The 8 Most Baffling Food Mascots of All-Time

If you're ever diagnosed with crippling insanity, you can always get a job designing corporate mascots. For instance: Orville Redenbacher used a reanimated corpse as their spokesperson. Yummy Mummy has one too, and both of them are perfect examples of what happens after you die when you're killed by Snuggle Bear. My point is, most mascots are crazy, and here are the food industry's eight craziest.

Please note that I did not include the Grape Nuts character Volto From Mars on this list because this is a "craziest" list, not a "best" list.

Kool-Aid Man represents the laziest of all mascot designs -- he's just a face and limbs grafted onto the product he's selling. What made him unusual is that his only mode of transportation was charging through walls. For a sentient glass pitcher, that's closer to a suicide bombing than it is to refreshment. The Kool-Aid Man has filled more thirsty people with shrapnel than Angola.

The idea of a drink running through walls is so insane that it may have started as a way for suffocating stuntmen to signal "Help, I need help!" from inside a scream-muffling drink costume. However, the Kool-Aid Man's smashing makes sense if you think about what he is. He's a creature made entirely out of tap water, sugar and a pouch of carcinogens. His body can't decide whether it wants to evacuate its liquid, run as fast as it can or die, so he just charges the nearest building in a desperate attempt at all three.

After what must have been a casting director's paperwork error, Wilford Brimley did a long-running series of commercials for Quaker Oats in the '80s. It was an ad campaign based entirely around intimidation. There was virtually no sales pitch involved in the commercials. It was more like Wilford was leveling with you that oatmeal was what he fucking had for you and you're going to goddamn eat it.

Wilford Brimley was way too tough for breakfast commercials. He looks like someone taught a pile of walrus leather how to fight. He talks like your ears just came out of the closet and he's disappointed in them. This was the guy who killed all the dogs with a fire ax in John Carpenter's The Thing. He exploded a team of human hunters from horseback in Hard Target. He will punch your heart out for having Type-2 adult-onset diabetes. Shit, Wilford Brimley was even kind of tough in Ewoks: Battle for Endor, and that's the official movie of corrective hermaphrodite surgery. Why was this man selling strawberries & cream instant oatmeal? Was Bolo Yeung busy or something?

In 1990, Kellogg's had the industrious idea to mix all their cereals together and put them in one box. The result was Bigg Mixx, a flailing of sugar and artificial flavors that tasted like the inside of a fat person's mouth.

Bigg Mixx, the mascot, was an unnatural union of chicken, moose, wolf and pig parts. If Family Feud did a survey that asked: "Name an animal that shits in its own water supply" those would be the four answers on the board. Bigg Mixx is what happens when a scientist combines too much free time with too much animal sperm. If you were to look at this cereal monster's DNA under a microscope, you'd just see a drawing of yourself burning, signed by God.

This chimera abomination and his cereal only lasted for two years before being discontinued. Not because it had the flavor palette of bulimia, but because every time a Bigg Mixx delivery truck drove past a church, it unconsecrated the ground.

In 1948, Peter Wheat Bread started publishing a monthly comic about its corporate mascot, Peter Wheat, a creepy pope-hatted elf that wanted to be your pal. He's what babies see when you can't figure out why they're crying.

The weird thing about Peter Wheat is that he was awesome. He was a toddler the size of a pubic louse, and most of his world was made out of cupcake, but his adventures were sword-clashing killing sprees. He wasn't prancing through meadows and singing about the pep you get from enriched wheat flour. He was punching birds in the face and driving axes into hamsters. And there was no whimsy in his fighting style -- he was all business. Peter lived his life by a single code: Shut up and fight. The second any woodland fuck looked at him wrong, he drove the nearest object into its brain, never saying a word. Peter let the screams of his enemies do the talking.

No one really knows what happened to Peter Wheat, but he was the most powerful 2-inch creature on the planet before Kim Jong-il promoted his penis to Colonel. Please enjoy more fine examples of this brave bread hero's silent ass-kickings: