Cereal-Induced Superpowers

The name is pretty indicative of the concept. Basically, the cereal depicts mild-mannered men, women, children, or a cartoon Talking Animal consuming their product, and then suddenly excelling at sports, defeating bullies or actually acquiring superpowers.

The trope is an exaggeration of the idea that a good breakfast gives you enough energy for the day. Expect the comment "along with hard work, exercise and sensible diet" to be casually thrown in somewhere once in order to be technically true. It will also have to be consumed as part of a complete breakfast, or the magic won't work.

A marketing form of Power-Up Food (and may count as this if it's the mascot shown doing it). Compare Super Serum.

Examples of Cereal-Induced Superpowers include:

Cereals

• Kellogg's
  • The main theme of the Frosted Flakes "Show Them You're a Tiger" campaign.
  • Kellogg's was a health-food company originally. Kellogg's products could, according to its founder, detoxify your colon and keep you from masturbating to excess.
• The Honey Nut Cheerios Bee has gained super powers from time to time because he ate Honey Nut Cheerios.
  • Campaigns for original Cheerios have also done this with Peanuts characters, animated chalk drawings, etc. In fact, '60s era commercials for the original Cheerios featured a Mascot for whom Cheerios served the same purpose as spinach did for Popeye the Sailor—once the Cheerios boy ate a bowl of Cheerios, he was capable of just about any superhuman feat.
  • As did the French campaigns, exclusively with a Tortoise and Hare.
  • Bullwinkle was a spokescharacter, touting the cereal's benefits in a series of poetry-reading ads. As 'Casey At The Bat', he still strikes out, and is chased by an angry mob, but:

Everyone knows that Cheerios did not let Casey down -
They gave him strength and lots of GO...to get him out of town.

• • Cheerios had the Cheerios Kid who ate the cereal and got strength to seal volcanoes, rescue people and save his girlfriend, Cheerios Sue from wild animals, kidnappers, etc. Later they both ate Cheerios and worked as a team. The Kid and Sue were around from the fifties to the eighties.
• There was also a series of ade with Bullwinkle and the Cherrios kid doing some kind of competition like bicycle racing, etc. Bullwinkle gets his energy after a bowl of the stuff, but usually ends up crashing into walls and other things. The slogan?

Cheerios Kid: Cheerios gives you GO!
Bullwinkle: (dazed) But watch where you're goin'...

• One of the mascots of yesteryear, Sugar Bear of Post Sugar Crisp/Golden Crisp, would gain super strength upon eating just a handful of his cereal.
  • During the period where the name changed from Super Sugar Crisp to Super Golden Crisp (because sugar had recently become demonized), Sugar Bear could transform himself into "Super Bear." This was meant to transition to a mascot without "Sugar" in his name; however, Super Bear looked like a real, full sized, angry grizzly bear who could easily decide to maul you. Not the image you want for a cereal mascot.
  • Super Bear's monstrous nature was used to devastating effect in the webcomic Breakfast of the Gods
• Quaker Instant Oatmeal had Popeye turn down spinach and have instant oatmeal give him his super strength. This series of ads was pulled very quickly due to public outrage. Plus, it irked the actual Quakers, who are pacifists, to have such a violent person associated with their name.
  • Lately, they've had commercials showing that Quaker Oats cans apparently make handy jetpack fuel. Okay...
  • They aren't fueling the jetpacks, they are the jetpacks.
• In Britain, Ready-Brek (instant porridge, basically) used to run adverts in which kids, after eating it, acquired a red glow around them; this was meant to indicate that the breakfast was "Central Heating... for Kids", but naturally, the ads were parodied by comedians attributing the glow to other things - like living next door to Sellafield.
  • In more recent ads the kids have also been subject to bizarre hallucinations, which can be defeated by manifesting objects made of the red glow.
• The eternal implication of Wheaties' packaging and marketing, which hasn't changed in decades.
• British cereal Weetabix did a whole series of these: Elmer Fudd dropped his gun and ran from Bugs Bunny after Bugs ate Weetabix. The Three Bears stopped being angry about someone sitting in their chairs after finding she'd also eaten the Weetabix. Robin Hood ran away from the Sheriff after seeing Weetabix on his table. The Wooden Horse of Troy came to life and made a run for it after seeing the Trojans eat Weetabix. Delilah cuts off Samson's hair, but flees when she sees he is about to eat some Weetabix. Only poor old Ned Kelly failed to use Weetabix-induced superpowers; he couldn't get the spoon through the slot in his helmet.
  • The Australian version of Weetabix, Wheetbix, constantly hires cricketers to endorse the product.
  • There's another Weetabix one. In it the Trickster character Hungarr gets super speed if he eats Frosted Weetabix.
    • Almost like they're admitting the sugar coating makes you hyper....
  • And then there's this other one, it has a bear in it prowling around the house and turns into a human after eating Weetabix.
  • The reason the Marie Celeste was found adrift with nobody on board? The pirate crew was about to attack a merchant vessel, but they panicked and dove overboard when they saw that its crew was eating Weetabix. Never mind that the Marie Celeste wasn't a pirate ship.
• Referenced and parodied in the third and last "Dexter Riley" movie from Disney, 1975's The Strongest Man in the World, in which Kurt Russell's hapless college student and his friends discover a combination of chemicals and breakfast cereal which produces temporary super strength.
• Subversion: the very healthy-sounding British cereal Sugar Puffs would supposedly transform children into giant, yellow hairy monsters if they weren't allowed to eat it. The ads were withdrawn when it turned out that they were actually scaring children. After that, they cut the transformation aspect and had the so called Honey Monster doing "cool" things like snowboarding or playing football. Probably the only instance of a company using Nightmare Fuel to convince kids to get on board.
• Honey Comb cereal in the US did similar, featuring a little fuzzy ball of frenzy who goes crazy at the very mention of the cereal. Later, they switched it to actual children who turn into the creatures.
  • Cocoa Puffs' mascot, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, has been at the first stage but hasn't quite moved to the second... yet.
• The Brain Grain cereal from We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story! made Rex and the other dinos super intelligent.
  • And its Evil Counterpart, the Brain Drain cereal, has the opposite effect.
• Played with in the Lightning Lucy children's novels, where the titular Magical Girl is hired to do a cereal advert and the director asks her to eat the cereal and float into the air, implying the cereal was the source of her abilities.
• Parodied when Shaquille O'Neal publicly admitted to using performance-enhancing cereals.
• Subverted in the commercial for Kellogg's Powerpuff Girls Cereal, where Mojo Jojo steals a box of the stuff from the girls and eats it, believing it to be the secret to their power. They beat him up just as easily as before.
• A '60s ad campaign for Kellogg's Apple Jacks told kids the cereal would give them the power to beat up bullies (no "hard work, exercise and sensible diet" qualifiers back then).
• This http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YpOw8o34BM&feature=related would be Moment of Awesome for all cereal ads. You WISH you could eat Weetabix chocolate cereal and dubstep like this girl while teddy bears dance a cacophony of stuffed dance moves around you.

Other Products

• The Vault energy drink is shown giving the drinker enough strength to dive into the sea and bring up more oyster pearls for the girl than the other guy.
  • Vault apparently also causes the drinker (always a guy, by the way) to develop incredible robot-scarecrow-building skills and to be able to use a squirrel as a weapon.
  • Various Billboards and Print Ads for Vault feature things like a Lumberjack carrying an entire tree over his shoulder, and a man catching an enormous fish.
• Red Bull give you WIIIINGS!
  • Actually, it helps to temporarily restore mental alertness or wakefulness when experiencing fatigue or drowsiness.
• A commercial for New Zealand Anchor Mega-Milk features a young kid who turns into a muscular anthropomorphic bovine crimefighter called Mega Bull.
• Many classic adverts for Guinness show people who just drank the alcoholic beverage in question performing feats of incredible strength. This includes carrying around steel girders and pulling horses in carts.
• There is a subversion in a series of commercials for Bud Light. The announcer says that drinking the beer will give you some super power/ablity, then shows someone using it with bad results and then the announcer says this no longer comes with the beer. Some examples include the ability to breathe fire, in which a man practically burns down his girlfriend's house, and X-ray vision, where a woman is horrified to see some fat guy naked.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger got a very epic example of this in these commercials... Or at least, I think it's the drink giving him those powers, because I've never seen him laugh like that..
  • Yes you have, you just don't want to remember it.
• The old Irn Bru ads with the slogan "Barr's Irn Bru, made in Scotland from girders" showed people aquiring super-strength and invulnerability from the drink.
  • A similar theme occurs in the "Guinness For Strength" ads.
• One New Zealand popsicle commercial implied that teenage Space Marines could POWER UP THEIR SHIP by eating a specific kind of popsicle.
• The print ad for Chef Boyardee's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pasta is a two-page comic in which the Turtles catch Those Two Bad Guys Rocksteady and Bebop stealing their supply of the pasta being advertised. Before taking them down, the Turtles munch down on the pasta because it gives them "total turtle power".
• Subverted in a Sprite ad. A boy drinks Sprite on a basketball court and then tries to dunk while a voicover says, (paraphrasing) "If you want to play like the NBA stars..." And he falls on his face. "...practice."
• In the 1940s, DC Comics had a series of one-page ads featuring Pepsi The Pepsi-Cola Cop, which was Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a police officer overcomes problems by drinking a bottle of Pepsi and becoming an instant Badass.
  • Well, if Spider-Man can foil criminals through the strategic use of Twinkies...
• While not consuming the product per se, various Holiday Inn Express commercials feature this.

First Guy: "Are you sure you know what you are doing/are you an expert at this?"
Guy performing feat: "No, but I did stay at a holiday Inn Express Last Night."

• Winner ice cream turns people into polar bears.
• PF Flyers had an advertising campaign in the 50s and 60s that claimed that due to a " PF Magic Wedge" (AKA a cushioned removable insole), you can "Run faster and Jump higher" with you wear PF sneakers.
• A classic Campbell's soup commercial features a young boy so overcome by the wintry conditions outside that he's turned into a snowman. But after consuming a bowl of Campbell's soup that his mother sets down for him on the table as soon as he arrives, all the ice melts away and reveals the red-haired, freckled boy inside.
• Golden Age Tootsie Roll comic ads had Captain Tootsie, a superhero who ate Tootsie Rolls to give himself a burst of energy before saving the day.
• She only does it the once, but the titular dog from Martha Speaks was able to talk after eating a bowl of alphabet soup.
• A juice drink ad has a kid at a school talent show take a sip, grab the mic, and make a big theatrical gesture, preparing our expectations for some amazing singing — then subverting them by having the kid make armpit farts.
• A series of Mentos (The Freshmaker!) commercials had the protagonist trying to navigate obstacles to get to his love interest, and he usually comes up with a clever, lateral-thinking solution after popping one of the advertised mints.

Parodies

• A Prairie Home Companion is fond of making fun of this kind of commercial with their fake ones:
  • The famous Powdermilk Biscuits campaign, which "gives shy persons the strength to do what needs to be done."
  • The Catchup Advisory Council's "ads" for ketchup tend to focus on how the "mellowing agents" in ketchup will help you, well, get mellower, but occasionally they claim something more outlandish.
  • No matter how terrible your day was, all you need is some Bebop-A-Rebop Rhubarb Pie and Rhubarb Pie Filling and "suddenly things don't seem so bad."
• POWERTHIRST gives you MENERGY!
  • Wow, I could get "menergy" just by going onto any online secondhand music retailer, searching for Patrick Cowley, and purchasing the single. ;)
    • But would that make you SO ENERGETIC you could have FOUR HUNDRED BABIES who run as fast as KENYANS?
• Lightspeed energy bars were a running gag on Justice League since The Flash did a commercial for them. In it, he is fighting the Rogues and his speed runs out until a kid on a skateboard throws him a Lightspeed bar. In a later episode, Deadshot smuggles a ceramic gun onto the JLA watchtower by hiding the parts in Lightspeed wrappers.
• "Why does Powdered Toast give you sooooo much energy? Because it comes in a can, stupid!"
  • It turns out that powdered toast can not actually give kids the power to fly, despite having Vitamin F.
• "Mintberry CRUUUNCH!!" Only the power of mint and berry combined can defeat the Dark One.
• Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a Stealth Parody of horror and 80s buddy action series, features a set of demonically possessed bagpipes that strip the protagonist of his trousers and make his legs glow orange, in a dark parody on the Ready Brek/porridge commercials. Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
• Referenced in the Danny Phantom episode "What You Want" -- Dash wanted to be a monster to crush the opposing football team, and after Desiree turns him into one, one of the announcers for the game comments, "Wow! It looks like those high-protein breakfasts are really paying off!"
• During the early 90ies, the Norwegian soft drink Solo ran a series of adverts that would always start out as stereotypical adverts of this kind... Only for nothing to really happen when they drank it, or for things to somehow get even worse. The tagline used was that Solo was "probably the only soft drink that does nothing but quench your thirst".