Fragility of life reflected in piece of Batman cereal

The world is full of foods that can kill you.

Improperly prepared fugu.

Salmonella-riddled chicken.

Most anything on the menu at Hardee’s.

The food that nearly killed me was Batman cereal.

I must have been 10 or 11 years old when Breakfast Batman tried to do me in. The cereal was released as part of the wave of merchandising unleashed in the wake of Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster film adaptation of Bob Kane’s beloved comic book creation — a period of hysteria historians have come to call “Batmania.”

As a dorky kid, I fully embraced “Batmania.” I’d stare at images of the toys in department store catalogues as if doing so for long enough would make them appear. When my parents would pick up a figure or two for me, I’d kneel next to my bed for hours setting up various scenarios in which Batman teamed up with the Ninja Turtles to defeat Godzilla and other such inter-intellectual-property mash-ups. I watched the cartoon; I listened to Danny Elfman’s soundtrack; and, yes, I ate the cereal.

Distributed by the now-defunct Ralston Cereals, Batman cereal was a comic-themed spin on Cap’n Crunch that replaced the mustachioed seaman’s golden bricks with sweetened corn bats. I remember the cereal being delicious; then again, it’s hard to go wrong with sugar-soaked carbs.

Being that this happened decades ago, I can’t recall the specifics of how I was eating the cereal. Were those golden bats swimming in a bowl full of 2% milk, or was I enjoying them dry by the fistful? We’ll never know. What I do remember is that one of those jagged little boogers decided to do some theme-appropriate acrobatics on the way down my throat and got lodged there.

Memories are tricky beasts, prone to shifting shapes over the years. Traumatic memories, which often grow in size and mass upon reflection, are even trickier.

Likely, I came nowhere close to choking to death. There’s a good chance I stood there for a few panicked seconds trying to force that single piece of cereal one way or the other before my gag reflex kicked into full gear and forced that rascally nugget back whence it came — up my throat, out my mouth and onto the linoleum of my grandmother’s kitchen floor.

In my increasingly unreliable memory, however, that piece of cereal almost killed me. The irony of it being themed after a hero who, in most iterations, has vowed never to take a life is not lost on me. I guess the breakfast adaptation doesn’t abide by that same code of ethics.