Berry Berry Kix

Keep an eye out for the movie. Michael Bay directs.

Berry Krispies, Bamm-Bamm Berry Pebbles...everybody has a berry version of an otherwise innocent cereal. Even Kix, the world's most flavorless cereal, has one. Berry Berry Kix. A cereal so nice they named it twice.

All natural...plus high fructose corn syrup.

I'm lying. It's bad. Berry, berry bad. It says, "No artificial flavors" on the box but I don't know how this can be. I'm pretty sure 'toasted typewriter ribbon' and 'cinnamon dusted plastic shavings' do not naturally occur in the world. If you read the side of the box, General Mills purports that high fructose corn syrup grows non-artificially in rain forests alongside the typewriter ribbon trees.

The back of the box is a chaotic vision of the American mall as resort. The activities involve finding the characters who are repeated in the drawing, finding the photographers and matching their corresponding number to the picture they took, and some stupid decoder which reveals the pithy answer to the question, "What does a berry use for a bandage?" "A berry patch." Kill me.

Why do cereal box designers go nuts whenever 'berry' is in the title? Almost every store in the mall incorporates the theme. Berry Republic. McBerries. Berrydales (offering a berry big sale). Berry Best Diner. Trouser Land. Berry Extraordinary. Wait...Trouser Land?

You can get a rough approximation of the puzzle solutions by noting their position on the image above. But really, if you need help on this, what hope do you have of finishing Halo 3?

Behind the movie ticket salesman (who is obviously skimming from the register based on his ludicrous smile), you can see a poster for "Kix: The Movie." Not many people remember this. It was directed by Michael Bay and featured 90 minutes of quick cuts, explosions and terrible acting...of Kix cereal. It's Bay's magnum opus, really--a penthouse view of his sum total contribution to the art of cinema. The Kix balls sit in a bowl. We don't know where the bowl is because no single shot lasts for more than 1.3 seconds, but we can surmise it is on a table. A table in Los Angeles. Or possibly Malibu.

The Hero Kix is part of an elite team of cereal pieces charged to protect the other members of the box from milk. He was married, but his wife died in a tragic accident in the opening scene in order to generate artificial sympathy from the viewer. He also has a dog with an eye-patch (named Patches) which is not pandering at all. Also not pandering is his adoption of the neighbor's kid who was orphaned during an earlier milk attack (that you can learn about in the prequel novel written by Timothy Zahn). Oh, yeah, and he's also the most badass Kix ever. Even Batman says so, which, wow, I mean, name-dropping Batman isn't an attempt to cozy up to the geek crowd. Hero Kix plays Madden in the third scene to show us he's one of the guys. The Token Female Kix proclaims her undying love for Hero Kix sometime before the end of the second act and without laying any characterful groundwork to justify the scene. The Bad Kix does something really, really bad in the first act, does something really, really badder in the second act (and is nearly thwarted but not quite), then threatens to do something really, really baddest in the third act during which time he is nearly successful but is thwarted at the last possible second (and yet prior to Hero Kix and Token Female Kix kissing).

It's a great Hollywood vision, and Michael Bay is a unique talent who surely could not be replaced by, say, duct taping a video camera to a Prairie dog.