Lucky Charms

In 1964, General Mills challenged its product developers to do something new with spare manufacturing capacity from Cheerios or Wheaties. John Holahan's answer came from a grocery-store experiment: he mixed Cheerios with chopped-up Brach's circus peanuts, liked what he tasted, and the first cereal with marshmallows in the recipe was born. The marshmallow pieces are officially called "marbits," an ad agency supplied the charm-bracelet theme, and the box got its mascot: Lucky the Leprechaun — originally L.C. Leprechaun — voiced by actor Arthur Anderson until 1992 and forever insisting the stuff was "magically delicious."

The original lineup was pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. Then General Mills discovered that sales jumped whenever the marbits changed, and the roster never sat still again: blue diamonds arrived in 1975, purple horseshoes in 1983, red balloons in 1989, rainbows in 1992, and in the mid-90s the yellow moons and blue diamonds gave way to pots of gold and blue moons. Dozens of limited-edition variants have cycled through over the years, and every single one felt like an event on the cereal aisle.

But the real institution was the ritual, and it needed no marketing: you ate around the plain oat pieces, rationing, hoarding, until the bowl held nothing but marshmallows and tinted milk — one perfect spoonful as the payoff. Everyone did it. Everyone believed they invented it. The cereal is a 1964 creation that predates its biggest fans by decades, but the kids of the 90s who worked that bowl like a chess endgame have a fair claim on it anyway.