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   Cereal Freebies With Snap, Crackle, Pop By Cindy Lane Poch Contributing Columnist You know you're lagging behind the times when your household is technologically incompatible with a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. The cereal package came with a shiny silver "Jim Henson's Bear in the Big Blue House" CD. Or so I thought. It's actually a DVD requiring a DVD-ROM drive and 64 megabytes of memory, which means it's not going to run on my computerex dinosaurus. According to a General Mills spokesperson, they're the first in the United States to put DVDs in cereal boxes. Not that I'm complaining about getting a DVD along with 20 ounces of sweetened whole-grain oat cereal for $3. It just shows that cereal freebies are getting better and better, thanks to modern technology. Think about the difficulties of putting an eight-track tape or a record album into a box of wheat flakes. Last year, I got two free "holiday" (political correctese for Christmas) CDs in boxes of Chex cereal - 62 blissful minutes of Lori Line's piano and 72 minutes of various artists, including "Away in a Manger" done by Gladys Knight and the Pips. And now breakfast moguls are giving away movies. Whereas the sheer volume of a movie reel or videotape would displace too many crunchy O's, DVDs are small, flat, lightweight, and relatively cheap to manufacture. General Mills wraps them in a plastic sleeve and glues them to the inside of the cardboard box. The convenient Cheerio shape of DVD/CDs is also easy to mail. I sent away for a Kellogg's Spider-Man PC game - it's not going to run on C-Rex because it requires a 3-D accelerator card, but hey, it was free. Another General Mills mail-in promotion offered six full-version CD-ROM games, including Monopoly Junior and Yahtzee. Chances are slim the companies would be willing to mail me a standard board game for the price of a few UPC symbols. These are great giveaways. I can almost forgive General Mills for putting an offer for free audio CDs of Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" on boxes of Oatmeal Crisp Raisin and Basic 4. According to a press release, Covey invites us "to make a habit of personal self-renewal by not only eating a healthy breakfast, but regularly feeding the mind, heart and spirit with powerful audiobooks." People who eat Basic 4 don't need to hear this book. Those burdened with the 77 habits of highly ineffective people are reading newspaper comics while munching out on Count Chocula. Luckily, GM is offering other Simon & Schuster audiobooks as mail-in offers, including "A Beautiful Mind," "Cronkite Remembers" and "Who Moved My Cheese?" The cost is $1.35 shipping and handling, two UPC coupons - plus you might have to eat a box of Multi-bran Chex. The marketing wizards at General Mills pride themselves on offering freebies that are "on the cutting edge of technology." Back in the 1930s, they decided to pack Wheaties boxes with a prize featuring the image of a popular radio show character. The product was made from the latest, hippest, newfangled material known to mankind. It was a plastic bowl. When digital-storage devices shrink to the size of postage stamps, who knows what my children's children will find in their Lucky Charms? Maybe they'll get a holographic World Wide Wrestling game that lets them beat the lucky charms out of Stephen R. Covey. Reprinted with permission from author. Article first appeared in Pioneer Press on Sun, Oct. 27, 2002. Cindy Lane Poch's family of five consumes enough Cocoa Puffs in a month to keep General Mills stock above 40. Her column appears here about every other week. You can reach her at clpoch@hotmail.com.
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