I went out of town this past weekend, spending time with my various family members. That’s exactly the type of thing I usually try so hard to avoid. A big part of my philosophy of life is: Why spend time with my family when I can lie in my bed watching The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.? So it was with a heavy heart that I entered my parents’ house on Thursday evening.

That heavy heart quickly became lighter than air when my dad remarked “I have something for you” and presented me with a box of Kellogg’s Limited Edition Star Trek Cereal. Oh, what a wonderful thing! I’d never seen any cereal like this before; I’m forced to conclude that, for whatever clinically insane reason, stores in my area didn’t carry such a bodacious product and left me ignorant of its existence. But now I know the truth, revealed to me like the words of a holy book. If I had the creativity in my soul, I’d write a poem in tribute to this blue box filled with eleven ounces of dreams. Instead, I’ll just talk about the marshmallows and stuff.

It’s a Sweetened Oat Cereal With Marshmallows, it is. The marshmallows only come in two shapes, but color variations allow them to come in five styles. The cereal pieces themselves come in one shape, but at least here they represent something, unlike in the Indiana Jones cereal, where they were just meaningless brown balls. Here’s a rundown of what’s in the box.

GALAXIES: The sweetened oat cereal pieces are little spirals, galaxies according to the box. Of course, not all galaxies are spiral ones, but since some are I guess we cannot call this cereal a liar. I like an honest breakfast. Not like that rat Cap’n Crunch. (Captain, indeed! He’s not even really in the navy!)

PLANETS: The first marshmallow pieces to deal with are labeled planets. They’re round, that much is true, but they’re also squat cylinders, like little bitty tuna cans. In my experience, planets show a distinct trend toward being spherical, and I’m forced to wonder if making ball-shaped marshmallows would really have been that much more difficult. The planets also come in two colors, blue for Earth and red for Vulcan. That’s pretty cool; I like to feel like I’m destroying entire worlds with my mighty molars when I eat breakfast.

DELTA SHIELDS: The other marshmallow shape is the delta shield, which is the famous insignia that members of Starfleet wear on their shirts. These pieces come in three colors, if you can handle that much excitement, yellow, blue, and red, corresponding to the uniform colors for command, sciences, and engineering and special services. I’d have been pretty pissed if a cereal based on Star Trek didn’t have some kind of piece with this shape.

The cereal box itself contains some additional treasures. Here’s what it says on the side panel:

“Get ready for the never-before-told story of the greatest space saga of all time – STAR TREK. Join James Tiberius Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Bones and the rest of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise for an epic adventure filled with edge-of-your-seat action and ground-breaking special effects!”

This is indicative of something that I’ve definitely found weird about the new Star Trek movie and its promotional materials. Look at that list of characters up there. “…Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Bones and the rest…” Based on things like this, the posters and the glasses they sold at Burger King, not to mention the movie itself, it seems like the filmmakers are definitely trying to screw with the three-character heart of Star Trek, which has always been Kirk, Spock and McCoy. In this new incarnation, it seems that for some reason they want the Big Three to be Kirk, Spock and Uhura. I’m not saying that Uhura hasn’t always been an integral part of what made Star Trek great. She has. I’m just saying that the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triangle is what lies at the core of Star Trek’s success when it comes to character, and messing with that seems like a very silly idea indeed.

The back of the cereal box offers two games for the advanced breakfast eater. On is called Join the Crew. It’s sort of like one of those quizzes in magazines for teenagers where you follow some arrows around various personality traits and find out what character from Gilmore Girls is most like you or whatever. In this case, you find out what job you should get in Starfleet, with the choices being Pilot, Captain, Engineer, and Chief Medical Officer (I got Engineer on this totally scientific test).

The other game is Chart a Course, a weird maze that I cannot for the life of me figure out. The bottom of the box provides an answer, and I can’t even make it work with that; the maze design in the answer doesn’t seem to match up with the layout of the maze itself. Damn you Kellogg’s for making me feel inadequate!

Final analysis? I give this cereal a thousand points for being about Star Trek, and minus 990 points for having a retarded maze that makes no sense. Which means, of course, it gets a perfect ten. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shower the box with kisses. Passionate kisses.

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• Breakfast of Champions
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• Star Trek
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• Eric’s Top Ten Star Trek Episodes