Food Theory: Count Chocula's Shameful Past! (Halloween Breakfast Cereal)

all right mascots listen up your halloween themed monster cereals are all basically the same we don't need all five of you so we're gonna have to cull the hurt a little bit one at a time step forward and deliver your catchphrase count chocula your first i want to eat your cereal all right not very clever but i get it you can stay next up is frank and berry you know what actually your cereal sells pretty well you're safe you too boo berry good job on those sales let's hear from uh you fruity mummy fruity yummy mummy makes your tummy go yummy is that real is that really your catchphrase yeah i say it in commercials and everything take him away what come on no uh fruit brute let's hear it from you all right gonna stop you right there so that's it you just howl the word fruit i'll see myself out yeah you do that honestly didn't even know you were a thing until today happy halloween internet welcome to food theory the show that's part of a balanced argument loyal theorists i'm not exactly what you'd call a sugary cereal kind of guy aside from applejacks which i'm gonna tell you all about in an upcoming episode we just don't keep cereals like that around the house except for the seasonal exceptions you see every holiday when cereals roll out their special limited edition flavors i love testing them out i'm curious what new sugary concoction they've come up with this time christmas crunch sign me up s'mores summer cereal absolutely lucky charms for st patrick's day it's just it's just lucky charms and on halloween you know we invite count chocula into the house as every sugar loving kid knows general mills seasonal monster cereals get trotted out onto store shells every year around halloween count chocula is probably my personal favorite he's the mascot of the chocolate flavored monster cereal that's been a fan favorite since its commercials first hit airwaves back in 1971. don't be scared i'm the super sweet monster with the super sweet new serial count chocula despite having 50 years of television commercials under escape count chocula's backstory isn't all fleshed out as his oh so punny name suggests he's basically a kid-friendly version of bella lugosi's iconic dracula character down to the accent the wardrobe and the fangs well they're not exactly fangs are they let's just go with his two beaver-like front teeth count chocula in the commercials is very proud of his chocolate cereal it'll go toe-to-toe with anyone who claims that their cereal is superior especially frankenberry his frenemy slash roommate in the monster mansion well they don't see eye to eye when it comes to chocolate versus strawberry both monsters can agree on one thing children and cute animals are downright terrifying count chocular frighten daddy hi chicken daddy called chocula meow and i love their commercials so it all seems pretty straightforward right count chocula is a not so scary version of dracula who sells delicious sugary cereal to kids he has no real backstory to speak of so he's totally uncontroversial well this is the part of the episode where your childhood gets ruined folks because we here at food theory did some digging turns out that count chocula does have himself a backstory it's been kept secret for obvious reasons count chocula is the product of excessive inbreeding yup and we can prove it so hold on to your frankenberries because this monstrous food theory has got itself some teeth first off let me just say i get it this is a weird bold claim to be making about a beloved children's serial mascot but it's not like i woke up this morning looking for a way to take down count chocula okay i woke up like a month and a half ago looking for a way to take down count chocula i'm a guy who follows wherever the facts lead me right and in count chocula's case the trail began with his chin see over the past 50 years we've seen count chocula drawn in a variety of different animation styles as you'd expect from any character who's been around that long but his chin has been a constant throughout every iteration there's no version of it that isn't long and protruding now this is known as prognathism the extension or bulging out of the lower jaw colloquially it's referred to as hapsburg jaw because it's most famously present throughout the hapsburg dynasty and by the way i'm gonna be spelling hapsburg with a b in today's episode despite the hapsburg with a p spelling that we're used to in the u.s yeah it does sound like a p to your ear but actually modern day descendants of that royal line spell it with a b and you know what if they're the descendants of that line i'm gonna trust the way that they spell their own names so it's good enough for food theory now the habsburgs were a massively powerful royal house with territories across central europe southeastern europe and beyond from the 13th century until the austro-hungarian empire fragmented in the wake of world war one in order to secure land holdings and alliances the habsburgs as well as many other royal families in that region at the time married strategically and by strategically i mean if you can't trust someone else to do it you gotta do it yourself long story short these ancestral lines were more incestuous than a youtuber's working crew not like youtubers are doing it with their family i mean youtubers are doing it with their family they're working together youtubers tend to work with their family and close relatives that's what i'm saying here all right i'm just saying that everyone tends to work with their family members in this industry and in the habsburg line they were they were working with their family in a different way anyway the result after a century or six of keeping it in the family so to speak let's just say the gene pool got a bit shallow and the genetic disorder prognathism became pronounced now obviously just because you have a protruding lower jaw doesn't mean that you're the product of inbreeding i don't want to say that in the slightest obviously there are plenty plenty of examples out there of people with an extended lower jaw that you know aren't their own grandfather but when you look at the details around count chocula's character the story starts to tell itself count chocula's accent closely mimics bella lugosi's original portrayal of dracula back in 1931. i am dracula my delicious super sweet cereal count chocula lugosi was born in lugos austria-hungary which today is lugos romania lugaj has been within transylvania's ever-changing borders at certain points in history though today it lies in the romanian historic region adjacent transylvania because lugosi used his natural dialect for the role of dracula this is strong evidence that count chocula hails from the same geographic region as bella lugosi that is to say near transylvania particularly the western edge of transylvania closer to the present-day hungarian romanian border as for chocula's title of count this also ties him to that region a count is a title of nobility that generally ranks towards the middle of the royal hierarchy not every european country has a title that's equivalent to count but both romania and hungary just so happen to be among the countries that do in romania the title is kont and in hungary it's vikon so to recap the evidence suggests that count chocula is a noble who hails from a region with a rich tradition of royal inbreeding and he happens to exhibit the genetic disorder prognathism which is a side effect of long-term inbreeding it's certainly strong circumstantial evidence but i'd like something a bit more direct after all just because someone's account doesn't necessarily mean that they have themselves a royal bloodline a non-noble may have a title such as count conferred to them by a monarch long after their birth so there's certainly a chance that count chocula was just a big chinned commoner with no royal lineage or family history of incest and he was just given the title of count for i don't know having the most delicious cereal on the block or something what i'm looking for is evidence of actual royal lineage and as a matter of fact count chocula does drop a super handy tidbit about his bloodline in count chocula goes to hollywood a record that came with monster cereal boxes back in 1979 to lay the scene count chocula here has just told frankenberry that he's going to hollywood to win a monster lookalike contest why should you win count chocula because i look just like my great-great-uncle drac from transylvania so count chocula claims to be the great grand nephew of dracula and that's incredibly useful information to us because we're basically trying to do the impossible connect a fictitious character to a real-life dynasty but dracula as it would happen is one of those characters who blurs the line between reality and fiction a little bit i suppose you could say he walks in both worlds allow me to explain in 1897 the world was introduced to dracula in bram stoker's gothic horror novel of the same name obviously count dracula an old school vampire who was sucking blood long before vampires started to suck is a fictional character but the character is largely based upon a real-life transylvanian-born royal from the 1400s vlad the third tepes aka vlad the impaler aka vlad dracula the thing is stoker didn't exactly fact check his novel or anything after all he was just a guy trying to write some cool creepy gothic fiction it seems stoker heard some stories about vlad the impaler being a generally bloodthirsty guy who impaled people then used elements of those stories to help craft a vampire character who isn't exactly vlad the impaler but also has enough overlap that it couldn't really be based on anyone else in history how many other transylvanian royals named dracula out there have a thing for impaling you know so essentially what count chocula is saying is that in his universe he's the great grandnephew of vlad the impaler and while vlad the impaler isn't himself a habsburg he did have himself the habsburg jaw i repeat a relative of count chocula has himself prognathism now of course we need to make sure that the timeline checks out vlad the impaler lived in the 1400s and his supposed great grand nephew count chocula is hidden up discos in the 20th century are we to believe that they're separated by six centuries and yet only three generations well yeah vampires are semi-immortal after all dracula is a vampire count chocula is a vampire well actually is he a vampire i mean he obviously dresses the part but let's look at the evidence there's a number of vampiric rules laid out in dracula that don't seem to apply to count chocula he sleeps in a bed rather than a coffin he's able to ingest human food he casts a shadow and yet he does possess some vampiric powers such as the ability to levitate objects and turn into a bat i think that's a bad it's close enough the point is this count chocula possesses some vampiric traits but not all which is solid evidence that he's not quite a vampire but rather a damn peer now what's that you might ask well get ready to learn about the bats and the bees everyone you see when a vampire and a human love each other very very much they make a damn pier according to legend damn peers are able to do specific vampiric things like practice sorcery and control animals but are also able to do certain human things like eat human food and sometimes cast shadows and according to mythology wiki quote damn peers may be more mortal than vampires who are known to have a semblance of immortality but they can still live for hundreds if not thousands of years and this makes so much sense because if you look at count chocula over the course of the past 50 years it's very clear that his body is in fact changing and i'm not just talking about his art style here he's gotten a lot taller in the 70s his eyes were basically at frank and barry's chin but just a decade later and suddenly their practically eyed eye and yet after that 50 plus years of adulthood he still doesn't look elderly so what's clear is that count chocula is aging but not at a human rate see if he were purely a vampire he wouldn't have aged at all if he were a human he'd be looking like the red woman without her necklace but instead he's put on a good 16 inches over the past five decades as he finally hit some kind of slow mo dampiric puberty so he's a damper in dracula's lineage but there's still a huge unanswered question lingering in the air what's the deal with his name why is he called count chocula this brings us to the final part of the theory consider this vlad ii was known as vlad dracul his son vlad the impaler was known as dracula meaning son of dracul so by this custom it's quite possible that count chocula's ancestors were chocol originally and was changed somewhere down the line oh and uh by the way chocola just so happens to be a surname that's found most densely in where else central europe including modern day hungary so if you're in transylvania and want to run into somebody named chuck cool you don't really have to travel that far so here's the theory my friends the food theory as to why literally everything in count chocula's life is the way it is his mother a vampire hailed from the dracula line and was vlad the impaler's grandniece count chocula's father who had the surname chocol was a regular old mortal the two lovebirds met somewhere in the vicinity of transylvania at some point in the last five centuries or so they gave birth to alfred yeah his first name is alfred had to throw that one in there and alfred being the son of chakul took the customary step of taking chocula as his name from his mother's side alfred inherited the noble title of count his considerable wealth as well as the protruding chin from there chocolate probably just kind of became count chocula's thing the same way pretzels became the wetzel family's thing when you got a name like that you just kind of have to roll with it you know so there you have it friends the most complete backstory of count chocula to date with all the good the bat and the inbreeding included and it's just in time too because general mills is reportedly developing an entire cinematic universe for its monster serial ip i wish that that was a joke but it's certainly not and given what we've learned today i think it could work it has echoes of the connected justice league universe with count chocula as the batman stand-in quite literally this time at the center of it all i mean the batman character has made for some really great movies over the years so i feel like inbred batman would at least be halfway decent besides it's not like general mills has many other options what are they gonna do put the fate of the franchise on the shoulders of this guy [Music] but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit thanks for watching theorists if you enjoyed our deep dive and account chocula lore definitely check out our episode on the kool-aid man did you know that the kool-aid man is part of the marvel universe oh yeah he is anyway be sure you subscribe to the channel or if you've already done that drop a new and improved catch phrase for fruity yummy mummy down in the comments if general mills is gonna thrust an entire monster cereal cinematic universe on us they're definitely gonna need our help to make it suck just a little bit less i'll see you all next week

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,659,359

Rating: 4.9409008 out of 5

Keywords: count chocula, breakfast, cereal, breakfast cereal, monster cereal, booberry, general mills, mascot, cereal mascot, halloween, dracula, chocolate, breakfast recipe, breakfast food, count chocula commercial, cereal commercial, booberry commercial, halloween food, matpat, food theorists, food theory, film theory, game theory, game theorists, film theorists, eat the menu, rosanna pansino, binging with babish, boo berry, franken berry

Id: vhrIacbgKak

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Luhood]

I love these silly theories, they're always great fun.