Breakfast Cereal Hall of Fame

The Breakfast Cereal Hall of Fame, like its sometimes mushy muse, has been greatly misunderstood: This Web paean to America's most important sugar-coated meal has turned up on more than one "worst of the Web" site. This is very unfair, for as the authors--"America's premiere cereal hysterians"--note right off the bat, over a Netscape-frosted background of Eucharist-shaped Honeycombs, "Like it or not, we Americans are what we eat, and we eat a lot of breakfast cereal." How much? "About ten pounds or 160 bowls of cereal per person per year." So stop sneering and pass the Coco Puffs. Surprisingly, the history of breakfast cereal is also the history of health food, religious intemperence and mass marketing in America. T. Coraghessan Boyle built an entire comic novel--The Road to Wellville--around this delicious irony, which makes Tony the Tiger the direct descendent of 19th Century Bible thumping medical quack/holistic food visionaries like C.W. Post and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford--the cerealistic minds behind the Cereal Hall of Fame Web site--offer a few golden nuggets of this history and fortify the experience with essential nostalgia. Remember Quisp, the propeller-headed alien who apparently suffered from the 1960s equivalent of sugar-induced hyperactivity, "Quazy Energy"? Or his "rival," the earth-core-dwelling Quake, who spiked his cereal "with deep-down sweetness and vitamins to give you the power of an earthquake"? Remember Freakies, the cereal with a cool concept (tree-dwelling, gloppy monsters), but with a metalic aftertaste that kept kids away in droves? (If you don't remember Freakies, you're either very young or very old.) Bruce and Crawford fondly recount the origins of these and other cerealebrities (Quisp and Quake, like Cap'n Crunch, were sired by the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Jay Ward). Bruce and Crawford also reproduce the actual cereal box art in glorious indexed color. And if you have the Quake-like fortitude to sit through downloads that move slower than plate tectonics, you can view 10-meg video clips of cartoon cereal pitchmen in their respective heydays. Only one problem with the Cereal Hall of Fame (which cross-promotes Bruce and Crawford's book on the history of the American cereal experience): Like two bowls of Cocoa Pebbles, enough is never enough. Unfortunately, the authors are miserly with the book excerpts, and tease us, as if dangling boxtop premiums, with a list of promising chapter titles like "Apocalypse Chow," "Battle Creek Babylon" and "Disney Diaspora." Don't they know that on the Net, information and sugar-smack-frosted-flake pops want to be free? (JW)

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