One of the most prized comics in my collection is Uncanny X-Men #201 (January 1985). No, not for the ground-breaking battle that pitched Cyclops against Storm for the leadership of the X-Men (Spoiler alert: Storm won), nor for the first appearance of everyone's favorite 1990s X-Man and the guy who brings you crystal-clear channel reception, Cable, but rather for a two-page advertising supplement that gives us the rarest installment of Marvel Team-Up ever printed: a crossover between Spider-Man and Cap'n Crunch. Now, I'm a big big fan of sugar-frosted cereals, and I've tried 'em all out of the Crunch family: regular crunch, Crunchberries, Peanut Butter Crunch, Christmas Crunch, Vanilly Crunch, Punch Crunch. If you're a fan of the Crunch mythos, you may even remember the ultra-rare Admiral Crunch, where the good Cap'n was promoted to a desk job but regained command of the Guppy and once again gathered his faithful old crew in order to fight off a massive destructive alien machine which turned out to be a Voyager probe and...oh wait, I've gotten my cereal mixed up with my Star Trek movies.
Published to tie into a promotional contest to deduce where the Cap'n had disappeared to (Spoiler alert: he was in the Milky Way), here's the two-page Spider-Man saga I like to call The Search for Crunch:
Geez, Spidey didn't search this hard for the killer of Gwen Stacy.
Still, the promotion was so successful that Quaker Oats revisited it in 1999 by creating the teeth-rottingly yummy Mystery Crunch cereal, sending the Cap'n off into limbo for several months as everyone tried to discover where he was. Mulder and Scully actually even spent fourteen episodes searching for him on the sixth season of The X-Files. No Spider-Man tie-in for that period, I'm sorry to say, as Spidey was busy still trying to live down the Clone Saga to play breakfast detective.
Still, we are indebted to the "Where's the Cap'n" promotion for giving us perhaps the ultimate Spidey/J. Jonah Jameson face-off:
Love this "story," particularly Peter's insistence on using the awkward "cap'n" construction.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I prefer Breakfast of the Gods.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to pull UXM 201 out of the longbox because I do not remember Cable in it... Was he a baby at that point? I remember baby Nathan showing up in Simonson-era X-Factor, but not in Uncanny. Then again, all that time-traveling, alternate future stuff could have me totally confused and they aren't even the same character. Okay, done babbling now.
ReplyDeleteParker! I need pictures! Pictures of Cap'n Crunch!
ReplyDeleteAm I the only person that considers all the ad-based stories-this, the Hostess ads, and so on-to be utterly canon? Because you know they should be!
Wow, "The Milky Way," that narrows it down! Thanks, Quaker Oats!
ReplyDeleteMy favorite series was the multi-company crossover that took place after Crunch was promoted to Admir'l Crunch. Teaming up with General Mills and Kellogg's Toucan Sam (Air Force), they fought crime as "The Joint Chiefs of Cereal!"
Bully, you've scooped Sims again! Report to Betty Brant for a fat check!
ReplyDeleteGeez, Spidey didn't search this hard for the killer of Gwen Stacy.
ReplyDeleteHow hard do you have to search to find a mirror?
So did anybody actually get rich off this? I'd like to think that some guy about my age who was a comics nerd back in the day is sitting in a mansion on a hill somewhere, eating Cap'n Crunch by the tubful and watching his HDTV and playing his Wii and Xbox 360 and ordering all his TPBs on the 'net, not having to go out and work all day just because he figured out where the Cap'n was when he was a kid.
ReplyDeleteIt's the American Dream.
Actually, it looks like 10,000 lucky cryptographers would each get $100 for their trouble. Although as my dad likes to say, over and over, to no one in particular, if one of those kids would've taken that $100 and bought and sold stock in Wal-Mart, then Dell, then Apple, then Google at JUST the right times...
ReplyDelete