things I collected - something came to me from the back of my memory bank: I had owned little booklets that came from inside cereal boxes.

I closed the post not being completely sure whether I had imagined the mini books, however. Within a short Google search, I realised they were not a figment of my imagination.

Yes, I did indeed collect Back to the Future books from my breakfasts.

As you can see, a box of Shreddies from 1985 was sold in an online auction. Its packaging clearly shows it was part of the Back to the Future adventure game book promotion.

As for the books - Well, I've found them on eBay. Here they are:

You know what makes this entire thing hysterical? I remember owning all but the fourth book in that six-part series. But that's not the funny part. I put myself through all that collecting with one handicap. 

I hated Shreddies. I still do to this very day. 

Actually, I'll be a bit fair to the brand: I am not keen on the regular Shreddies, that were only available back in the mid-80s, I do find the frosted Shreddies slightly more enjoyable. At a push.

Can you imagine how many boxes I must have gone through back then to be able to get five of those books? I must have swapped some around at school to have amassed a near-perfect collection. That's the only way I can try to reason with it.

The things I did for Back to the Future.

It did get worse for me.

Within a year or so, Shredded Wheat had a promotion in which they gave away Dungeons and Dragons hologram cards inside boxes of its breakfast offering. If Shreddies were high on my list of cereals I disliked, Shredded Wheat would have been above it in the rankings. But, I had to get the holograms. So - I had to eat the Shredded Wheat.

Unfortunately, my mission to collect all of the holograms failed. My teacher confiscated the cards as I was looking through them as she was reading to us. I never saw them again.