Pirates of the Caribbean. A fine film, soon to have what I assume (by the involvement of both Johnny Depp and Mick Jagger) will be a fine sequel. But I'm not here to tell you that Johnny Depp is cool. I'm not even here to talk about how much I liked Pirates of the Caribbean.

No, I'm here to discuss something that the PotC franchise should never have been involved with: A nutritious breakfast. I was strolling through my local grocery when I saw Johnny Depp looking all sad in the cereal aisle. I didn't know they made a Johnny Depp flavored cereal, but if they did I wanted to try it. But in a TOTALLY heterosexual way. The same way I'd want to try Oscar Wilde brand fruit juice.

Anywho, Mr. Depp was all decked out in pirate rags and such, and he was holding a steering wheel full of cereal that looked like it was tossed into a white lava lamp or possibly a bowl of exploding milk. I'll go with the last one because I imagine that any milk cool enough to touch Pirates of the Caribbean cereal would have to be explosive, but we'll get to that later.

I put back my cinnamon toast crunch and picked up the be-pirated box of brown balls and globular colorful marshmellows. The first ting I noticed was that this cereal was completely fucked. Johnny Depp may be sexy. I don't get insecure by admitting that. But is he sexy enough that anyone young enough to get off on marshmellows and poorly flavored chocolate balls would notice? I don't think he is.

The marketing guys, rather than make a cereal that would be eaten by pubescent girls (his main fan base) chose to make a cereal more appropriate for a much younger audience, but use Depp to market it to an older consumer base. The result is that while fan girls will most certainly buy a box or two of it (because it has three Johnny Depp faces on it and, inexplicably, has his feet on the side panel) there won't be much of it being eaten.

And the stuff on the box is pretty juvenile as well. Here are a few random quotes:

"Create a cool Treasure Hunt Map that requires at least 2,000 steps to to find some healthy booty... such as bananas, apples and oranges! Invite your friends to join in a search party where everyone benefits from the fun."

Box, even though there's a Johnny Depp on you, fuck you. If any kid ever invited their friends to a treasure hunt to find a motherfucking banana that kid would not only cease to have those friends, but their booty would cease to be at all healthy, and probably be in the hospital for a while after a well deserved ass kicking.

"Walking is great excersise- requiring no special pirate skills."

Thanks for telling me I don't need to be a pirate to walk. Maybe if you went back twenty one years and found me crawling on the floor and picking up a bandana and a saber under the mistaken impression that I needed them to learn to walk this revelation would have been usefeul.

While you're at it you could have told me that you don't need to drink rum to stop breast feeding. And I'd have been out of diapers a lot sooner if I'd known that potty training didn't involve running people through and stealing their goods. I can forgive you for not telling me sooner, Kellogs, but I don't know if any of the pre schools I was expelled from will ever be the same.

"Do yo have what it takes to be a pirate worth your weight in gold? See how many doubloons you can spot on this box."

This has to be the most confusing collection of unrelated sentences ever. If I were to make a list of skills needed by pirates with large bounties on their heads I think "finding doubloons on cereal boxes" would be low on that list. The two things have nothing to do with eachother. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the dialogue in the sequel goes something like this:

Lord Admiral Arsehat: My god! He can tell spanish currency apart from things that aren't spanish currency! Get me Boba Fett and tell him we'll give him anything to capture this... this Captain Doubloon Spotter"

The other problem is that [dear god I'm a pirate nerd - editor] the gold pieces on the box are NOT Spanish doubloons. They're the cursed Aztec medallions that Barbossa and his crew had to search out. So no matter how many of the little blighters you spot, there will still be zero doubloons on the box. Idiots.

There's also a gruelingly difficult puzzle that asks what the best transport is for finding treasure. It's apparently two five letter words and the letters you have to choose from are B L A C K P E A R L. It took me hours to find it out just because I expected it to be some stupid shit about how it was a good idea to walk.

The back of the box showcases Johnny Depp and some things that are definately not Spanish doubloons.

Anyhow, having properly looked over the box, I was now faced with a dilemma: How does one eat a cereal this cool? Just using my nifty green Kelogg's saber spoon didn't seem good enough. Pirates didn't wield lightsabers. And what was I to moisten it with? Certainly not milk. There aren't many cattle in the Caribbean and even fewer on pirate ships, and no matter how I begged the local Safeway to sell me some exploding milk they still had me escorted off the premises.

Well, Captain Morgan and Commodore Norrington and MP3 pirates didn't ply the mediterannean just so that I could drink milk with my cereal. No. Fuck no. A real pirate would pour rum over his cereal*. A real pirate would eat his cereal with a dagger after not shaving for a week. A real pirate would wear a cool bandana and listen to the pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. Most of all, a real pirate wouldn't vomit after eating rum soaked marshmellows and cocoa puffs.

* Though the idea of rum on cereal has been put forth before in CTRL-ALT-DEL I'm still going to be the first one dumb enough to try it and photograph the horror that results.

But would I be able to measure up to such greats as Calico Jack or Anne Bonnie or William Teach? To find out I've decided to conduct an experiment. My materials are as follows:

One box of Kellogs' Pirates of the Caribbean cereal

One bottle Captain Morgan's spiced rum

One bowl

One dagger (not pictured)

One CD player

One Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack

One gag reflex

One red bandana

One ring to rule them all*

*No not really.

On to Part 2, Matey!