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.”

That transience might be an alien concept to most record collectors, who treat their vinyl as a premium product to be preserved in pristine condition. But throughout the 20th century, millions of disposable records were printed and used for advertisements, greeting cards and magazine inserts.

“I’ve come to call them ephemeral records,” said Michael Cumella, 61, a collector from New Jersey who specializes in these audio oddities. “One of the first patents was in the early 1900s for a system where you could record your voice onto a postcard and send it to a friend.”

Decades after that initial innovation, the idea of applying the technology to cereal boxes was pioneered by Rainbo Records. Joining forces with General Mills, the company introduced the first record-on-a-box in 1954.

“Those early records were printed on the front of the box,” Dimock said. “They used generic songs that were all in the public domain.” The first recordings were performed by an anonymous chorus of singers. But by 1956, a partnership with Disney brought in the voices of Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck, in an early instance of cross-brand promotion.

Those first records may have lacked artistic merit — “They were tripe,” as Cumella put it. But the world of cereal box record collecting is unique, in that the songs themselves and the quality of the audio are of lesser importance. It’s more about the connection to history. “They’re fascinating insights into our past,” Cumella said. “Today, it stands out as a bizarre artifact of another time that we would put a record on a cereal box.”

Children seemed equally undeterred by the questionable quality of cardboard records — the partnership between Rainbo and General Mills sold a reported 30 million boxes of Wheaties. “The quality was as low as you could get,” Dimock said. “But when you were a kid, it didn’t matter. You got this record on a box that you could cut out and play. What more fun can you have than that?”

Cereal box records reached new heights of popularity in 1969, when the cartoon band the Archies had several songs pressed onto the back of Super Sugar Crisp boxes. At the time, they were stars of a popular Saturday morning cartoon. They also had the best-selling single of the year with “Sugar, Sugar.” Cue the synergy. “Everybody watched the Archies and we all had all their records,” Sutton remembered. “The cereal box records were huge. They were everywhere.”

By 1970, real-life bands were getting in on the act. The Monkees issued 12 tracks across boxes of Post cereals, including Alpha-Bits, Honeycomb and Frosted Rice Krinkles. These included their No. 1 hits “I’m a Believer” and “Last Train to Clarksville,” as well as the theme for their TV show, which was in syndication at the time.

The records seem to have made a real difference in driving cereal sales. Sutton has a rare Bobby Sherman LP that attests to that. “It was a promotional item for sellers and retailers,” she said. “It’s a gatefold so it opens up with all this great marketing information about how the cereal boxes sold more when they put the records on them.”

Despite this, promotions gradually shifted from mainstream artists to cartoon bands fronted by cereal mascots. One of the most popular was the Sugar Bears, which appeared on boxes of Super Sugar Crisp in 1971 and included vocals from a pre-fame Kim Carnes. “I got a chance to talk to her once,” Sutton recalled. “I mentioned the Sugar Bears, and she laughed and said, ‘You know, that was my first gold record!’”

As the 1970s progressed, cereal box records moved further into gimmickry. General Mills issued a set of audio adventures starring their cartoon mascot Count Chocula. But by that point, the records were being included as inserts, rather than on the box. “Those ones are so thin,” Cumella complained. “They’re not even cardboard. They’re paper.”

When the last true cereal box record appeared is unknown. “There’s no definitive history of it,” Cumella said. “I have people that I speak with about this, and we all share our clues.” The latest example in his collection is a 1991 promotion from the United Kingdom, which included singles by Lonnie Gordon and De La Soul on boxes of Frosties. Cumella mused that there could be later examples.

For now, he’s focused on preserving the history of this forgotten format, and other ephemeral records, before they disappear forever: “This is one of the few completely undocumented areas of our recorded history.”

Dimock’s collection may already be worthy of a museum. His cardboard records are part of a larger collection of cereal prizes and over 10,000 boxes, including some unassembled proofs he rescued from destruction. “Not to brag, but these might be the only ones that exist,” he said of his 1954 Wheaties boxes, featuring the first record-on-a-box. “Storage is money. So these companies got rid of their archives. That’s why a lot of these boxes don’t exist anymore.”

Sutton said she’d love to see the records in a pop culture museum someday. But she acknowledged the challenge of getting the next generation interested in this obsolete format. “The young people that have come to my house and seen them — it’s made no impact on them,” she said regretfully. “It’s sad because you want people to think it’s cool. But it doesn’t necessarily mean the same to other people.”

Cumella likewise recognized a futility in hanging onto these disposable records, that were designed to be thrown out decades ago. “I don’t need them,” he admitted, sifting through his boxes containing thousands of old records. “No one needs them.” But he suggested they fulfill some spiritual purpose that might benefit us more than ever today. “It’s nice to have a curated collection of the things you like around. Especially with everyone trying to ‘Marie Kondo’ their lives and get rid of all unneeded items,” he added.

“Otherwise, in the future we’re all just going to be in white rooms with one speaker and a touch screen. And that sounds like a really boring life.”