Free Prize at the Bottom

At least as much nutritional value as actual cereal!

"What you do want to look for are cereals with sound effects in the name—"Smacks", "Pops", "Puffs", "Blasts", and, um... "Gunshots in a Crowded Mall". You know, the kind with the squarish sugared pieces of styrofoam they claim are marshmallows. These are guaranteed to have a nice big reach-your-nasty-unwashed-hand-straight-to-the-bottom-of-the-box toy in it."

— Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email #194 "specially marked"

A once-standard marketing strategy for breakfast cereals and other products meant for children was to put some sort of "prize" at the bottom of the package—typically something plastic and useless, but still pretty cool to the target audience. Cracker Jack, having started this practice in 1912, was likely the first to do so. Unfortunately, repeated instances of children simply disregarding the notice of a prize contained inside and scarfing down the contents and choking on the toys led to the widespread abolition of this practice, in some cases by legislation, in others on the initiative of the companies manufacturing the product for the sake of avoiding lawsuits. Cracker Jack "Prizes" are now just little paper squares that have little puzzles and stickers on them that even little kids realize are lame, and just end up being thrown away. As a result, the term is nowadays used as an analogy for something very cheap.

Modern examples would involve the prize being packaged outside the cereal box's bag, where the actual cereal is stored, in order to prevent choking hazards and preserve said cereal prize.

In fiction, when characters notice the free prize at the bottom label on their box of cereal (or other package), they will attempt to cash in immediately. This means employing a method of getting past the actual product, such as sticking one's entire arm into the box and digging around while pieces of food fall out. More innovative characters will come up with a less messy method such as opening the product from the bottom. In some cases, they find that the prize is missing and may have already been taken. Sometimes in animation, a character, particularly a Big Eater, will scarf down the prize.

Since this strategy is specifically used to sell to kids (or, more accurately, their parents), it is most often seen referenced in cartoons, comic strips or other media that are considered as being meant for children, although that's not always the case.

For decades, in the United States DUZ detergent was sold with a piece of glassware in the box.

Shokugan is an inversion that exists in Japan. The main product being sold is a good quality toy, packaged with a pitifully small amount of cheap candy or snacks.

The Ur-Example, dating back to the middle ages is the Three Kings Cake, a cake with a small figurine or other trinket, traditionally meant to represent the Christ Child, hidden inside. Modern King Cakes may include licensed figurines of more contemporary characters.

Competition Coupon Madness is a variant. While that trope deals with the collection of box tops or some other part of a product package and sending away for the prize via mail, this trope is for situations where the prize is immediately available in the package itself.

---

Examples:

Comic Books

• Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #182, the first time Peter Parker proposes to Mary Jane (she wouldn't say yes this time) he does so by giving her a box of Cracker Jacks, with the regular prize inside replaced by an engagement ring.
• In Sunny Side Up, Sunny takes down a box of Corn Flakes that says there's a toy inside while at her Gramps. She dumps the whole box only to find a pack of cigarettes and no toy; Gramps is hiding them all around the house, as he's been told to stop smoking (but hasn't quit yet).
• Supergirl: When Matrix is dealing with becoming an Earth Angel, she discusses her situation with Clark over a box of Cracker Jack. He mentions that he and Pete Ross used to guess what the prize was, until x-ray vision took the fun out of it, but swears he hasn't x-rayed this box. After he's gone, she finds that the prize just happens to be a pendant shaped like an angel.
• Superman: In Superman (1939) #226, the Man of Steel is exposed to red Kryptonite found as the prize in Jimmy Olsen's cereal box, which turned him into King Kong.
• Wonder Woman: The only completed and published part of Wonder Woman and the Star Riders, which was intended to be an animated show and toy line, was a promotional comic included for free in boxes of Kellogg's cereal.

Comic Strips

• Happens frequently with Jason in FoxTrot.
  • In one Sunday strip, Peter is seen wolfing down bowl after bowl of cereal until the box is empty. He sheepishly turns to Jason and asks "Did you really want that decoder ring?" Jason's reaction shows that this isn't the first time this has happened.
• A Story Arc in Peanuts concerned getting one free marble in a box of Snicker-Snacks cereal. In one strip Charlie Brown told Shermy that the packing center made an error - there were 400 marbles and one Snicker-Snack.
• In one Sunday Strip, Garfield dove into a bag of cat food after Jon told him about the prizes at the bottom. Garfield surfaced with a whistle and Groucho Marx glasses.
  • Cereal boxes with prizes in them have appeared more than once. One strip has Garfield throw the cereal all over the table (and Jon) to get the toy ring inside, another features a box that has no cereal in it, only a large toy robot (which smashes the bowl), and a third one where Garfield accidentally ate not only the cereal but also the prize.
• In Do They Ever Grow Up?, a book of one-panel comics by Lynn Johnston, a boy, who has dumped three boxes of cereal on the floor, tells his disapproving mother, "I couldn't 'member which one had the free helicopter."
• Parodied in one The Far Side cartoon where a family of dinosaurs is having breakfast, the son digging through a box of cereal that advertises "Free Kid Inside!" on the box. His mother sternly tells him to eat his breakfast and look for it later.
• One Calvin and Hobbes arc has Calvin get excited when his favorite cereal has a promotional giveaway for a beanie hat with a battery-powered propeller on top. Hilarity Ensues as Calvin endeavors to eat enough cereal to get all the box tops needed. And then he's disappointed when it finally arrives and he discovers that no, it doesn't enable him to fly.

Fan Works

• The Bolt Chronicles: When Bolt loses the title objects in "The Rings," he and Mittens improvise using Cracker Jacks decoder ring prizes as replacements, tearing open several boxes in the process.

Films — Live-Action

• Our Miss Brooks: In this film, the cinematic grand finale to the series of the same name, Mr. Boynton finds an engagement ring in the bottom of a box of Cracker Jack. However, before he can place the ring on Miss Brooks' finger, it's stolen by a female chimpanzee named Chiquita. No matter, now engaged, Mr. Boynton and Miss Brooks walk out of the zoo arm in arm.
• UHF has a scene where Stanley Spadowski notices — while on air — that the box of cereal he's hawking comes with a free toy. Saying, "Don't let your parents know you do this," he then disassembles the box to get at the toy, making a mess of the cereal.
  • Earlier, George mentions that there's a neat prize inside each box of Mrs. Hockenberger's Butter Cookies, though we never learn or hear any more about it once we find out what box he's actually holding.
• In While You Were Sleeping, young Mary Callahan doesn't want her older brother, Jack, to eat her favorite breakfast cereal. When he protests that it's very special cereal, she complains that "last time [he] took the toy surprise."
• After the opening sequence of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, Jesse's little sister digs through a box of cereal for the free prize, a set of small, plastic finger blades. The cereal, incidentally, is called "Fu Man Chews".
• The Dictator has a scene of Aladeen having cereal with one of his generals. As the general pours his cereal, the prize inside lands right in his bowl. Aladeen tells him to enjoy it, then immediately orders the general's execution.
• At the climax of Spaceballs, Yogurt tells Lone Starr that the Ring of the Schwartz - which he formerly claimed was enchanted - is cheap junk, that he got it from a box of Crackerjacks.
• In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Paul takes the ring from a Cracker Jack box to Tiffany's to be engraved as a present for Holly.

Literature

• In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the five Golden Tickets are placed inside candy bar wrappers. There are reports of rich people buying bulk orders of Wonka Bars and tearing through their wrappers in hopes of finding a ticket, presumably discarding the chocolate. In fact, this is how Veruca Salt's father got her a ticket — he bought up all the Wonka Bars he could and gave them to the workers in his nut factory to "shell" until the ticket was found.
• This is referenced by Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe when a receptionist tells him that the executive he wishes to see is on an intergalactic cruise... in his office.
  Zaphod: Listen, three eyes, don't you try to outweird me. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
  Receptionist: Well, just who do you think you are, honey? Zaphod Beeblebrox or something?
  Zaphod: Count the heads.
• Only You Can Save Mankind has a Running Gag of characters finding plastic alien action figures in their cereal. One of them is noted to look a bit like a ScreeWee.
• The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken: On a packet of Brekkfast Brikks cereal, there is a beautiful model garden which can be cut out and assembled. Mark discovers that if he sings a verse printed on the side of the cereal packet, the garden grows to an enormous size, and he can enter it. When he finds out that there are six sections to the garden altogether, he offers to do extra housework, to earn enough pocket money to buy the remaining five packets.

Live-Action TV

• The short-lived television series The Wizard had an episode in which the title character had invented a little robotic beetle-like thing that was specifically designed to dig through boxes of cereal and retrieve the prize at the bottom.
• In Night Court, Judge Harry Stone ends up in the hospital because of abdominal pain. He thinks it could be his appendix, the head of a local Greasy Spoon thinks he poisoned Harry. When he takes a turn for the worse, the rest of the cast is worried sick. Turns out his box of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs had a toy whistle at the bottom and Harry ate it by accident.
  Judge Stone: You know 'Zippy Bits,' that breakfast cereal that promises a free circus whistle in each box? Well, I bought a box, polished off the whole thing. No whistle. I even called them. They said there was a whistle in every box. Guess they were right.
• One of the spoof ads on The Goodies was for Goodies Plastic Spacemen, which came in a cereal box with a free corn flake.
• In Scrubs, JD has a flashback where he had a box of cereal that ended up having, not one, but two secret spy decoder ring prizes, he gives one to Turk and they both claim it's the best day of their lives (even above Turk proposing to Carla).
• One episode of Psych begins with young Shawn trying to get the prize from a box of cereal, and then his dad shows him that the most efficient way to accomplish this is to just open the box from the bottom, teaching him about flipping perspectives. Shawn uses this to help solve the case and later get the prize when Gus attempted to claim the toy for himself by dividing the cereal a certain way.
  • Gets called back to in a later episode when Shawn attempts to confess to Juliet for the first time. He mentions the kids who would flip the box to get it immediately or the ones who went through bowl after bowl until it happened on its own (along with a humorous third one of a kid who would eat anything, including the prize.)
• One incident in the Monk novel Mr. Monk on the Road has Monk figure out that a salmonella poisoning victim was murdered because the box with the contaminated cereal had a toy that wasn't in the boxes that were on the recall list.
• In a fake commercial from The Amanda Show, some kids eating the new cereal Meatloaf Crunch ("It's turning the milk chocolatey!"-"That ain't chocolate—that's gravy!") get lotion and a mousetrap in the box. Another fake commercial for Mammal O's Cereal featured LIVE ANIMALS in the bottom of the box!
• An All That sketch had a family taking free prizes out of all the grocery items, even the mayonnaise.
• On The Cosby Show, Rudy and Theo dig through (and ruin) a box of cereal to get the pack of 5 candies enclosed inside. Cliff asks them how much they were if bought at the store. "Two for a penny," Theo responds. (The box of cereal cost them a couple of dollars.)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In one episode Dawn is seen pouring out multiple bowls of cereal just so she can get the prize at the bottom. She then admits she doesn't intend to eat any of it and wants eggs for breakfast instead.
• In one episode of Reba, Van mentions that he jokingly slipped a request for a red convertible into a prayer for something important. Later in the episode, he finds a toy car in his cereal-a red convertible. He takes it as a good omen.
• In "The Breakfast and the Furious" from Cutthroat Kitchen, all of the challenges were breakfast-themed, and the finally challenge was to make cereal (with milk, though they didn't have to make the milk.) The first sabotage of the round was to make your opponent forfeit all their tools and vessels and use only what they could find at the bottom of cereal boxes provided by Alton Brown, such as toy dinosaurs, a toy truck, and, yes, a little toy pan.
• In one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Salem and Aunt Hilda are buying (and eating) lots of frozen waffles because the company is running a promotion where one box will contain a solid gold waffle. Aunt Zelda points out that the gold waffle is "probably in the really heavy box."

Music

• The music video "I'm on a Boat" involves Andy Samberg discovering a coupon for a free boat trip for three in his cereal.
• Referenced in "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" by Meat Loaf:
  I know you're looking for a ruby in a mountain of rocks
  But there ain't no Coup de Ville
  Hiding at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box
• Appears in "Weird Al" Yankovic's "She Drives Like Crazy," a parody of "She Drives Me Crazy" by Fine Young Cannibals
  When you drive, I can't relax / Got your license from Cracker Jacks
  • Also referenced in "It's All About the Pentiums", which parodies "It's All About the Benjamins" by The Notorious B.I.G.
  Where'd you get your CPU, in a box of Cracker Jacks?

Tabletop Games

• The first edition Ghostbusters RPG adventure module "Ghost Toasties" was about an ancient gem linking to the demon lord of sugar, Hagost, being given away as a prize at the bottom of the cereal box.

Video Games

• At one point in The Secret of Monkey Island, Guybrush finds a box of his favorite breakfast cereal. The prize at the bottom turns out to be necessary to progress.
• Word Krispies involves eating box after box of alphabet cereal to discover an important item dropped by the main character while touring a cereal factory. Finishing the last bowlful in a box reveals the usual cheap toy surprise.
• Chex Quest is a game that was given out in Chex cereal boxes in 1996. It's a Doom reskin with more family friendly action and custom levels. It has since gained quite a cult following and has received multiple sequels.
• A Super Mario cereal was made as a tie-in to Super Mario Odyssey. Rather than having a prize included in the box, the box itself is the prize — it includes an embedded chip that lets it act as an amiibo, which Nintendo's game systems can scan to unlock various small bonuses in multiple games.

Web Animation

• The Strong Bad Email "specially marked" is all about Strong Bad providing his thoughts on breakfast cereal and breakfast cereal prizes. For the record, Strong Bad's cereal prize of choice is anything that can cause lasting damage to Homestar's face.

Webcomics

• Layla in Eerie Cuties won a random prize with CD (see the next page) and one extra mood swing of her new good friend as a bonus in bonus. Yes, "she leads a charmed life".
• Fighter in 8-Bit Theater has mentioned that he has sometimes dug his arm into a cereal box in the urge to get the prize inside, resulting in quite a mess. Black Mage soon becomes horrified when he finds out that Fighter only washes his hands once a week.

Web Original

• In Caddicarus's video "The Ripoof World of Crash Bandicoot Merchandise", he covers a couple of cereal box toys featuring Crash himself. He also laments that most cereals don't do this anymore.
  Caddy: The toy was the tastiest bit! [Caddy eats a spoonful of cereal with a Squirtle toy on top]
• CollegeHumor: Why settle for one prize when you can get a cereal box made entirely of prizes? "All Prizes Cereal" has all the toys you crave without all that boring cereal. It's the best thing to happen to breakfast since marshmallows!

Western Animation

• The Angry Beavers: The episode "Boxtop Beavers" featured Norb and Dag competing over a variant: the boxtop prizes. Dag would reach in and grab the prize at the bottom, but Norb would clip boxtops and mail them back (and receive a much better prize in return).
• Ben 10: In the episode "Washington B.C.", Ben uses Grey Matter for the first time to go digging through boxes of Sumo Smacks cereal to try and get a rare gold Sumo Slammers trading card.
• In "No Tradebacks!" in the fifth season of Caillou, Caillou gets a small toy shovel as a prize in a cereal box, but is upset because it's not the stickers that he wanted— ones like those that Rosie got when it was her turn to get the free prize. He trades it with his friend Jay for a set of the stickers and they agree to "no tradebacks," but then Caillou is upset that he traded it away when he sees that Jay attached it to his dump truck, this being a feature of the shovel. He cajoles Jay so much that Jay finally agrees to a tradeback anyway, but when Caillou sees how upset Jay gets, he finally honors the original agreement.
• In "I Am Collecting a Collection" from Charlie and Lola, Charlie pours all the cereal out of a box and gets the second-to-last dinosaur he needs for his collection of plastic dinosaur figures.
• An episode of Cow and Chicken is about Chicken finding a credit card in a cereal box (which only has a limit of 25 cents). Also, in the episode where he gets insomnia after eating coffee-flavored cereal, he finds a pair of underpants for a prize.
• Dexter's Laboratory: In the episode "Decode of Honor" Dexter and Dee Dee each get a decoder ring for their respective favorite medias (Loose parodies of G.I Joe and My Little Pony) that they have to use to fulfil a list of tasks to join the fanclub. Due to a mix up, they grab the wrong code sheets.
• DuckTales (2017): In a flashback to Donald's childhood growing up with his lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, Gladstone finds $20 in the bottom of a cereal box. His luck can even spontaneously generate $20 bills within a reality entirely controlled by a villain, so it's a safe bet that the manufacturer didn't intentionally put that in the box.
• The episode "Tag Yer Ed" from Ed, Edd n Eddy begins with the Eds obtaining a box of Chunky Puffs, which Eddy points out has a prize inside (a giant marshmallow). Ed, being Ed, reads the "Low in Fat" label and assumes the fat is the prize.
• In an episode of The Fairly OddParents!, this trope is exploited by a race of super-cute aliens, who use their charm to take over other planets by making the inhabitants of said planets want to buy more Giggle-Pie "merchandise".
• In Family Guy, Jeremy Irons is adamant to point out there is no prize at the bottom of his cereal.
• In "Franklin's Fossil" on Franklin, the title character and his best friend Bear have been collecting a series of colored spinning tops that they're using as models of the solar system. The last one that they need is a purple one that's supposed to represent Pluto (this being back when it was still a planet) and when Mr. Mole sees them playing with them, he mentions having found the purple one in his cereal box. Later, when Mr. Mole gives it to them, Bear is thrilled that they can finally start eating some different cereal.
• Hey Arnold!: The episode "Sally’s Comet" has a variant of this where Arnold and Gerald need to collect box tops in order to win a telescope before Sally's Comet passes by. They end up getting their friends and various boarders to help, during which Harold accidentally eats a prize from one of the boxes.
• In "The Masked Mouse Rides Again" from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Oliver and Mouse find a tiny toy telescope at the bottom of their cereal box. Oliver gives it to Mouse, who is inspired to create a pretend galaxy.
• The Johnny Test episode "Johnny-O's" is centered around this. Johnny is sick about all the lame laser guns that come with cereal boxes, so he decides to create his own cereal—with a working laser gun as a prize inside. It comes back to bite him when Porkbelly goes crazy with the guns.
• One episode of Kaeloo has Stumpy buy a cereal box for the sake of a free hat, and then rip the box to shreds and let all the cereal fall on the ground, taking only the hat.
• In "Super Trolley" from Mr. Bean: The Animated Series, Bean gets an action toy prize from his POP cereals. However, when he's ran out of cereals, he goes to shopping to purchase Mrs. Wicket's needs especially cat litter and the POP cereals. After Bean goes back to his house, he got lots of action toys thanks to his POP cereals he brought.
• The Patrick Star Show: Exaggerated in "The Patrick Show Cashes In". Patrick makes a cereal that only consists of toys. Of course, this means you can't actually eat it because there's no actual food.
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "No More Bunny Business" the boys make working X-ray specs and use them to look into cereal boxes to figure out which boxes contain the good prizes.
• In the Regular Show episode, "Lunch Break", a flashback is shown where Mordecai and Rigby, who were pre-teens at the time, are trying to find an action figure of RGB2, one of their favorite TV show characters, inside a box of "RGB2iOs". Unlike other examples, there is not a prize in every box; only 1 in 5 boxes. Mordecai and Rigby buy 5 boxes of the cereal, but Rigby's father catches them sifting through one of the boxes just to get the toy, and forces them to eat the entire box of cereal before opening another box. Mordecai and Rigby DO end up eating each box of cereal they open but end up not finding the action figure in either of the boxes and get food poisoning from eating too much cereal after eating four of the five boxes. Mordecai and Rigby are sent to a hospital, where they are given the action figure by two representatives of "RGB2iOs". Turns out the action figure was defective.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: "Stimpy's Breakfast Tips" showed Stimpy's preferred method for getting at a Muddy Mudskipper cereal bowl caddy: He just gets a very big bowl and pours all of the cereal into it. After he claims his prize, he stuffs the cereal back into the box.
• Rugrats (1991): In "The Odd Couple", when Tommy stays at Chuckie's house for the weekend, he and Chuckie are served Dummi Bear Sugar Lumps for breakfast. As Tommy tells Chuckie that in his house, he has Reptar Cereal for breakfast, Chuckie tells him that Dummi Bear Sugar Lumps are the cereal brand that his dad buys. He also shows Tommy the Dummi Bear whistle he got in his box of Dummi Bear Sugar Lumps, to which Tommy tells him that he gets a free dinosaur in Reptar Cereal. An annoyed Chuckie blows his whistle at Tommy.
• The Simpsons:
  • An early episode had Bart trying to find a police badge at the bottom of his cereal. It turns out Homer got to it first.
  • Another episode features a box of Krusty-O's brand cereal that comes with a free jagged metal O at the bottom. Bart accidentally eats it and wins a court settlement of $100,000 from the company (of which Lionel Hutz takes all but $500 as his "legal fees"), which he then spends on something for Lisa, because she was the only one who believed he was sick. He plans to get another settlement from the new Krusty-O's prize - flesh-eating bacteria.
• At the start of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Shanghaied", SpongeBob is shaking his cereal box to find the toy inside. Just then, a giant anchor crashes into his house, leading to the line: "Squidward! The sky had a baby from my cereal box!"
  • Also, in the episode "Waiting", SpongeBob misreads a "Free Prize Inside" message by ignoring the small print advertising a "free prize offer inside". After sending in the offer, the titular wait is SpongeBob's wait at the mailbox for the prize to arrive.
• Taz-Mania once had a bit where Taz went to insane lengths to get the prize from a box of cereal...which turned out to be one of those baking-powder propelled submarines.
• In an episode of Timothy Goes to School, Nora decided to forego her normal breakfast cereal in favor of something called "Weeds and Seeds" so that she could get the prize of emerald slippers at the bottom as a birthday present for Yoko. And she was such a good little girl that she actually ate the stuff, only to find that to her disappointment, there was only one slipper, and it was some dinky little thing. Her mother suggested making a necklace out of it and she did but thought her gift was lame and didn't want to give it to Yoko at first. When she finally did, Yoko was delighted, as the slipper was the mate to one that she already had. In the book version of the story, "Buried Treasure" from the anthology ''Timothy's Tales from Hilltop School," Yoko says that she ate 49 boxes of the same cereal trying to find the other slipper.

---

So what's the free prize at the bottom here? A Stinger? Aww... I already got one of those :(

---