Breakfast at Funko’s

The cereal aisle has been coasting for decades. The same rotation of sugar-delivery systems in the same bright boxes, a carousel of cartoon mascots that peaked somewhere around 1993 and have been running on brand recognition ever since. I stopped looking at it with any genuine interest sometime around age eight.

Then Funko made cereal. The collectibles company responsible for those wide-eyed vinyl figures of essentially every character in the known pop-culture universe has entered the breakfast space with FunkO’s—boxes fronted by their licensed roster, which Kotaku correctly identified as the next evolution in gamer food. Cuphead on red. Mega Man on blue. Gollum on green. It is exactly what you’d expect and somehow still completely charming.

Part of it is how well the Funko aesthetic translates to packaging—that particular style of rounded, desaturated cute that makes everything from Batman to Bob Ross look like it belongs in the same toy chest. The boxes have an internal logic that makes you want to stare at them over breakfast, which is more than I can say for a tiger in a neckerchief telling me frosted flakes are great.

More characters are apparently coming. I’m holding out for something genuinely deranged—all-black Dark Souls cereal that depletes your health when you eat it, maybe. In the meantime, the FunkO’s are available through Funko’s site, and the nerd economy has officially colonized every last corner of domestic life.