In 2015, General Mills reformulated Trix with “natural” colors. Customers complained that the bright hues of their childhood cereal were now dull yellows and purples. Two years later, the company released Classic Trix to stand on store shelves alongside so-called No, No, No Trix, the natural version. This nickname, promising “no tricks,” sounds abstemious; the virtuous customer says no to technicolor temptation. But Trix customers wanted their colors back. As one Tweet put it: “I mean, I get that artificial flavors are bad and all that shiz, but man I miss neon colored Trix.”
What can (or should) the scholar of American culture make of this desire for color? Bright foods are in some sense an invention of a modern food industry that uses dye to intensify visual aesthetics. They also, however, evoke the tropics, brilliant fruits like bananas and oranges that became more broadly available in the United States in the early twentieth century thanks to corporate imperialism and cold storage. Though its colors came from industrial dyes, General Mills hoped to associate Trix with this tropical paradise. When Trix cereal was first released in 1954, advertisements trumpeted its “bright fruit-colors!” and personified its colorful puffs as though they were eager to be eaten: “Gay little sugared corn puffs in a happy mixture of colors—red, yellow, orange. Fun to see! A joy to eat!” Color itself promised to communicate pleasure.
This association between color and gaiety has a long racial history in the United States and in the food industry in particular. Miss Chiquita Banana trilled a captivating song, while the mischief-maker Brer Rabbit struck a dapper figure on a molasses company’s products with his yellow bow-tie and matching trousers. Suggestively, this same character, who had recently starred in Walt Disney’s Song of the South (1946), was the first in a long line of rabbits to be featured on the Trix box, appearing in a campaign designed to promote the mid-1950s re-release of the film. In the Disney movie, Brer Rabbit wears a bright pink shirt and speaks in black dialect. And beginning in 1958, Trix used an image of a grinning brown bunny dressed in the classic minstrel show ensemble of an oversized top hat and white gloves to promote the product. His hat is yellow, and his nose is bright red, the very colors featured in the fruit-flavored cereal.