I was at my local Target the other day, and as I was passing down the cereal aisle, I came across this. General Mills is doing a “retro” promotion for its more popular cereals, like Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs, complete with the old designs of their mascots on the boxes.

There’s something undeniably charming about some of these old designs. Although seemingly crude on the surface, the simplicity of it all, from the geometric-like bodies down to the poses the characters are standing in make them more iconic than their current Disney-like proportioned, iris-eyed incarnations. And seeing them literally side by side on store shelves made it all the more jarring to me.
Nearly all advertising mascots have changed over the years: Tony the Tiger, the Vlasic Pickle stork, Scrubbing Bubbles, even a design so deceivingly simple as the Kool-Aid Man has had an overhaul: