This Almost-Forgotten Cereal Brand Was Truly Beloved By Gen Xers

The latchkey kids. The MTV Generation. The people who really want us to know they drank water out of the hose when they were kids. They're Generation X, and right now, they're at the peak of their buying powers — which is why so much media these days, from "Stranger Things" to "Star Wars," is set on wooing them. (The failure of the "Masters of the Universe" movie may be the only thing saving us from the next decade's box office looking like the Saturday morning cartoon lineup in 1985.) Well, we're not marketing executives, no matter how good it would be for our bank accounts, but we humbly suggest they try bringing back Pink Panther Flakes, an obscure, discontinued cereal beloved by Gen X.

While most Gen X nostalgia is rather '80s-centric these days, Pink Panther Flakes were enjoyed by the very oldest Gen Xers back in the early 1970s. They were released as a tie-in with "The Pink Panther Show" in 1972, a cartoon based on the popular series of comedy films starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling French detective Inspector Clouseau. (This makes it the only successful cereal based on a Peter Sellers movie, at least until we get our "Dr. Strangelove" cereal pitch in front of the top brass at General Mills.) Essentially just palette-swapped Frosted Flakes, this cereal was known for being overly sweet even by breakfast cereal standards, as well as for turning your milk the color of Pepto-Bismol.

You might have been surprised to read that this cereal originated in the 1970s, despite being based on a very '70s franchise like "The Pink Panther." After all, everyone knows that the tie-in cereal heyday was the 1980s, where kids could beg their parents to buy sugary cereals based on franchises like "Star Wars," "Strawberry Shortcake", and, of course, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (whose Pizza Crunchabungas we still want back). But there's a reason why the novelty cereal explosion happened in the '80s, as well as why Pink Panther Flakes were ahead of the curve.

Licensing cartoon characters for products to sell to kids is, of course, a well-established practice that predates the 1980s. (Fruity Pebbles may be one of the worst gluten-free cereals, but the "Flintstones"-branded cereal was released in 1971.) But before the '80s, these were usually pre-existing characters taking advantage of an advertising deal; Pink Panther Flakes came about because the show was sponsored by Post. There were regulations established in 1974, enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that kept a certain remove between a show and its licensed products. The boundary between program and commercial needed to be maintained, and the products could not be advertised during the show.

But along came Ronald Reagan to change all that. In 1984, his FCC did away with those regulations, allowing for a deluge of merchandise-driven programming from brands like "Transformers" and "My Little Pony" that sold virtually everything under the sun to children — including tie-in cereal, which spiked in 1985. (On the other hand, Reagan was partially responsible for Pizza Hut's nostalgic Book It! Program, which is nice.)