The 10 Best Cereal Box Prizes Of All Time

For lots of kids, having Mom or Dad buy you a box of cereal at the grocery store doesn't just mean that you'll be eating cereal for breakfast tomorrow. It also comes with the promise of something greater within: a prize. Be it a special treat waiting at the bottom of the box or something that required you to cut out those mysterious UPC codes and mail them in, there's something about the allure of a cereal box prize that makes them an essential part of childhood. These 10 just might be the best ones ever.

The O.G. cereal box prize, Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures was a three-panel flapped booklet that included illustrations of animals, as well as hinged panels which let you switch around the heads, bodies, and feet of the animals. 

This toy may look like any old whistle, but it's actually quite possibly the most infamous cereal box prize of all time. Given out in the '70s (a time when phones were slightly more primitive), if you covered up the holes and blew, you could actually hack the telephone system into giving you free long distance calls thanks to the 2600 HZ frequency. Whoever figured this out was a genius. 

Last year, in anticipation of the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, General Mills put free Star Wars movie posters inside boxes of its cereals. We have a feeling some collectors bought a lot of General Mills cereal that month.

If there's one phrase that sums up childhoods in the late 1940s and early '50s, it has to be "Lone Ranger secret compartment ring." This metal ring has a small detachable face, and behind it is a little picture of the Lone Ranger himself, which can be swapped with other pictures as well. Now if only it decoded something!

What "Lone Ranger secret compartment ring" is to the '50s, "Darkwing Duck fanny pack" is to the '90s. Free with purchase of Corn Flakes was a fanny pack emblazoned with the logo of the show, which ran from 1991 to 1995. Perfect for walking around Disney World in the '90s, and even more perfect for walking around Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2016. 

First of all, getting a sheet of 30 temporary tattoos in a cereal box is bound to make any kid's day. Second, them being of just about every MLB team makes them even cooler. But third, check out those logos! Kid-friendly and unique, we've never seen MLB logos like them before or since. Exceedingly awesome. 

Just about every kid wanted to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in the early '90s, when there were more product tie-ins than you could imagine, from Hostess pudding pies to breakfast cereal. From stickers to "adventure sets," Ninja Turtles cereal boasted some radical (dude) prizes, none better than a paper eye mask. The power of a strip of paper to transform a kid into a fictional beast still amazes us. 

This nifty magnet-powered car came with boxes of long-gone Kellogg's Pep in the 1950s, and was "magically" controlled by putting on a two-fingered ring that housed a small magnet and putting your hand close enough to the car to make it move forward or backward. Not only do we wish we had one of these back in the day, but a mint-condition one sells for upwards of $150. 

Face it: Minions are adorable. Even if you actively dislike them, it's hard to not find their shtick amusing. It should come as no surprise that when General Mills partnered with Universal Pictures to give away figurines of the funny little creatures in a variety of outfits, kids everywhere flipped. 

Why put a regular reflector on your bike when you can put a reflector bearing the likeness of quick-witted '80s and '90s icon Garfield on your bike? Given away inside Kellogg's products in the '90s, these were available in three colors, attached to the spokes of the bike, and were the must-have bike accessory of 1992, along with Spokey Dokey beads and a Ninja Turtle horn.