I guess the deep and debilitating depression started in my adolescence. In fact, one might say that I have been suffering from teenage angst for the last two decades. That will change, for I will soon be (more) medicated thus enjoying all my Morrissey records less and less. Is it any wonder why I celebrate my upper-middle class childhood through sugary cereals of days gone by? Of course not, the adult world is crushing me alive and you too.

General Mills saw this and decided to rectify this injustice to all of us and returned the cereal of our youth back to us in their beautiful boxes that the Good Lord intended. Well, sorta.

Available for a “limited time” exclusively at Target, General Mills is offering all their mainstays (Trix, Honey Nut Cheerios, Regular Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Lucky Charms) as they might have appeared in generations better than our own.

I picked up Trix and Lucky Charms. Sure I wanted them all, but sometimes life is hard. Also, the rest aren’t kooky enough for me.

Just look at the leprechaun!  What a mighty painting. Can people even still paint like that? I guess we’ll never know, thanks to the x-treme photoshop sunglass wearin’ Lucky that adorns modern boxes these days. Does everything really need to be “cool”? Of course it doesn’t. Especially not leprechauns.

This is the Trix box that jumped (hee hee) off the shelf and into my basket first in my local Target. What a striking design. That’s right, you don’t need every color in the rainbow on your box. Let the beautiful rabbit design do the work, and I promise we’ll do the rest – by which I mean, buy the damned cereal. I won’t even assault your eyeballs with what passes as the Trix Bunny now ah’ days.

Oh, and speaking of every color of the rainbow, unlike Pepsi, with their sublime return to retro form, General Mills tries to have it both ways. Sure, the boxes are great, but cereal itself? It suffers from the modern mentality that more is more. Just look at all the colors in these cereals! I said LOOK. Yuck. Plus, they appear on the boxes, creating an anachronism if I ever seen one- and believe you, me, I have.

Of course they taste delicious, but that’s beyond the point.

The days when a child would be entertained by a leprechaun marionette clipped from the back of a cereal box are far behind us, but I’d take that over the internet any day, especially after the meds kick in.