The year was 1984.C-3P0's Cereal hit grocery store shelves and enjoyed a modest success. It was a Sunday morning and it was breakfast! So you sit with your chosen bowl of droid kibble, happily munching away while trying to make sense of the insanely convoluted and not-at-all-like-the-movies storyline found in the Star Wars newspaper strip. C-3P0's featured naughty little sweetened bits vaguely shaped like droid parts. Somewhat of a cross between Honeycomb and Apple Jacks, it was an inoffensive sci-fi delight that was even better for dry snacking as it was doused in milk. The lack of marshmallows, chocolate and gratuitous sugar kept C-3P0's from being the cereal with our preferred taste, but in a shocking Jedi twist the stuff was good for you. While Franken Berry and Sugar Bear were off rotting teeth, C-3P0 was fueling young Jedi with nux-shaped animal feed. It was all about the oats, wheat and corn. I wonder if the cereal had been named after Vader...maybe we would've gotten a few marshmallows. C-3P0's are closely based on a prior Kellogg's cereal, "Graham Crack-Os" (something like that), but where as the former version couldn't survive with a overbiting cartoon horse mascot, no 1984 cereal could fail with 3P0 on the box. He was a hero. A legend. Made of gold. Plus, it came in a great box. In a solid starlit blue with the famous gold robot peddling his bowl of crunch in the center, C-3P0's plainly stood out from the competition. Every "version" of the cereal came with some kind of free toy (even if they were sometimes only cutout masks), and yes, the premiums always had to do with Star Wars. Even crappy plastic rocket shooters that had been given away in countless cereals for decades were treated to a Mos Eisley makeover with new stickers. As if this wasn't enough, many of the time's grocery stores placed specially made C-3P0 standees right in the cereal aisle. If you're six-years-old in 1984 and passing by a life-sized C-3P0, you're going to take his breakfast suggestion whether he's cardboard of not.
