Urkel-Os. Named after a spectacularly annoying character on a spectacularly mediocre show. We never watched it; the promos alone made us cranky. Remember Steve Urkel of Family Matters? Neither does anyone else, which makes it doubly mysterious how he got his own cereal. Take Webster (strike one), endow him with the hyperbolic trappings of TV nerddom (strike two) and keep him on the air long after puberty makes an annoying voice much, much worse (strike three). "Mmm! Tastes just like Jaleel White!"

That'll wake you up.

Quisp. The fact that Jay Ward drew the cover art mitigated the cutesy pronunciation of the name, but not by much.

Boo Berry. Who knew that the dye that made those marshmallows such a fetching shade of powder blue was toxic? Not General Mills, who produced and distributed, but apparently did not test, this cousin of Franken Berry and Count Chocula. While the spooky theme was charming in a kitschy way for the other two cereals, the deadly crunch made Boo Berry genuinely creepy.

G. I. Joe Cereal. What kind of impression does a kid get from a cereal with "Sergeant Slaughter" as one of the shapes? Does it bring the specter of war to the breakfast table? Or does the kid in question get a rush from chewing and swallowing an intimidating authority figure? The Freudian implications of this are staggering.

Smurfberry Crunch. They were like blue singing mosquitoes, those damned Smurfs: just loud enough to be annoying and damn near impossible to get rid of. It figures they came from France. They inflicted upon an all-too-willing public this Captain Crunch knockoff with red and blue "berries" of questionable origin. We can only wonder what technicolor horrors this produced from the intestines of its consumers.