If you had mentioned this to me a week ago, I'd have guessed this to be an "only in Japan" kind of thing. But no, I found this odd little bit of co-branding at our local US grocery store.

Several points make this really odd. The first being that it's not really a box of "Kingdom Hearts Fruit Snacks," it's just the characters temporarily shilling for a pre-existing Florida's Natural brand. Florida's Natural is the orange juice company that does those "as close to the grove as you can get" commercials. I'm sure I'm not far off in speculating that they struck a Disney deal based solely on their FL proximity to each other.

Secondly, KH2 came out a year ago, so either these are really old, or somebody is just sper late to the table of product placement. I could not determine any way to tell the age of the box. The snacks tasted fine, at any rate.

Thirdly, no big images Mickey, Donald or Goofy. I'm sure the complicated web of endorsement rights kept any and all major Disney characters off of the box... but the KH local team of Sora, Roxas, Kairi and Namine were okay. The only clues that this is a Disney thing (aside from the KH2 logo) are a tiny "copyright Disney" on the back and some small screenshots where you can make out Chicken Little and B&W Pete. (And if you look exceptionally well, you can see some little heads of Goofy, Tron and Stitch, from the game's HUD.) No Final Fantasy characters either.

I love the desperate "Best Selling Video Game" text on the front.

Each box has one of six cut-outs, one each for Roxas, Kairi and Namine and three poses of Sora. My store only had the guys in stock. Inside are the pathetic "tips" that you always get whenever a video game property appears on food. "Always remember to upgrade your team with skill points!", that kind of thing.

On this very same shopping trip, we discovered that this grocery store now has a video game section. And not just cheapie $10 GBA games either... it seemed like a valid selection of marginally new stuff. You could even buy a 360 controller, a PS2 headset, and some other not-total-crap accessories. Knowing how grocery stores typically handle non-food merchandise (read: poorly), my feeling is that this could be a weird way to find either overpriced games or killer discounts, with no in-between.

And yes, they had Kingdom Hearts 2 on sale for $50. Which is overpriced.