Most record collectors want the highest quality audio. But Duane Dimock, 68, is different. He’s proud to have one of the best collections of low-quality records on the planet. “They sound really bad,” he said of the hundreds of cereal box records he has amassed at his home in San Diego.
This forgotten format emerged in the 1950s. It used a thin plastic film to stamp records onto cereal boxes, providing a cheap cutout prize for children. At the peak of the trend, artists as big as the Monkees and the Jackson 5 had their greatest hits pressed into cardboard, helping to sell millions of boxes of cereal.
The disposable nature of these low-quality records means most were eventually thrown out or destroyed by their rambunctious preteen owners. But some survived, and today a small community of collectors continues to hunt down and preserve these forgotten treasures.
“I find them at garage sales, estate sales, swap meets,” Dimock explained in a recent interview. “I’ve even found cereal boxes that were used as stuffing behind picture frames.”
Lisa Sutton, 63, is more of a wistful nostalgic. She has held onto the original records she cut out as a child over 50 years ago. “It all started back in 1970,” she remembered. “I hated cereal, but I loved Bobby Sherman. When they started putting his records on the boxes my sister and I forced my mother to buy them. We would cut off the records and listen to them all the time.”
Sutton’s records are now framed in the kitchen of her Los Angeles home, providing a breakfast-time view that takes her half a century back in time. “It’s a nostalgic thing for sure,” she said. “Everybody had them at the time, but not many people kept them. I collect vinyl too. But the cereal box records are special because they’re so transient.”
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