BannedCast

While perhaps not as impactful upon my impressionable young mind as Fruit Islands cereal, Dinersaurs remains another top-tier, long-lost breakfast cereal from that heyday of the mid- to late-80s when Reaganomics made anything possible and America’s food industry was hard at work achieving unimaginable heights of processed food euphoria.

Dinersaurs had a very strong, syrupy flavor perhaps unparalleled in the annals of cereal’s pantheon, and if it had one flaw, it lay in the unfortunate naming of this product, which was sort of distracting for a number of reasons that I shall enumerate here.

Firstly, electing to name your children’s breakfast cereal Dinersaurs when Dinosaurs was equally available and would have worked better, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s no patent or trademark on the term “Dinosaurs”, and grocery store shelves at that time were stocked with plenty of cans of Chef Boyardee Dinosaurs as well as Sunkist’s well received Dinosaurs Fun Fruits fruit snacks, both of which I and my gluttonous overweight peers readily consumed as part of our daily pursuit of Type 2 diabetes.

Secondly and more importantly, let’s consider the “diner” to which this cereal’s name refers. If you’ll examine more closely the Dinersaurs cereal box, you will notice that the diner consists of a smiling, hollowed-out dinosaur, which should be occasion for some alarm on the part of both parents and children alike.

For example, it begs the question as to what is being served in the Dinersaurs “diner” if not the excavated and cured viscera of that unfortunate dinosaur, shaped into colorful mock-dinosaur pieces upon which the other dinosaurs inhabiting his hollowed-out mortal coil eagerly feast while seated alongside human children. This would make the dinosaur purveyors of Dinersaurs cereal pictured on the box and in the TV ads little more than psychotic, greedy opportunists attempting to make a quick buck by hocking the product of their cannibalistic urges to unsuspecting kids looking for an early-morning sugar rush.

In truth, this cereal should have been called DinoChitterlings, and it should have had the consistency of rancid meat left sitting inside of a Buffalo Wild Wings dumpster over Labor Day weekend somewhere in Phoenix, Arizona. Or, to put it in more familiar terms, the consistency of Fruity Pebbles 23 seconds after it has made contact with milk.

This latent dino-cannibalism masquerading as a children’s breakfast offering might cause us to wonder whether Dinersaurs cereal provided the catalyst for a young Jeffrey Dahmer to flaunt social taboos and feast upon the flesh of his human victims just as the Dinersaurs dinosaurs feast upon the victims of their own ritualized slaughter. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your faith or lack thereof in humanity), we may never know whether Dinersaurs could have unleashed an army of cannibalistic prepubescents hellbent on world domination because Dinersaurs went the way of their dinosaur predecessors and was pulled from grocery store shelves a few short months after its initial release.

And while there is yet no memorial dedicated to him on the mall in Washington, consider this the opening salvo in my campaign to see one erected there in honor of that Dinersaurs dinosaur who selflessly gave his life in service of countless American youths who voraciously consumed the symbolic representation of his flesh in what amounted to a late-1980s breakfast-time transubstantiation of the dino-Eucharist.