Silly conejo! Trix is for los niños!

So I’m pouring The Boy’s cereal this morning, and I notice something a little different about this week’s box of Trix:

It seems our old friend the Rabbit has decided it’s finally time to abscond to South America, Nazi-style, with his ill-gotten booty. Fun in the sun! Brazilian chicks! And — best of all — South American kids are too busy earning their next meal by selling chiclé to tourists to worry about an idiotic talking rabbit and his box of gums-bleedingly crunchy cereal!¹

We’ve talked about cereal marketed to Spanish-speaking kids before. I believe we’re looking at the beginning of a trend here. And it isn’t bad, necessarily; I just wish these companies could figure out a way to do it without pandering. I think that the target audience for this stuff has got to be hip enough to be completely unimpressed with a game of ¡Encuentre el Trix!

(Which means: FIND THE TRIX!)

Of course, to find the Trix, you need to take a tour of South America, and all the wonderful things it has to offer:

The colorful chameleon calls the jungle rainforests of Costa Rica home. Here one is perched on a leafy maze. Draw a line from start to finish throughout the maze, and behold, thousands of colorful chameleons have been bulldozed by greedy capitalist land-raping developers! ¡Encuentre los indigenous peoples!

Some of the world’s greatest coffee is produced in the central highlands of Guatemala. Can you guess the name of the drug hidden in these bags? Did you know that you can’t spell “cocaine” without using the letters C, I, and A? ¡Es muy bueno!

Did you know that in Brazil, soccer is called fútbol? Add up the total goals in this game, then multiply your answer by the total number of fatalities from the riot in the parking lot, divide by two, and you’ve got the number of people in Los Estados Unidos who give a flying fuck about soccer! Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal!

Considered one of the great marvels of the world, the Panama Canal links the Caribbean with the Pacific Ocean. Can you name the country whose government Señor Teddy Roosevelt intentionally destabilized in order to complete construction? ¡Viva J.P. Morgan!

Now suppose you just can’t get enough of that South American flavor. What do you do? You can’t very well go around eating Trix all day. Not to worry — the fine people at Sunshine Foods have just the thing for you:

They’re shaped like triangles, because the triangle is the official shape of Mexico. ¡Viva Fiesta Cheesy Taco!

This comes as no surprise; Cheez-Its have come in all sorts of new flavors recently. Most of them look pretty awful — I’m pretty sure there’s something like a “Cheddar BBQ” variety out there, and “Garlic & Sour Cream” Cheez-Its sound like poison — but I guess “Fiesta Cheesy Taco” Cheez-Its make a little bit of sense. There’s also a “Fiesta Cheddar Nacho” flavor, but I chose these because The Boy thinks he’s allergic to cheese, and I thought the “Taco” in the title would outweigh the “Cheesy.”

I was right. He ate one — more than one, actually; more like a handful. Then he declared “THESE TASTE TOO MUCH LIKE TACOS” and has refused to go anywhere near them since. It was a strange comment, even from The Boy; he loves tacos. But now I understand what he meant. These things taste like tacos, all right — just like tacos. From a poorly-ventilated taco truck. I think you know the taste I mean — a little meat, a little cheese, a little tortilla, and a lot of sweat. It’s somehow tolerable when you’re eating an actual taco (under the right circumstances, it can even be downright delicious). In cracker form, however, it tastes like nothing so much as sweaty cheese. The “sweaty” part is all on the back end of the taste, too, so you munch for a few seconds thinking “This isn’t so bad,” and then you gag a little.

And yet somehow it looks like half the box is gone. I think eating all this shit must finally be catching up to my taste buds.

¹Seriously, what’s up with the Trix? They’re like fruit-flavored croutons. Me and my friends couldn’t make it through a bowl of these things without bleeding from our gums for the rest of the day, and that was back when they were round — now they’re actually shaped like fruit, all the better for poking bloody holes in the roof of your mouth. Let the damn rabbit have it already.