I have recently had cause to be angered and annoyed. When I was a wee lad, back in the 80’s (yes, the 80’s, shut up you doubters out there), there was a series of characters called The Munch Bunch (Wikipedia linkage here). These characters had various products tied into their franchise, such as yoghurts and lollies, of differing flavours depending on the character.

For example, there was a character called Pedro Orange. As his name does indeed suggest, his products were orange flavoured. There were many others, including Sally Strawberry, Corky Coconut and Rozzy Raspberry. Each character was portrayed differetly, ie Pedro Orange was, for some reason, Mexican, so wore a Mexican-style hat and played a Mexican-style guitar of some sort.

I don’t know why, but the names of The Munch Bunch characters have always stuck with me. I still, in my late twenties, occasionally refer to oranges as Pedro Oranges. Those fruity and vegetabley characters are close to my heart.

Which is why the new, revamped, modern contemporary Munch Bunch that you might have seen advertised sickens me. What have Pedro and his buddies been replaced with? A cow. This stupid, trainer wearing, educationally aware, inanely-grinning cow. I feel anger, malice and rage towards this crappy character. What had the old Munch Bunch done wrong? Why replace them? They embodied the different cultures and beliefs of the globe, oranges and strawberries getting along together, despite their differences. The world was a better place with them around, but now they’ve been cast aside in favour of a ghastly bovine nightmare.

I saw this simpering cow character on an advert for Munch Bunch the other day. It did nothing exciting, just went on about the virtues of calcium and blah-de-frigging blah. A 6 year old child isn’t going to give a tarts nipple about calcium or nutritional value, they want to know if it tastes good, and if these new Munch Bunch products taste as good as they’re marketed then they must surely be the most vile of all the yoghurts.

Finally, to wrap up this tirade, I think that the heathens at Nestle have missed the point. Let’s have a look at the name shall we? Munch Bunch. Bunch. Hmm. A bunch of grapes consists of…? Lots of grapes. A single grape isn’t a bunch of grapes, it’s just a grape. The same principle works for bunches of bananas. So how many characters are in the new Munch Bunch? One. ONE?! No! That’s not a bunch, is it, you feckless morons? A bunch is a collection, you can’t have a bunch of one!

The whole thing is ridiculous. Thanks Nestle. They’ve turned The Munch Bunch from a host of fun loving characters into a horribly insipid corporate cow, they’ve taken the life out of the products by making them educationally aware, they’ve put Pedro and his mates out of work and they’ve made a huge semantic error with their ‘bunch’ of one character.

Nestle, you have done wrong, and soon the people of the world will realise the error of your ways and will rise up against you, with Pedro Orange first in line to issue the beatings.