Into It

Super Nintendo changed the gaming world, but not always for the better.

The 16-bit gaming boom took over the early nineties. It gave us classics like Super Mario World, but it also emboldened marketers to dream up spin-offs. In these crossovers, the best parts about pop stars, TV shows, and movies were often abandoned. The result was a string of glitchy maps and questionable plot.

The cereal aisle is run by kids. It’s their purchasing power that brings TV shows, movies, and even stranger products together with the barons of breakfast.

Mr. T cereal debuted in 1984 and was essentially T-shaped captain crunch. But it got a little more cool when it teamed up with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

When movies inspire cereals, the commercials sound like trailers. The kids become part of the action and eat like the stars.

California’s San Andreas fault is slowly shifting LA away from the mainland. But we don’t have to look to the future to imagine a disjointed coastline. Instead we can look to the past, to the maps of the 17th and 18th centuries that share a strange discrepancy: the inclusion of the Island of California.

If there's a pilgrimage for the industrialized world, it probably ends in the Amazon Rainforest, at the center of a abandoned town called Fordlandia.