Sprinkle Spangles

Sprinkle Spangles arrived from General Mills in 1993, a bowl full of little stars dusted with rainbow sprinkles — dessert reframed as the most important meal of the day. The mascot was the Sprinkle Genie, a purple wish-granting spirit voiced by comedian Dom DeLuise, whose catchphrase 'You wish it, I dish it!' promised a cereal built entirely around the part of a cupcake kids actually cared about.

The pitch leaned all the way into the sugar fantasy, with the tagline 'Spangled every angle with sprinkles.' It was pure novelty, and like a lot of pure novelty it burned bright and briefly — by General Mills' own telling the cereal was gone within about a year, one of that stretch of early-90s General Mills experiments that lived just long enough to lodge permanently in the memory of the kids who ate them.

Today it survives mostly as a fond blur: the star shapes, the confetti of sprinkles turning the milk faintly colored, and a genie who existed to grant the single wish of a sweeter breakfast.