A little over two years ago, people were delighted to discover that, in the replies to every tweet from @realtonytiger, the official Tony the Tiger Twitter account, dozens of mascot-mad furries could be found begging the cereal tiger for sex. These tended to be pleas written in what grammarians refer to as the horny imperative: “@realtonytiger fist me tony,” one user wrote in 2015, “i love you.”
We know Tony wasn’t a fan of his more adult-oriented followers. In 2016, he started blocking accounts for their lusty replies. When the furries revolted, the account made what seems to be the only acknowledgement it’s ever made of Tony the Tiger’s incredibly horny fan base.
At some point over the past few months, the @realtonytiger account disappeared. That url now leads only to an error message. If it weren’t for all the outrageously horny replies and some uploaded fan-drawn art of Tony the Tiger’s erect penis, we’d have no proof he ever existed on Twitter at all.
Did these aroused furries harass Tony the Tiger’s Twitter account to death? An investigation was in order. Here’s everything I have learned.
What happened to Tony?
As recently as May 6, 2018, Tony the Tiger was still tweeting as @realtonytiger, as evidenced by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine here.
The page wasn’t snapshotted again until Sept. 22, and by then, @realtonytiger was no more.
Do a little digging, however, and you’ll find that Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes® has not abandoned Twitter altogether. Currently, there’s only one verified account dedicated to the cereal: @frosted_flakes, and its most recent tweet (that wasn’t simply a reply) was sent almost a year ago.
Look back at that last known archive of @realtonytiger, and you’ll find an identical tweet.
What’s more, both accounts were created in July 2013, and both tweeted the exact same tweets up until that fateful tandem bike ride. In other words, they’re the same account. @Realtonytiger was not deleted; it was transformed into a duller, cereal-based, mascot-free ghost of its former self.
When did Tony leave?
We know @realtonytiger left this world at some point between May 6, 2018, the date of the last known archive, and Sept. 22, 2018, the date of the first archive of the now-disappeared account.
If you search Twitter for mentions of “realtonytiger,” you’ll find that that people began noticing that something was awry on July 15.
Just a few weeks later, user @e_sibe also took notice of the disappearance and, in the process, seemingly confirmed the name switch.
And since people were tweeting at @realtonytiger up to July 9, 2018, without incident, we can confidently say that Kellogg’s murdered their furry thirst trap at some point during the following week.
Why did Tony leave?
The obvious question: Did something so egregious happen that Kellogg’s saw no other recourse for their irrevocably sexed-up Twitter tiger? A brief survey of tweets sent to @realtonytiger around the time of the transfiguration show little out of the ordinary, just a lot of furries expressing their desire to make love to a cartoon cereal mascot.
It was nothing Tony hadn’t dealt with before.
Was there something in the replies to that Oct. 23, 2017, tweet, then? After all, since that post, Tony had restricted his tweeting to straightforward customer-service replies dealing with concerned or unsatisfied customers. Where once he had bounded across the savannas of Twitter, all smirks and coiled muscle, now he had been reduced to slinking around in others’ replies, terrified of hornballs.
Did any of the replies to that final tweet chase Tony off Twitter? It’s hard to say definitively, though the fact that Tony was riding a bicycle certainly didn’t help.
One reply, sent several months after the tweet to which it was responding and several months before the account’s name change, was a bit more visually explicit than the usual fare.
Whether it was this particular tweet or just a general accumulation of years of sexual propositioning from the furry community, it does seem as if Kellogg’s decided a Tony-centric Twitter just wasn’t worth being asked to please frost my flakes, daddy a hundred times a day. Perhaps someone should inform the people who designed the actual cereal box.
I’ve emailed Kellogg’s for comment on their decision to change the Twitter handle, and while that email has been opened no less than 26 times, according to my mail tracking extension, I have yet to receive a response.
UPDATE: 8:30 p.m. — A Kellogg’s spokesperson has offered the following statement: “Thanks for reaching out. In July, the account was renamed to Frosted Flakes as we decided to broaden the content to more brand news.”