By Chris Benedict

General Mills has announced that they will once again be resurrecting from the cobwebbed breakfast cereal vaults their beloved sugar-coated, marshmallow-loving monsters Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry. This is music to the ears (think creaking doors, screeching cats, an ungodly boom of thunder, Lon Chaney’s Phantom playing his pipe organ deep in the Opera’s catacombs) of people like me who grew up, as children of the 1970s, not only devouring them at the kitchen table on weekend mornings, but sneaking bowl after bowl-overflowing with milk slowly turning brown, pink, or blue-into the living room while watching horror movies on late night TV.

As with the last several years, boxes will begin materializing-as if out of thin air on a fog shrouded, moonlit night-on the shelves of major retailers sometime in mid-September. In 2013, not only did Target release the Monster Cereals boxed exclusively in 70s-style retro packaging, but brought Fruit Brute (remember Eric Stoltz eating it while lying in bed watching TV in Pulp Fiction?) and Yummy Mummy back from their decades-long slumbers in the General Mills graveyard for one time only.

Last year, comic book artists Jim Lee (Batman, Superman), Dave Johnson (Punisher, Deadpool), Terry and Rachel Dodson (Harley Quinn, Uncanny X-Men) were tasked with providing original cover art for the re-vamped (no pun intended) boxes. Halloween 2015 will allow you to see the Monsters like you never could before courtesy of 21st Century technology. The limited edition Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry packaging will all be compatible with a mobile app called Blippar which will display short animated greetings from each monster (in recognizable impersonations of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre) on your modern-day doo-hickeys when held up in front of the boxes. The reverse panels will also contain inter-active trips down memory lane such as trivia, vintage commercials and advertisements, alternate box art, and more ghoulishly fun surprises.

Bela Lugosi’s Ygor shares with Lon Chaney Jr.’s lumbering Creature the revelation that “Your father was Frankenstein, but your mother was the lightning,” in 1942’s Ghost of Frankenstein. He might well say to Franken Berry today that “Your father was Trisodium Phosphate, but your mother was High Fructose Corn Syrup.”

Negligible nutritional value aside, I highly anticipate their return and will be one of the first on line the day they emerge from the shadows to the shelves.

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