i remember a time when there were three chefs on every box of cinnamon toast crunch. i didn’t really know their names (everyone knows wendell now, but the other two are bob and quienno, apparently), but i imagined they each had their own role in the vast kitchen at general mills cereal headquarters. just like how the turtles had different abilities, except for when their bandanas were all red sometimes. (anyone else remember that?)

but apparently i was wrong. when couch potato wendell goes stark-raving roky erickson mad via tv overdose and gets sucked into his boob tube (i think the writer for this had just seen stay tuned ), the other two chefs “can’t make cinnamon toast crunch without him.”

what the hell? what kinda message is that to kids everywhere? when someone succumbs to an addiction and gets merged with a piece of electronics, everyone else might as well give up too?

so i guess millions of kids had to rush out to buy a box of cereal so they could try to find out what tv program wendell got wedged into. great. way to help yourself out, you lipid-soaked walrus. get a bunch of children to bail you out of tv land. and then what? then, after you’re rescued, what are you going to do?

kill off the other two chefs, like a total ratfink. i saw it coming all along. bob? he represents the brits, obviously. quinneo? i guess that’s spanish or portuguese or something. sure, they didn’t have the accents. but i know what they represented. and i did a class presentation in world history about how this whole snafu was an allegory for imperialism! wendell was a fucking benedict arnold. worse than that snooty marcel dude on top chef who just puts foams on everything he makes. and speaking of which, what else can wendell cook? you ain’t much of a chef if you can only make cereal, buddy. and one kind of cereal. no wonder he turned to a brain-rotting addiction: reality set in on poor little wendell.

i can’t eat cinnamon toast crunch to this day. call me old-fashioned, but betrayal, murder, and racism are not part of my balanced breakfast.