Quentin Tarantino’s love for an unusual piece of Keanu Reeves merchandise
Aside from being one of the most highly respected auteurs of his generation, Quentin Tarantino is a professional cinema nerd with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film history. Unlike many of his peers, he never went to film school or learned his craft at the feet of a great cinema master; he simply watched movies. A lot of them. In high school, he’d skip class in favour of the hobby and eventually dropped out entirely and worked in a video store. By immersing himself in films of all eras and genres, he developed a knowledge so vast that he’d give any film academic a run for their money.
But while it’s easy to see the influences of Dario Argento’s vivid Giallo cinema in Tarantino’s work or the soundtrack-driven majesty of Sergio Leone, the Pulp Fiction director’s love of filmmaking goes far beyond the techniques that he has mastered and repurposed in his own filmography. He’s also a fan of movie memorabilia and, on at least one occasion, was able to combine it to perfection with one of his other great passions – breakfast cereal.
Tarantino adores breakfast cereal. He could probably talk about it all day. He even has a set list of clear reasons why it’s so great. For one thing, it’s delicious, and for another, it’s easy to prepare. In a 2007 interview, he discussed how his love of cereal is often intertwined with his love of cinema and comic books. He said: “I’ve always loved the fact that cereal is still really aimed at kids and is more fashionable and faddish than a hip-hop tennis shoe, because they will literally, constantly, come out with, like, ‘butterscotch toast cereal,’ alright? And it’s on the stands for three months and then it’s gone. Never to be heard of again. Especially all of the cereals they tie in with this movie or that Saturday morning cartoon or this show or this that and the other.”
That said, Tarantino noted that many of these supposedly special editions of classic cereals are hardly different from the original. Instead of creating a completely new flavour, brands simply repackage the same old product with the movie’s branding and call it a day.
But there is, according to Tarantino, one noteworthy exception. “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Cereal was an exception to the rule,” the director said. “It was cool. It wasn’t based on the movie, it was based on the cartoon […] It was good; it tasted better than Lucky Charms. It was really good. It had the cartoon drawing of Bill and Ted on there and I was like, ‘man, I should call up General Mills and get a year’s supply of this, cause it’s gonna be on the stands for four months and then it’s gonna go away and never to be seen again.’”
The iconic 1989 slacker time travel franchise was technically more geared toward teens than adults given its educational exploration of history and the age of its protagonists, but it’s no surprise that it gained a cult following with older audiences. Quirky, full of quotable one-liners, and the perfect vehicle for Reeves’s particular brand of barely acting, it was destined to be a cult film from the moment it was released.
To add even greater prestige to the franchise’s legacy, the breakfast cereal somehow did not drop the ball. During a 2008 interview with Reeves, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel presented the actor with a box of the cereal, which, at that point, was more than 15 years past its sell-by date. Noting that the maker of the cereal – Ralston Purina – was most well-known for its dog food, Kimmel sampled one of the music-shaped marshmallows and deemed it to be safe for consumption.
“It’s excellent,” Reeves concurred.
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