New! Fruity Cheerios

I know it's been a little longer than usual since I've written a review. I apologize. Instead of reviews, I've been writing a novel. How selfish of me.
Well, today I'm back, just for you, whoever you are. And I'm going to review New! Fruity Cheerios.

If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you may already know that my favorite cereal is Multi-Grain Cheerios, which I reviewed several months ago. So why am I now reviewing another Cheerio, instead of something cool and exciting? Because, sadly, the convenience store across the street no longer carries Multi-Grain Cheerios, and I was forced to purchase a New!, brightly-colored Cheerio. And so I will force this review upon the world.

Walking down the dusty isle of my most convenient convenience store, I stopped in the Cheerios section, looking for my old friend Multi-Grain. There were the plain Cheerios - a timeless classic, the Honey-Nut, some crazy-looking yogurt Cheerios that I wouldn't poke with a ten-foot stick, and - what the - Fruity Cheerios?!!?!? Aaaagh - brightly colored - large "NEW!" written on the top - uuh - can't... resist...

So I tried them. They are, as you might have suspected, like a combination of Cheerios and Fruit Loops. But somehow, they're not as good as either. They maintain the trademark shape, size, and consistency of Cheerios that even Malt-o-Meal fails to reproduce accurately, but there's something very different about the familiar Cheerio in its latest incarnation.

I read the ingredients list. Corn... oats... blah... orange juice? That doesn't go in cereal... rice bran oil.. calcium carbonate (that's chalk, folks)... trisodium phosphate... wait - what's this? Red 40? Yellow 6?! Blue 1?!!??! And other color?!!!?!?!??! That's right, Fruity Cheerios come in five bright, unnatural colors! But what flavors do the five colors represent? I can only assume that at least one of them is orange, but all the others must be placed under "natural flavor". Or maybe "riboflavin." I'm just kidding, riboflavin is just vitamin B2, everyone knows that. It doesn't taste like anything.

So what do I actually think of Fruity Cheerios? Well, they have some good points: they're flavored with real fruit juice and no artificial flavors, they're a good source of whole grain (the box says "excellent" but I don't know if I'd go that far), and they supposedly have 25% less sugar than "the Leading Fruity Cereal*" (Nowhere on the box do they mention an actual comparison to Fruit Loops.) But when it comes down to it, they're just not as good as either Fruit Loops or Cheerios, and they definitely don't compare to Multi-Grain Cheerios. Plus, they only leave your milk a faint pinkish color, instead of that crazy pink-purple-green that you get with Fruit Loops.

So Fruity Cheerios gets a 5.6 out of 10.