Popular British breakfast cereal from the 1980s marketed by a cartoon Freddie Kruger, the notorious sleepy serial killer that haunts your dreams from the hit Nightmare on Elm Street film series. Krueger’s catchphrase “Eat it, Bitch!” was the most popular phrase in 1989 according to the ONS data for that year’s most popular phrases, beating out “Let’s get physical!“, “Now that’s what I call… Now Then, Now then!” and “…not!” to the top spot.
Many remember the advert fondly. In it, children of the Robinsons - a fictional family used to sell many products across TV and radio campaigns from matchsticks to gravy - complained about feeling groggy from a poor night’s sleep, only to be given a bowl of Fredd-O’s to help get a bit of pip in their step. The first two children narrowly avoided contact with the plasticine mascot, while the slow third child, who hasn’t made it to the breakfast table in time, is later found with his entrails wrapped around a bed post, a chilling reminder of the importance of getting a good night’s sleep and eating your breakfast promptly before Freddie finds you and disembowels you. The parents laugh it off, and the family head off for their day. The initial run received 1100 complaints, but the breakfast ad agency - OFFBREK - disregarded the complaints, saying that the allotted kids TV slot was responsible advertising, and used science and data to communicate facts to children about the importance of not staying in bed too long and teaching valuable human anatomy.
This wasn’t the only attempt to make violence sell kids on the idea of a morning meal. In Early Worm: A History of Breakfast And Those That Get Up First For It by Jimmy Crumpet, the author retells the birth of many breakfast foods that we know today. The most apocryphal story is that of the Quakers, a godly initiative made to by victims of earthquakes to benefit those who have suffered from seismic rumblings and help get them back on their feet; their initial forays into breakfast oats were intended as a means of stemming teenage violence, with their porridge oats believed to be responsible for a 90% reduction in hanger related violence in teens under 19.
In more recent history, Crumpet claims, many executives in the big 3 breakfast cereal companies (namely Kellog’s, Nestle and Alf’s Remarkable Breakfasts) attempted to cash in on popular horror films in order to sell high sugar cereal snacks to a mass market. For the Nightmare on Elm Street films, already a box office smash, the breakfast cereal tie in was inevitable. Who wouldn’t want to associate their brand with a cinematic masterpiece notorious for the deaths of many fictional teenagers? Other attempts to break into the horror breakfast market included Children of the Corn, Golden Omen Crunch and Cannibal Chococaust.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the industry, new foods were appearing hoping to break into our homes like Toastbusters - a kind of toastable pie pocket that featured a ghastly green syrup inside a slimer shaped flaked pastry to tie in with the popular Ghostbusters franchise. These ideas were not ill conceived - for a brief moment, ‘orange’ was replaced with ‘beetle’ as the most popular flavour of British table juice served between 7.30 and 9.10 am in hotels, despite the horrific taste and visual appeal. Clearly, the British public were hungry for a thrilling start to their day.
These attempts to bring the violence of the silver screen to the breakfast table were not without controversy however. When Fredd-O’s first released, there was a lot of bruhaha as the box contained tiny puffed rice in the shape of knives filled with a strawberry nectar that many believed resembled blood. The issue arose when children complained of ailments such as sweating, insomnia, permanent red teeth, rosie cheeks and in some cases unexplained internal bleeding. In response, the recipe was changed so that the cereal merely tasted like strawberry, and promotions no longer included miniature weaponry in a box in case of accidental ingestion.
These days, you are only likely to find Fredd-O’s when buying one of those miniature box taster sets. But, that does not mean they do not have a place in modern British discourse as in the economy they are used as a consistent metric to measure the value of the pound. Back in 1985, one box of Fredd-O’s would set you back 15 pence for 1.5kg of energy dense and delicious grain; however, due to market pressures, legal compensation costs for victims with red teeth and the fashion to abuse shrinkflation, a single 110g box will now cost around £14. Many obsess about these costs, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves rumoured to be using her first budget in power to attempt to artificially reduce the costs of Fredd-O’s by offsetting loses with increased taxation on pebble-dashers and door-to-door knife salesmen.
