Alpha-Bits

Alpha-Bits was a breakfast cereal primarily aimed at children produced by Post Consumer Brands between 1957 and 2011.

The cereal's USP was that the corn cereal pieces were shaped like letters of the alphabet. During the 1980s computer boom someone at their marketing department realised than computers use letters too and for much of the decade the cereal was marketed in a much more 'futuristic' fashion, including the hugely optimistic "This Box Plays Like a Computer" promotion, which encouraged kids to save the box and included cardboard tokens to create what probably technically counted as a computer in the broadest historiographical sense of the term.

Promotions

They also included licenced tie-ins, and in 1986 passed the stringent vetting of Tonka (i.e. their cheque cleared) and produced a GoBots promotion. This sadly didn't involve a box that could turn into a GoBot but instead a trio of iron-on decals depicting Leader-1, Cy-Kill and Scooter in both modes. These were simply mounted on the rear exterior of the box. A beleaguered parent could then be badgered into ironing these onto an item of clothing where they would stay for at best a few days or one machine wash, whichever came first, before leaving a fragmentary, flaking remnant of the original picture and taking a perfectly good t-shirt out of the rotation.

The box also included an offer whereby cut-out tokens could be mailed off in exchange for selected GoBots activity books from the oeuvre of Western Publishing - the Sticker Fun book and Big Color/Activity Book.