Politically incorrect breakfast cereal

When I was putting up today’s Fat City post about the potential rice problem in Japan, I was thinking back on when I first started eating rice. It wasn’t ever a staple in our home (unless someone brought carry-out Chinese food over), but I’ve always loved it. Even as the ingredient in a breakfast cereal. Suddenly I flashed on a long-forgotten memory from my past: So Hi!

So what? So Hi was the little Asian boy cartoon figure who shilled a cereal manufactured by Post called Sugar-Coated Rice Krinkles. I didn’t eat a lot of this cereal, but decades later, I can tell you exactly what it tasted like: a caramel-sweetened version of the more popular Kellogg’s Rice Krispies (which I passionately loved as a kid). I demanded my mother buy Rice Krinkles because this particular brand always had really good toy prizes in the box.

My siblings and I learned about the current breakfast cereal prizes on the TV commercials that aired non-stop during Saturday morning cartoons. I just found this hilarious vintage commercial for the cereal that would send up howls of protest today — it’s totally un-P.C. — but I suspect no one in the 1960s would have thought a thing about it — even though it evokes the same kind of response today as this commercial.