Trix (Cereal)
The neon-bright fruity cereal and its eternally denied mascot — "Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!" The Trix Rabbit spent decades scheming for a single bowl and never got one, making him one of advertising's most beloved lovable losers.
General Mills launched Trix on May 1, 1954, as a fruit-flavored, sugar-sweetened spin on plain corn puffs. Five years later, in 1959, came the character that defined it: the Trix Rabbit, a cartoon rabbit forever concocting disguises and schemes to sneak a bowl, always exposed by a couple of kids with the catchphrase "Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!"
The gag became genuinely interactive. General Mills ran mail-in "Should the rabbit get to eat Trix?" vote campaigns off the box tops — repeatedly over the years, including 1976, 1980, 1984, and 1991 — and kids overwhelmingly voted yes, prompting follow-up ads where the rabbit finally got his bowl. The '90s box had its own distinct look: in 1991 the cereal switched from round puffs to colorful fruit shapes (it would flip back to round in 2007, then to fruit shapes again in 2018).
Across seventy years of near-misses, the never-satisfied rabbit outlasted every reformulation — a mascot whose entire appeal is that he can never, ever win.
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