What did they do to Count Chocula?

Do you know what the Monster Cereals are?

"No," you say. "I am an adult with adult concerns and interests, and the idea that I would have any spare mental space for Monster Cereals is almost insulting. These are juvenile issues best left to the geek-culture man-childs who wear superhero shirts at an age when one should be anticipating your first AARP mailing. Unless you mean Count Chocula. Is that what you mean? I just bought a box of that."

Count Chocula is part of a quartet of breakfast cereals that were once available year-round, but now are on the shelves just once a year to herald the return of Halloween.

First, of course, is the Count. He is a vampire, an undead servant of evil who preys on the living, but he's fun because he likes chocolate. He speaks in an exaggerated version of the standard vampire accent, like someone imitating Bela Lugosi while hopping on a pogo stick.

Besides the Count, there is:

Franken Berry. He sounds like Boris Karloff, is pink and has a steam whistle stuck to one side of his head. As the pedants will tell you, his real name is Franken Berry's Monster, since Frankenberry was the man who cobbled him together from other dead cartoon mascots. You all remember that scene in the movie when the mad doctor screamed "IT'S ALIVE! AND FULLY COPYRIGHTED!" as it twitched to life.

Boo Berry. He looks rather sad, which is to be expected, since he is ectoplasm that has left all manifestations of his mortal life behind, and exists as a berry-flavored cloud. He wears a hat. When he first appeared in 1973 (in December, according to sites that care about these things), he was dragging around a box of cereal and a bowl by chains that were attached to his chest.

Fruit Brute is a strange one. He is a werewolf, which you'd think would mean his cereal requires a full moon to assume its cursed form. Any other normal morning it's just flakes of unsweetened grain. He's not regarded as a core member of the Monster Cereal troika, but a Lonny-Come-Lately.

There was once a Fruity Yummy Mummy, the Gummo Marx of Monster Cereals. There does not seem to be much enthusiasm for his return, since mummies — desiccated bodies wrapped in fabric and saturated with spices — are not "yummy" in the popular imagination.

That's the lineup. When they showed up in the store the other day I thought, "Oh, right, those guys, loved them as a kid." Then I looked at the packages a bit more closely. Something was off.

Count Chocula had X's for eyes. So did Boo Berry. Franken Berry: X'd out orbs. They were drawn in an odd style, scratchy and jittery, like someone had traced them after eating six bowls of the stuff. Instead of ears they had huge gray misshapen blobs.

Something was very wrong about this.

This seems a bit too much for children's cereal. It's like seeing Cap'n Crunch consumed with scurvy because he didn't bring enough citrus on his voyage. Or Toucan Sam with antennae coming out of his ears because he has a common jungle parasite. Dead eyes! Why?

Because General Mills commissioned it, that's why. They got an artist who goes by the name of KAWS to design the characters. Looks like he traced over the original drawings and added a few signature touches, including X's for eyes. I went online and looked at his stuff. And, yes, art is subjective, but his work seemed low-effort stuff of no enduring value whatsoever, which means it sells for millions.

It also means that General Mills doesn't think the target market for Monster Cereal is the kids who love it, or the moms who buy it to give the tot a seasonal treat. It's the geeks, the fanboys, the overgrown kids who say "Oh, KAWS? Cool!" because it sets them apart from people who don't know who KAWS is.