Corn Pops
The cereal that could never settle on a name — Sugar Pops, Sugar Corn Pops, Corn Pops, and briefly just "Pops" (we don't talk about that). What stuck was the 90s jingle: a teenager tearing the kitchen apart because he's gotta have his Pops.
Corn Pops debuted in 1950 as a Kellogg's puffed-corn cereal, and then spent half a century in an identity crisis. It was renamed Sugar Corn Pops in 1951, trimmed to Sugar Pops, restored to Sugar Corn Pops in 1978, and finally returned to plain Corn Pops in 1984, when cereals across the industry quietly scrubbed the word "sugar" from their boxes. The cereal underneath never changed — golden, glazed, vaguely corn-adjacent.
The 1990s gave the brand its defining campaign: "Gotta have my Pops!", a decade of commercials starring ravenous teenagers treating a cereal bowl like an emergency. The campaign's best-remembered spot is the 1999 ad starring a young, big-haired Aaron Paul, nearly a decade before Breaking Bad — a clip that resurfaces every few years as prime pre-fame nostalgia.
In January 2006, Kellogg's tried renaming the cereal just "Pops." Fans hated it, and the company reverted after the poor reception. Corn Pops is still sold today, its clunky, hard-won name finally left alone.
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