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This weekend while in the sticks of Pennsylvania I reluctantly found myself in the evil empire that is Walmart. I needed some quick snacks, and the options of the average consumer in Landisburg (aka Nowheresville) are severely limited. Needless to say I was quite horrified by what I found. Childrens' branding has really reached an all time low—and Count Chocula is going to be my sacrificial lamb.

In search of some healthy weekend day-trip snack food, I found myself in the cereal aisle, and was immediately assaulted with the Neon Pantone Colors of General Mills and Post brand cereals. Except I immediately noticed that the fronts of the cereal boxes HAD no cereal on them. They were JUST characters. The brand has so overtaken the product that the product LITERALLY does not exist anymore. It's wasn't a chocolate kid's cereal—it was a big ugly head on a box! That's it!!

Using silly cartoon characters to brand sugar-coated junk has been around since the birth of supermarkets, when the rise of food package design first took hold. Dan Goodsell, author of Krazy Kids Food!, has an entire portfolio of old characters who managed to entice my grandfather, and my father, and then myself as we were all reluctantly dragged through the market by our multi-tasking mothers. The characters were so fun and colorful and interesting that we would lunge for them in the aisle, and scream until we got them! I remember thinking Tony the Tiger was one Bad-Ass Mother. My brother was a sucker for Cookie Crisp, although my mother rarely gave in. In the case of Count Chocula, it was designed in 1971 by Laura Levine, a copywriter for the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample.

But looking back on my supermarket memories, I remember being excited by a variety of exciting reasons to pick certain cereal brands: You mean it's CHOCOLATE? And it has MARSHMALLOWS? And that cool guy on the cover? AND a maze on the back?? MOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!! And then off I went, either crying in defeat or giggling with victory.

These days, however, it seems that demographics studies and marketing agencies have gone the Nike route and have stopped selling a product, and started selling an idea. Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, came to the conclusion that he did not run a "shoe company" but rather an "experience of what it means to be an athlete." Since then, Mr. Knight has put the quality of his shoes behind the quality of his advertising. It seems General Mills, creators of Count Chocula, have also come to the same conclusion. I can just hear them in the back room, quipping that "We aren't a food company anymore—we sell fun from now on."

As a result, the screaming child who comes barreling down the supermarket aisle, will no longer see a variety of food options, but rather a hallway full of familiar cartoon characters fondly smiling on you. Not only have the faces grown and the cereals shrunk, but in Count Chocula and Co's case, even the silly typography has shrunk and relocated itself from a Masthead to a byline. It's really appalling.

Zipping around the food aisle I also noticed a clam-shell box full of Donut Peaches, or Chinese flat peaches, depending on your preferred nomenclature. Iove those things, so I grabbed a box. To my horror, they weren't just peaches, but rather Disney Garden TM Peaches. Complete with an illustrated Johnny Depp and an accompanying parrot, I reluctantly supported a franchise because there were no non-Disney peaches around. But hell, at least its fruit: all natural (I think), healthy (I guess), and low in artificial sugar (I'm pretty sure). These days you just don't know.