![\"Free](\"http:\/\/www.lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/freeinside.jpg\" "\\"freeinside\\"")
Was there any joy comparable to picking out your cereal based solely on which one had the best prize inside? This was, of course, long before the days of Nutrition Facts panels that droned on about sodium levels and fiber content (and, of course, long before we would care about these things). <\/p>\n
Who cared that the cereal was filled with enough sugar to possibly quadruple your blood sugar levels? It’s the one that had the ___________ (fill in the blank with whatever cheesy piece of plastic crap you simply HAD TO HAVE<\/strong> but now couldn’t remember what it was if your life depended on it) inside! And, of course, the instant you got home, it was absolutely imperative to rip open the box and cram your little hands into the bag of cereal until you dug out the prize inside (or maybe that was just me). Between you and me, wasn’t the end result of all that anticipation usually about as much of a letdown as Ralphie’s Ovaltine revelation? <\/p>\n My favorite go-to cereal, both for toys and taste, was always Frosted Flakes (Tony the Tiger never steered me wrong!). These lovely trinkets to the right are obviously little Tony baubles. For the life of me, though, I can’t really remember what they’re supposed to do. I know it involved dropping them into an old soda bottle filled with water, but that’s all I can remember right now. Strangely enough, though, I still have six of them. <\/p>\n I guess cereals still have prizes inside, right? Sadly, it’s been a very long time since I walked that far down the cereal aisle at the store (the oatmeal and bran flakes are all right at the beginning of the aisle…I guess they don’t want us old fogies walking too far to get our fiber). I can’t really imagine getting that excited over a hunk of plastic floating around in my Special K, but I might change my tune if they ever advertise something like “Free Dr. Crusher Action Figure in Every Box!” <\/p>\n Now that <\/em>would be awesome. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Was there any joy comparable to picking out your cereal based solely on which one had the best prize inside? This was, of course, long before the days of Nutrition Facts panels that droned on about sodium levels and fiber content (and, of course, long before we would care about these things). Who cared that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}