In which I talk about the moral decline of Weetos

Breakfast cereals are a fascinating example of the way in which marketing operates. Children like sugar and chocolate thus, in order to persuade them which of the delicious options their parents should buy, the packaging should be brightly coloured, have freebies and provide them with entertainment during breakfast – brands like Frosties and Coco Pops do this. Adults like food with no flavour and boredom so their food should be advertised by showing Stepford Wives and bland packaging –like Alpen and Special K. Right?

Well I buck that trend! I eat my child-like cereal and I love it. I don’t have a single bowl of miserable muesli in the place; I love Weetos.

Weetos, for your background information, are a circle of wheat with a hole in the centre, coated in chocolate. I don’t like milk on my cereal so I need to eat a food item that can taste delicious even when dry. Weetos has done that job through my entire life, excluding brief flirtations into Cheerio’s and other toroidal eatables.

Yet a sad thing has come to pass. Weetos has remained generally pleasant tasting (although they have had a drop in their sugar content in 2006[1]), but I would like to chronicle the moral decline of their advertising strategy.

I will begin with Professor Weeto. Professor Weeto was the creator of the cereal and its loveable mascot. He fit the mad scientist trope with his white crazy hair, his lab coat and his stylish patterned bow tie. Through Professor Weeto I learnt that playing with your food is Science. He was a kitchen genius.

Warning: Nostalgia! The truly wonderful thing about the Weetos of my childhood was the free toys. These were not naff freebies like the shower gel samples you get in Cosmo. These were toys that were actually cool. We had Crayola pens that changed colour, rubbers shaped like dinosaurs, trolls when trolls were popular and various animals that could be contained inside your clothing: bunny in my pocket, pony in my pocket, puppy in my pocket, wildebeest in my pocket. We had pencil ends, curly straws, stationary and holographic cards about orangutans.

The trolls were my personal favourite. Not just your run-of-the-mill under-the-bridge-and-having-a-bad-hair-day troll, but trolls who have broken out of the bridge and have got out there, joined a band, played some sports and gone on holiday! I still have my own Professor Weeto troll with his hair long since gone grey instead of Persil white. 

Trolls on Hols, found at http://www.bibelotmania.com/visite.php?pag=cid508_alb&idf=3&idm=1353

Then out of nowhere the sad decline in exciting breakfasts began. Gone was fighting over whose turn it was to keep the toy and eyeing up the opened box in the pantry; now we had wordsearches. The marketers at Weetabix world kept us entertained with their cheap and lazy puzzles: spot the difference, crosswords and join the dots for the next ten years. Bored at university I would still follow the labyrinth patterns with my eyes every morning.

And now you ask, now what has happened? This:

Images taken by me of my cereal box

What were they thinking? My mild sadness at the lack of bizarre plastic creations has been replaced by anger and confusion. We have gone from a proud inventing intellectual –a positive role model, a giver of toys and an aficionado of co-ordinating clothes- to a vain, suicidal jock.

Please.

Every morning now I have to look at the back of my cereal packet and see not a picture of a cute puppy that may be contained within, or a simple puzzle to entertain me, but a picture of my food admiring itself. No one wants their food anthropomorphised. It becomes as sinister as the Ooglies. Why does it want to be eaten? Why is my cereal looking in the mirror and flexing its muscles?  Why does it even have muscles?  

The plastic toys were fun and cool at eight, but at twenty three I accept that, when we should be caring for the planet, kids do not need the resources of the earth turned into pencil toppers. However this is too much. The new Weeto mascot is described as ‘hunky’ on the Weeto website and is also portrayed a being a little bit stupid. In the adverts we seem him attempt some kind of sporting violence, such as boxing a watermelon, but then getting his hand stuck. This does not prevent him launching into the self-absorbed catchphrase, “I’m chocolatey, I’m wholegrain, I am Weeto!” What. An. Idiot.

It is a worrying trend of turning interesting, amusing advertising into an insipid world of gender stereotypes and boredom[2]  (and may I remind you that boredom is reserved for adult cereals). I may be twenty-three and eating my chocolatey hoops, but dammit –I want my inner child to have role model I can respect!

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[1] Keating, Sheila (August 6, 2005). "TimesOnline.co.uk - Food detective: cereal offenders". London: Times Newspapers Ltd. Retrieved 2009-06-28. Via Wikipedia.

[2]See, for an example of this, discussions on gender bias in Lego at Feminist Frequency or my blog post on sexism in Playmobil. 

In which something Wonderful this way comes

Friday night was mine and the boy’s four year anniversary. We decided to do something pretty special for it –and it turned out a little bit more special than I guessed.

We went to see Wicked, which I have wanted to see for years, ever since a friend played me a YouTube video of the song Defying Gravity. I’ve been to see quite a few of the London shows now but we have always got pretty cheap seats. We decided to splash out on this one and got fantastic seats -and the show was incredible.

I even planned my outfit around the show. I dressed all in black, with green nail varnish and gold shoes. I would have worn silver shoes, but sadly don’t own any so it was the next best thing. Similarly I don’t own a winged monkey necklace, but I do own a Pegasus one so a winged horse would have to do! 

 

Right down to the wtichy lace socks and points on the lace-ups. 

I apologise for the rubbish photos –they were taken on my camera phone.

So yes, me and the boy got to the theatre and swapped presents. I got him the Dungeon Masters guide for 4^th edition. Yes, we are nerds.

He got me a big box that looked like this:

Inside was lots of blue tissue paper and several Playmobil figures in their boxes (I think I’ve mentioned I like Playmobil before), some Lego figures (including a Lego Mowgli with a monkey and a female viking!) and a happy faced noodle bowl. I was so happy with all my new Lego figures and general cuteness that I nearly stopped there.

Awesome.

The boy then nudged me to open the lid on the bowl and inside were a series of smiley faced food items decorating colourful boxes, each one inside another. Boxes in boxes. He told me to keep going.

All the way up to one last happy jam box. 

It contained this Lego figure:

 And these: 

 

So I believe that would make us engaged. : D

and elated. 

(Also I promise this will not turn into a wedding blog, in fact I have a post in mind about Weetos so no worries on that account.)

In which I progress to pink

When I was a kid my mother had a delightful occupation with the idea that my sister and I should wear dresses on a Sunday. According to her understanding the Lord likes people to look their best. I actually fully understand this reasoning –but I am not sure that the natural conclusion is ‘dresses’. I see about fifty percent of the people wearing trousers after all.

Sometimes our mother even put my sister and I in matching dresses. (Why would you do such a thing?) I don’t recall either of us enjoying it. It gave me a predisposition to dislike anything stereotypically ‘girly’.

I remember one particular aunt who always gave us matching presents -and sometimes still does, in our mid-twenties. They were sets of hairbrushes and that sort of thing: mine were always pink. She got green or purple or red or blue and I got the pink. Pink hairbrush, pink nail varnish, pink bag. Yuk.

So at primary school I despised pink as a colour forced on me. I did not want to wear dresses or be ‘girly’, I wanted to climb trees, go go-karting and pretend to be a detective in the garden.

I then went to high school where there were so many more things wrong with pink and dresses. The girls fought for permission to wear trousers which once obtained were proudly worn –why would I revert to the old grey skirt instead of triumphant trousers? It was also at this point in my life that I became interested in feminism. I saw how the division of pink = girls/blue =boys was damaging and controlling. I spent a great deal of my youth on a feminist forum called Sheroes having my eyes opened to the sexism of the word ‘slut’, the wonders of the Tamora Pierce and the friendship available in an online community. So at the end of high school pink was not so much associated with girly girls who wouldn’t scramble up trees (I now understood that ‘girl’ should not be an insult, climbing was not inherently ‘boyish’ and you can even like pink and be outdoorsy), but instead with the fashion and toy industries that stereotype to control women. I still felt a kind of superiority to other people my age in pink –Hah! Look at them conforming.

After all my reading of feminist theory, my English Lit degree and my interest in fashion, why is it so hard to buy anything pink?

You know what I have recently realised? My feelings towards pink were always heavily theoretical. I didn’t like it because:

1. -People forced me to wear it

2. -People who liked pink were not my friends

3. -Society forced me to wear it

I am going to tell you a secret: I know not how or why, but I like pink.

I like my salmon shoes and I like hot pink hair.

I like peach glasses

I like my soft pink handbag

I like my Hello Kitty headphones

I genuinely try to justify buying it to my boyfriend before he even questions it, “It’s not exactly pink, it’s more orange” or “Well at least it’s not baby pink” or “It’s only one part of my outfit” I jump in as though I am afraid he will look at my pink shoes and say in horror “Egads! What have you become!”

I think it is true liberation at last to be aware of all the ways in which society controls women and choose to wear pink!

If only a little.

Bride with pink hair and glasses, found via Off-Beat bride profile

This is the new handbag I bought from New Look which I love completely

Polly Pocket -one of the only pink toys I loved as a child. I wear Polly Pocket jewellery sometimes.

My Hello Kitty headphones, pushing the limits as to how much pink I can wear

In which I have a new home

This is the necessary ‘new flat!’ post. It even includes a before and after picture and a game/toy theme, so I hope you will put up with the temporary squeeing.

Those of you who have been reading my blog for sometime/ know me will be aware of my obsession with playmobil. Try here and here for some history on that.

Well –now I have my own place! So I can have playmobil (and other toys) everywhere! I do actually share this place with my boy and at several points nervously asked him “Do you mind having playmobil on the bookcase?” or “Is it ok to have lego figures on the windowsill?”, but every time he said it was great and did not mind at all. That is why he is great of course.

So here we are:

This is the living room after first moving in. Plain chairs, a tables and a few games.

This is the room after some proper moving. Throws on the chairs, painting on the wall with matching candles, cheery blossome lights, our tv and PS set up and our expanded game set.


Collection of board games -note that even here we have Lego board games.



Playmobil setting of Bethgelert. I actually have this set up as a series of freeze frames of the story.

Lego minifigures on the bedroom windowsill

Books, Heroes picture and Lego dinosaur. These have turned out to be the key things we feel are needed, Robert Graves, Dianna Wynne Jones, Wind in the Willows and Gaynor Deal.


New white board to write messages on...

Lego fruit by the fruit bowl



Spice rack! Oh delight of my eyes. The spice rack makes the whole house come together.

Me, somewhere in the moving process.



Geraniums in the kitchen
Playmobil shepherd on the windowsill

Also, just to be clear there are some of the boy's things in the house. I had a lot of fun taking pictures of his dice collection in the bright sunlight yesterday. It was so good to have a working camera and take macro shots again. I love the way the dice reflect the light and come in such beautiful colours.


So there we are. New home. Awash with childishness and cookery.

In which my camera is fixed

A very quick note to say Huzzah! Hurrah! and other such happy sounds. Here is a little story behind my current happiness. My camera was not working at all. I thought I would have to buy a new one and it was all annoying, but the guy at the camera shop suggested it just needed a new battery. One arrived this morning and here we are! With photograph-taking abilities all over again.

(Hurray for helpful people)

I am now going to rush all round my new flat (2 months now, so new-ish) and at last take pictures of it all.

To celebrate here is a picture of me being ridiculously happy in some snow: