Treasure Hunting Ship

As promised, here's an update detailing (sort of) the construction of a "Treasure Hunting Ship" from a cereal box. The box specifically calls it a "Treasure Hunting Ship," not a "Pirate Ship," even though it is pretty obvious that the bird on the box is a pirate. Or else he just has peculiar fashion sense. I think the naming is due to the cereal being named "Fruity Treasures." The front of the box features an unnamed Parrot in traditional pirate garb digging the cereal out of a treasure chest enthusiastically using what must be a comically small shovel. The cereal itself is a meijer Fruity Pebbles knock-off and pretty good, but only if you like that kind of thing. Some people don't like how the pieces of cereal get completely soggy in milk, forming some kind of vaguely fruity mush. I dig it, though. With a shovel.



On the back of the box, there are the pieces of the ship to be cut out. This is the worst step by far, and hurt my fingers. The cardboard used for cereal boxes seems to be at just the right thickness to be impossible to cut but still deform instead of folding properly. The design isn't helped by the fact that one of the pieces is on the side of the box, which is glued to the back of the box in such a way that it will never come apart cleanly, leaving me missing some of the tabs on the main piece of the ship. Also featured on the back is the same picture of the parrot, just flipped over and shrunk down. The parrot is also present in the crow's nest of the ship.

I've never really understood the point of generic cereal mascots. It's almost as if the store brands are required by some archaic law to put mascots on all their sugary cereals. They don't bother giving the mascots names or backstories or even proper drawings, so why bother with them at all? It's not as if kids would go to the store and decide to pick up bran flakes instead of Sugar Bombs if there wasn't some kind of bear on a unicycle or shark in sunglasses on the box.



Cutting out the pieces takes a while, and by the time I got through with that, I could see that this was going to be a bigger hassle than I had originally thought. The box clearly states that there are three pieces to cut out, but there are four, so that should have been a sign that this cereal box giveaway was not going to be all that well thought out. Once the pieces are cut out, they just need to be folded along dotted lines and then taped to make them stay together. The problems with this are numerous. First, the cardboard refuses to fold properly, as previously mentioned, but enough force will mash it into a sufficiently close approximation of the right shape. Second, one of the dotted lines is curved. How is this supposed to work? Again, mashing it worked in a fashion I was pleased with. The third problem is that one of the pieces is simply the wrong size. This was easily fixed by cutting off a useless part of it. Finally taping was a bit of hassle because I don't have tiny, tiny fingers, but I suppose this was designed for kids. Whatevs.

Anyway, it worked out alright. So, I give you the finished product:

Not exactly seaworthy, what with not even having a bottom, but worth the time when you are as busy as I am.