Oatmeal Swirlers

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For this edition of Retro Ramblings, we’re jumping in the time machine to revisit another junk food lost love of mine. We’re going to take a look at one of the more interesting breakfast foods of the late ’80s and early ’90s…Oatmeal Swirlers. Do you remember this? It seems like the split between people who remember it, and those who don’t is 50/50. If you remember it, enjoy this trip down memory lane. If you don’t remember it, get ready for a quick education.

I was very fortunate that my Mom didn’t work when I was growing up. My Dad made a good living and she was able to stay at home and raise us kids for the most part. At two different points, she took jobs and only worked for 6 weeks at each, so for 99% of my childhood, she was always home. This meant that every morning before school, she was up early and made a home-cooked breakfast for the family. Most days that consisted of eggs and toast, or biscuits and gravy, and sometimes her home-cooked oatmeal. 

On the rare occasion when she or one of us had something going on early, she would turn to something quick like frozen pancakes or waffles, or cereal. My favorite of the quick breakfast options however was instant oatmeal. I loved Quaker Maple Brown Sugar Instant Oatmeal. It was a staple of my breakfast diet then, and it still is now. No other instant oatmeal could touch it in my eyes. That is until I first saw a commercial for General Mills’ Oatmeal Swirlers. 

It was instant oatmeal that came with a squeeze pack of what I guess would be best described as jelly. You could squeeze out smiley faces, or words, or even play tic tac toe with the pack. It was awesome. When this stuff hit the market it took instant oatmeal to a whole new level. 

While I don’t even faintly remember how it tasted, I do remember how much fun breakfast was on those mornings. I can remember almost being excited about going to bed on those nights when I knew that Oatmeal Swirlers was going to be for breakfast the next day. Sadly, like so many other favorite foods of my youth, this one bit the dust far too early. For a long time after it vanished from the shelves, I missed it terribly. Time went on and other breakfast novelties came along to take its place, but it certainly left its mark on me to this day I wish I could pick up another box of this stuff and share it with the kiddos. 

Now, some people will tell you that you can duplicate the magic yourself using various kinds of oatmeal and jellies. But I disagree. The magic was how it all came together. The low-quality oatmeal, the over-sweet “jelly” in its plastic pouch, and the simple, yet beautiful design of the box. You can’t replicate shit like that. I’m not even going to try.

Oatmeal Swirlers
Oatmeal Swirlers
Oatmeal Swirlers
Oatmeal Swirlers

    Highlights From a 1988 Toys ‘R’ Us Sale Paper

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    On this week’s episode of The Retro Network Podcast, Jason and I scoured through an old Toys ‘R’ Us sale paper from 1988. Even at just sixteen pages, the thing was loaded with all kinds of cool toys from the past. You can listen to us salivate over everything in the ad on the show, but here are five things from it that I want to highlight in this edition of Retro Ramblings.

    Army Gear Playsets from Galoob

    Until we recorded the show, I was completely unaware of the existence of these incredible looking toys. They’re kind of like Transformers in that they’re two distinct toys in one. Like the M-16…you could play with it as a machine gun while running around chasing the neighbor kids, but you could also open it up into a playset for the Combat Troops.

    Besides the M-16, it looks like there was also a flashlight that transformed into an air defense station, a watch that transformed into some kind of missile base, and a pistol that turned into a 3-level silo…and they had sounds!

    Not to mention the combat troops themselves which you would obviously need to ramp up the fun with the playsets. And for just $3.99 you got ten good guys and ten bad guys to battle it out. This is a line I’m going to have to look into further.

    Bone Age from Kenner

    Way back when, well I guess in 1988 as it turns out, I saw commercials for what I thought were pretty cool-looking toys. I never ended up having any of them, and they gradually slipped from my mind until just a few years ago. I searched high and low for a name for the toy line with no luck. Then I did what I should have done in the first place. I turned to Twitter for the answer and got it pretty quickly. Bone Age.

    I had been enamored with the “vehicles” and the like from the line, and still am today. So when we flipped the page in the sale paper and happened upon these things, I was ecstatic. These aren’t even the best representations of the toys in the line. It wouldn’t fit this post if I started adding images from other sources, so you’ll just have to google them yourselves.

    But the gist is that you’ve got these big skeleton dinosaurs and the cavemen that ride on them I guess. But some of the other toys in the line are net launchers and other such fancy weapons. Maybe the coolest thing about them was that you got to put the dinosaur skeletons together before you played with them, adding another layer of fun to the toy.

    Crossfire from Milton Bradley

    Raise your hand if you remember the badass commercial promoting this game. I can’t really see if you’re raising your hand or not, but if I could, and you weren’t raising your hand, I would pretend I didn’t see it out of pity for you. That commercial kicked seven kinds of ass and had more ass lined up down the street waiting to be kicked.

    Besides Fireball Island, Crossfire may be the most fondly remembered board game from the era. It was pretty simple, as you and your opponent both were equipped with guns that shot small ball bearings across the surface of the board. You had to use those ball bearings to knock a couple of pucks into your opponent’s trench. At the same time, you had to keep your opponent from knocking them into your trench.

    This game was just so much fun. It usually went quickly with someone winning after just a few minutes, but what a few minutes it was. Your hand would get sore from pulling the trigger so many times in just a short span. And loud. Holy crap was this a loud game to play with the ball bearings bouncing off the plastic sides of the game board at high speeds. I’m sure a fair number of parents second-guessed their decision to buy this for their kids.

    G.I. Joe Toys from Hasbro

    As you already know, G.I. Joe was my bag back in the ’80s. I had more than my fair share of Joes, Cobras, vehicles, and playsets, and I loved every one of them.

    One of the bigger pieces I had was this Mobile Command center pictured on the left side of the image. That thing was massive with its three levels that would fold out. And when it was closed up, it actually rolled along. As Jason said on the pod, it looked like a sand crawler from Star Wars.

    But the playset was filled with every kind of nook and cranny you needed. There was a jail cell for captured Cobras, a command center, gun turrets, missile launchers, and even a “trap door” that would allow the Joes to slide down from the top level to the ground in somewhat of a quick deployment mechanism.

    I never had any hands-on experience with any of the other vehicles pictured in the ad, but I did have the Road Pig figure pictured in the set. He was instantly one of my favorite figures and was the resident badass on the Cobra side of things. He and Sgt. Slaughter went on to have numerous knock-down, drag-out battles in my bedroom.

    Nintendo Games from Various

    I never get tired of looking at old Nintendo game ads. Whether singular titles or ads like this featuring a glut of gaming goodness. Nintendo was the undisputed king of playtime in this era, and these games are the reason.

    I see several that I actually owned featured in this ad. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Double Dribble, Contra, Defender of the Crown, and my all-time favorite game for the system, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.

    Blades of Steel always piqued my interest, but I never got to play it. Bayou Billy had a lot of hype around it if I remember correctly, but I never was around it either. Skate or Die was a perennial favorite of my best friend Geoffrey so I got to dabble with it a little bit too. But like I said, these games were the reason Nintendo was king, and I don’t even know if I could figure up all the hours I spent on the games I mentioned above.

    So that’s just a little sampling from the sixteen pages of awesome that was the Toys ‘R’ Us sale paper that Jason and I covered on The Retro Network Podcast. You can give it a listen to hear us talk about everything in it and share old memories. Before you give it a listen though, you can view the entire 16-page ad here.

    Dr. Pepper Gum

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    In the late ’80s, we were drowning in a sea of gum choices as kids. In those days, gum still came in packs of trading cards, it came all shredded in a pouch meant to resemble chewing tobacco, heck….it even came in a round stick wrapped in paper to mimic cigarettes! 

    But a new fad hit the shelves when bubble gum with liquid centers hit the market. I don’t recall what the first gum was to showcase the new feature, but I DO remember the first one to make a “splash”, and it was Dr. Pepper gum. It was a simple concept. It was gum that tasted like Dr. Pepper, with a liquid center that also tasted like Dr. Pepper. What a concept. 

    As a kid in those days, one of the few things your life revolved around was soda and all of a sudden we had a gum that tasted like soda! Life couldn’t get much better. For those of you who have read my previous articles, you’ll know that my parents rarely felt the need to buy into gimmicks or fads, but when it came to this gum, they were both happy to pay for a pack of it whenever I would throw it up on the checkout counter. 

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    Tetris for Nintendo

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    We all know the story of this game. Several different odd-shaped blocks fall from the top of the board, and you had to rotate them, move them left or right to get them to drop into position to complete a line and make it go away. If you weren’t quick enough or smart enough to do that on a consistent basis, your board would be full and your game would be over.
    My first experience with the game came with the launch of the Game Boy.  A local department store had the Game Boy demo set up in their electronics department.  Every weekend while my mother would do her shopping, I killed time playing Tetris on the demo machine.  It wasn’t long until I had enough money saved up to buy the game for the NES, and then a much bigger, and full-color version of the game was mine.

    It was so simple of a game, even an adult could play it too!  And that’s exactly what happened at my house, and why this game is so high up the list. My father never would play video games. He didn’t even like to sit and watch me play a game. So when he saw how easy Tetris was, he wanted to give it a try. For months afterward, we would play it together, seeing who could get the highest score and the most completed lines. He would even be the one most times to suggest us playing. Those times spent with my Dad, doing something that I loved are ones that I’ll never forget, and Tetris gets a high spot on my all-time list because of it.

    Wax Pack Flashback: Operation Desert Shield Cards (1991)

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    Here is another old Wax Pack Flashback video I did for the TRNTV Youtube channel. In this one, I open an old pack of Operation Desert Shield trading cards from 1991. I was fascinated by the thoughts of these cards when I saw them on store shelves back when they were new. I never picked any up though because there were other cards that I was more interested in and only had so much allowance money to go around. But I found some unopened packs on eBay for cheap and finally got to quench my cravings from all those years ago. You can watch the video below and live vicariously through me as I flip through the cards in the pack.

    Morning Funnies Cereal

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    Morning Funnies Cereal was produced by Ralston Cereals in 1988 & 1989. It was a super sweet cereal, bright in color and shaped like smiley faces.  The taste and shape weren’t the hooks for this cereal though…..the box was. I know what you’re thinking.  How could a box be better than what was inside?  Well, because the box featured comic strips on the front and back panels!  In addition, the back of the box featured a full-size flap that opened up and featured even more comics on the inside!  It was nirvana for comic strip lovers. The company actually won an award in 1988 for “innovative packaging” for the fifth-panel design.

    The comics featured were Dennis the Menace, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Family Circus, Luann, Marvin, Funky Winkerbean, and What A Guy!.  Not a bad lineup, but still it left something to be desired when Garfield, Peanuts, and The Far Side were all the rage at the point this cereal was on the market. 

    The cereal was canceled in 1989 due to poor sales…or so we’re supposed to believe.  I call that a conspiracy theory.  As good as this stuff was, there’s no way it had poor sales.  The ultra sweetness of the cereal turned off parents, and the lack of fresh cartoons turned off the kids.

    From my own experiences, I remember seeing the commercials for the cereal and feeling that I just had to have it. For one thing, it was part of my morning ritual to read the funny pages from the newspaper while I ate breakfast every morning, so this cereal seemed right up my alley.

    My mom bought just one box. She rarely went for gimmicky cereal like this but caved under my constant pressure. Wait a minute.  Was I one of the kids who were responsible for those “poor sales”?  No, I’m going to plead innocence here.  That was my mom’s doing.  Anyway, I don’t remember what the cereal tasted like, but I do remember enjoying reading those comics on the box…..at least for the first two or three mornings. After that, the novelty faded and I was back to reading fresh daily comics from the newspaper.  I remember looking at the comics on the boxes at the grocery store, and they were all the same.  Maybe if they had different strips on different boxes in the same case, it could have led to more sales.  As it were, you could grow very tired of seeing the same strip every morning.

    It seemed like a good idea at the time but quickly fizzled in execution. However, I would love to see it back on the shelves at the local grocer just to take one more chance on it.

    The commercial was a lot of fun too with all the comic characters featured in one place.  Give it a watch and then let me know if you remember and miss this cereal too.

    Wax Pack Flashback: Topps Baseball Cards (1992)

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    Here’s another episode of my Wax Pack Flashback series of videos I did for The Retro Network on our TRNTV YouTube channel. In this video, I open a pack of my favorite baseball cards ever, 1992 Topps! I believe the ’92 Topps baseball series is the set I acquired the most cards for in all of my years of collecting. I just thought they were some of the best-looking cards I had seen up to that point, and they were readily available everywhere I went, so I was picking up a pack or two on an almost daily basis back in 1992. So enjoy this little trip down memory lane and watch along as I break a pack and see what I find inside.

    My Origin Story: Nintendo

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    Nintendo was a big part of most kids’ lives who are now my age. I’m sure we had all spent our fair share of time in arcades pumping quarters into machines, and probably even took a few turns playing Atari, ColecoVision, or other earlier systems. But when Nintendo came along, it turned the video gaming world on its head and changed the business forever. We probably have it to thank for the continued video game obsession today. But for every one of us who loved Nintendo, there was a singular point in time when we first got to experience playing a game on one. This is the story of my first time.

    Let me set the stage for you.  It was spring or early summer 1987.  I’m 9 years old and hanging out at my grandparent’s house on some lazy day.  My uncle Ernest is there visiting too, and somehow the conversation turned to him talking about this new thing called Nintendo that he had gotten for my cousin Tim.  I’m sitting and listening in puzzlement and amazement at the same time.

    I’ve not heard of this Nintendo thing.  Somehow, someway, all the marketing and hype for it had completely eluded me.  Heard about it at school? Nope. Talked excitedly about it with my friends? No, missed out on that one too.  In what was surely a massive marketing blitz and rampant fever for Nintendo, I had somehow been completely oblivious to its existence.

    So continuing to listen to Ernest as he spun intriguing tales of this game called Super Mario Brothers, I am becoming increasingly jealous of Tim and this “wonder box” that he now owns.  Then it happens. Ernest looked at me and said that I should come over and play it with Tim. He promised I would love it. The man had no idea what he had just unleashed upon me.

    Going to visit Tim wasn’t any kind of chore since he lived right beside me.  When I got home that afternoon, I strolled next door, and what I found there left an indelible mark on me for the rest of my life.  This slightly odd-shaped gray and black box had me hooked from the first moment I picked up the controller.

    Tim explained to me the basics of how it worked….how there were cartridges that contained the games that you inserted into the system, and hand-held controllers with which to play the games.  You didn’t need quarters or anything. You just turned it on and played arcade-like video games!

    He gave me the basic rundown on how to play Super Mario Brothers, and let me watch him play for a while.  A LONG while. Eventually, he asked if I would like to play and I’m sure my answer was something along the lines of “HECK YEAH!”.  Sadly, he set us up in two-player mode which meant I would be Luigi. At that moment, I didn’t really care. What I didn’t know then was that Mario went first, and got to keep playing until he died.  Tim had already gotten quite good at the game, so I had to wait impatiently for quite a while before I got my turn.

    Eventually, my time came.  I was so excited and barely able to contain myself.  The only thing I can even remotely compare that moment to is the first time I got a girl in the back seat of my car.  The nervousness and awkwardness of the moment were overwhelming. Much like when I had the girl in the backseat of the car, I hit the wrong button and it was over just as quickly as it had begun.  I had watched his moves intently and thought I was ready to run through the same levels I had just watched him complete. I mistimed the first jump and died a horrible death at the hands of a mutated mushroom.  After roughly 5 seconds of play, I was relegated back to the sidelines to sit and watch Tim and Mario dominate the playtime for another 15 – 20 minutes.

    The afternoon continued on like this up into the evening, and when it was time to go, I was feeling a lot less enthusiastic about the whole video gaming experience.  In 4 hours of time spent with him, I had amassed about 20 minutes of total play. I went home thinking that it seemed fun, but I wasn’t really sure since I didn’t get very much hands-on time with the game.  

    The following day, however, was a different story.  I showed back up at his house early and wasted no time in asking if he wanted to play Super Mario Brothers some more.  He darkened my whole world when he said, “Nah, I don’t want to play Mario today.” Just as quickly as he darkened the day, he lit it right back up when he said: “Let’s play Pro Wrestling instead.”  PRO WRESTLING?!? There was a game for Nintendo about Pro Wrestling?!?

    Tim and I were both HUGE fans of pro wrestling in general and the NWA in particular.  We watched it together religiously and were huge fans of the Rock & Roll Express. He showed me the cartridge, and I’m surprised I didn’t wet my pants with excitement right then and there.  I may have, but I don’t really remember. When that game started up, it was like a choir singing Hallelujah!

    We went through the cast of characters and were excited about the possibilities of matches we could have.  Since Tim hadn’t played the game much yet, we were pretty much on even footing when it came to experience. And throw in the fact that this was a game that both players played at the same time instead of taking turns meant that I got a whole lot more hands-on time with this than I ever would have gotten being Luigi on Super Mario Brothers.

    We spent the entire day playing Pro Wrestling and I personally didn’t care at all about not getting to play Mario anymore.  The next several days were like that, with us playing Pro Wrestling by day, and me begging my parents for my own Nintendo by night.  

    About a week later, my family went to the Hills Department Store in Bristol where my Dad picked up my first Nintendo Entertainment System for me, along with the Pro Wrestling cartridge, and a Space Invaders-type knockoff called Alpha Mission.  But I’ll save the details about that game for another time.

    I can remember getting it home that night and being anxious as hell for my dad to get it hooked up to the television. By the time he had gotten everything hooked up and in place, it was getting late into the night. My mom let me play one quick match on Pro Wrestling, but then it was time for bed she said. I was like a kid going to bed on Christmas Eve with so much excitement coursing through my veins that it was hard to sleep. I’m sure I spent the night with visions of brain busters and somersault kicks dancing in my head.

    I got up the next morning before the sun was up, and was immediately in the living room to play more Pro Wrestling. This was a Saturday, so that meant I was choosing Nintendo over my Saturday morning tradition of watching cartoons. But that was ok. I had watched cartoons my whole life. Nintendo was a new thing, and it wasn’t going to take a backseat to anything that day, even the glory that we now refer to reverently as ’80s cartoons.

    I probably spent the entire day playing Nintendo. Most likely I played Pro Wrestling for most of that time, but I also popped in that Alpha Mission cartridge and gave it a go as well. My dad bought it because he thought he might enjoy playing it. I can only remember him giving it a shot one time, and from then on, it was mine all mine. His interest in Nintendo faded within the first 24 hours of having it in the house.

    Within a seven-day period, I had gone from not knowing what the hell Nintendo even was, to playing one, owning one, and becoming obsessed with it. I bet if I thought about it, I could put that week in my life up there in the top 10 weeks in my life overall. I’ve been a Nintendo enthusiast since that point in time, and it all started with that first trip to Tim’s house. And Pro Wrestling will forever hold the distinction of the game that originally stole my heart, and I still keep a pristine copy of it on display in my home. Right behind it, you can see pictures of my kids.

    Time Capsule: 1989 KayBee Toys Sale Ad

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    I’ve got a very fun Time Capsule

    Welcome to Retro Ramblings

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    I’ve spent most of my adult life looking backward. Hell, I spent a lot of my teenage years looking backward. The difference is that while in my teens, I was looking back fondly on my childhood days a few years prior, and as an adult (allegedly) I spend my time looking back at both my teenage years AND my childhood.

    I knew I was never really alone in doing this, but I spent a lot of years wandering around in the dark without many folks to talk about old stuff with. I first got online in 1996, but it took me until the year 2000 to discover nostalgia-based websites. Then blogs came along and I stumbled across a few of those whose primary focus was talking about stuff I liked from the ’80s and early ’90s. A couple of years after that, I discovered Retro-Daze and found out that I could actually share my own memories with a group of like-minded people.

    So I started writing articles about things I enjoyed while growing up. I was a pretty fortunate kid who had a good childhood, and I found that I had plenty of inspiration for writing articles. My parents weren’t rich, or even well-off. But my dad’s business provided what I would call a comfortable lifestyle for the family. There was always food on the table, and new clothes when we needed them. When I was into something, like a toy line, I usually ended up with a decent amount of it to play with. So I was able to make a lot of positive memories from those days.

    Fast forward a couple of years, and I had found several other bloggers and webmasters whose writing styles I started to emulate. I enjoyed that for a while, but I found that just writing about a “thing” for the sake of writing about it wasn’t fulfilling. I wasn’t sharing my own experiences with that “thing”. I was just writing for attention. And I grew to really dislike that. And after a while, I decided to end that phase of my nostalgia writing and focus instead on writing memories. Writing about stuff that I was actually passionate about instead of writing about something just because I think other people enjoyed it years ago.

    Fast forward a couple of more years, and I ended up co-founding The Retro Network with Jason from Rediscover the ’80s. Jason and I clicked right away, and before long we were joined by a handful of other creators and now have a blossoming community of writers who share memories, along with writing features about “things”. It’s a nice blend. We also have several podcasts as part of the network, and even a dedicated YouTube channel that presents nostalgia-themed original videos. I’ve been so blessed to be able to be a part of that community and to help nurture it.

    With The Retro Network being a place where I can just write about “things” when I want to, it frees me up to just share memories here at Retro Ramblings. And that’s what I intend to do. You shouldn’t really find random posts about “things” here. What you should find, I hope, are essays and articles from my heart, with plenty of memories to fill the space with.

    I’ll be sharing memories of toys I had and some I didn’t but really wanted. Stories about Nintendo, G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, ’90s comic books, trading cards, and one of my favorite subjects of all…extinct junk food. There’ll be other stuff thrown in along the way too, I promise.

    A lot of my nostalgia has to deal with my mom, who is now in a nursing home suffering from dementia. It’s a cruel disease, and I’ve watched it wipe away most of her memories. It saddens me tremendously that she can no longer remember all of the fun times she and I enjoyed together through the years. That is a big reason for doing Retro Ramblings. It’s kind of a tribute to her as I reminisce about the fun she helped make possible by buying me those toys, Nintendo games, and candies that can no longer be found.

    So I hope you enjoy this winding trip down memory lane that I’m going to take you on. It’s going to be a fun ride.

    – Mickey