Count Chocula and Franken Berry are getting reimagined as actual puppets built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, 55 years after General Mills first put the cereal monsters on shelves. The redesigned boxes, part of a second-year collaboration between General Mills and The Jim Henson Company, roll out to retailers this fall, according to General Mills’ own announcement.

Key Points

• Count Chocula and Franken Berry debuted in March 1971, with Boo Berry joining a year later — making 2026 their 55th anniversary, per General Mills’ brand history.
• This year’s packaging lets fans fold the boxes into build-your-own Monster puppets, following last year’s debut Henson Creature Shop redesign.
• A limited-edition “fuzzy” Count Chocula box, with a fleece-like textured surface, is exclusive to Walmart.com starting October 1 for $7.76.
• Standard redesigned boxes hit retailers nationwide this season for Halloween.
• Megan Brooks of General Mills said the Monsters have “brought a smile, and a little thrill, to cereal bowls” for 55 years, per Yahoo Finance‘s coverage of the press release.

The Monster Cereals have survived longer than most of the sitcoms and toy lines that debuted alongside them in 1971. General Mills launched Count Chocula and Franken Berry as the only chocolate- and strawberry-flavored cereals on the market at the time, according to the company’s own brand history, and both have stayed in production continuously ever since — an unusually long run for a novelty cereal built around a cartoon vampire and a cartoon Frankenstein’s monster with a heart-shaped nose.

Boo Berry, the ghost-themed blueberry entry, joined the lineup in 1972 and went national the following year. All three were year-round grocery staples until 2009, when General Mills shifted them to seasonal, Halloween-only availability — a move that, if anything, seems to have deepened fan attachment rather than hurt it. The brand periodically resurrects retired characters like Fruit Brute and Frute Brute for nostalgia-driven limited runs, but Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry have never actually left.

Last year’s initial Henson collaboration turned the box art into puppet-style character portraits, an approach popular enough that Nicole Goldman of The Jim Henson Company said the Creature Shop team wanted another shot at it, per the General Mills release. This year’s twist pushes the gimmick further: the packaging itself is designed to be punched out and assembled into a wearable or displayable Monster puppet, turning an empty cereal box into a piece of Halloween décor instead of recycling.

For a brand that started as a marketing afterthought — General Mills needed something to compete with the sugary cereal boom of the early 1970s — outlasting five and a half decades, several cultural shifts in how junk food gets marketed to kids, and at least one attempted 2010s hipster nostalgia relaunch is no small feat. A cardboard vampire that folds into a puppet is, in its own small way, proof the joke never got old.