Or try new Cinnamon Ghost Crunch

These Mini-Wheats ads are... a little weird.



Mini-Wheat 1: "Ah, the first day of school. New pencils, new books..."
Mini-Wheat 2: "New backpack! Looks good."
Mini-Wheat 1: "Just trying to look our best."

This is where things start getting weird. "Our" best? These kids are being followed around by the anthropomorphic spirits of the cereal they ate for breakfast this morning, and that cereal is talking like it and the kid who ate it are a single unit. Does that weird out anyone else?

Mini-Wheat 2: "Gonna take more than looks. From what I hear, Miss Haskins is a toughie."

From what you hear... from who? Is there some sort of Mini-Wheat grapevine? "Well, I happened to overhear the Mini-Wheat this kid's older brother ate telling the Mini-Wheat his mom ate that Miss Haskins was tough when he had her last year. Because, uh, he's been eating the exact same Mini-Wheat for a year? Or like, if you eat Mini-Wheats every day you just get this kind of Mini-Wheat spiritual advisor as a permanent thing? Also, I can't believe they got David Spade to do this voice." (Possible alternate theory: David Spade impersonator? Could such things exist?)

Mini-Wheat 1: "Oh, we had a good breakfast, so we're ready!"

...who? Who fucking had a good breakfast? Did the Mini-Wheat have a hearty bowl of grits just before being devoured by the kid? Why doesn't this commercial make any goddamn sense?

Mini-Wheat 3: "Gonna be another great year, huh, guys?"
Mini-Wheat 1: "You bet your eight layers!"

Eesh. Another great year? So these are, in fact, some sort of permanent Mini-Wheat spiritual guides? Presumably they slap you upside the head if you ever eat anything else for breakfast, since the end result has literally everyone with a personal Mini-Wheat as though this were one of those liquor ads where every bottle behind the bar is DiSaronno. Of course, this is an ad for Mini-Wheats; I guess we can't expect Toucan Sam perched on one kid's backpack or anything.

Voiceover: "A clinical study showed kids who had a filling breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved their attentiveness by nearly 20% when compared to kids who missed out on breakfast."

This just annoys me. Not that there's anything wrong with their methodology per se, but the idea of a world in which the only choices are Frosted Mini-Wheats or go hungry is kind of ridiculous. Also, did they really conduct a study in which they actively had to deprive kids of breakfast? Because that seems kind of shitty. And if they simply picked a bunch of kids who happened not to have eaten breakfast as their "control" group, that fails to account for about a bazillion potential extraneous variables. I also wonder how they're defining "attentiveness" and whether 20% is really statistically significant. But hey - good use of the word "clinical" in there. Makes it sound really important!

I also like the close-up shot of the bowl of Mini-Wheats with raspberries in it while the woman is talking. How many bowls of Mini-Wheats in history - particularly those eaten by children before school in the morning - contained fucking fresh raspberries? I will say zero.