September 30, 2004:
When we think of words synonymous with "Halloween," several spring to mind: bats, pumpkins, ghosts and dark stormy nights are among the chief notables, but this year, we've gotta add another to the witch's cauldron: yogurt. Next time you go grocery shopping, check out the dairy aisle. The amount of Halloween-themed yogurt brands is both appalling and the greatest thing I've ever seen. I only allowed myself to approach the checkout lady bearing four different Halloween yogurts, but rest assured, there's even more than that. View if you dare...
You can't beat entertaining yogurt, and friends, this is entertaining yogurt. The dairy wonder has quickly crawled from its housewife roots into the #1 Lunch Box Snack position for most kids, replacing all kinds of potato chips, cheese dicks and choco-crunchies. These "kid brands" of yogurt remain perfectly healthy, but what's changed is their color, now radioactive, and their flavor, now fruity to the point of radioactivity. Most of the kids I spy on at night can't go a single day without Go-Gurt, even if I still can't believe people will eat the stuff from a plastic baton, slurping it up like predigested fly food. None of the varieties are ever without a gimmick, but they've all really tacked on the extra extraneousity for Halloween.
Halloween Trix Yogurt, with glow-in-the-dark temporary tattoos. I'm still not digging seeing the Trix Rabbit peddle yogurt in the new commercials. It just makes his mission to eat Trix cereal feel so watered down -- if there's anything we didn't need to know, it's that the Trix Rabbit had other hobbies. He can't even fake it in the ads; I challenge you to compare the look on his face in a Trix cereal commercial and Trix yogurt commercial. He can't take his black pupils off the fruit-shaped corn balls, but whenever yogurt is present, he pretends there's something really interesting on the offscreen ceiling and stares thatta way. That's not to say Trix Yogurt is bad, just that I wish they could've devised some long lost cousin of the Silly Rabbit to do the hard sell.
The yogurt is from outer space, each cup containing two insanely bright colors somehow kept separate. The flavors for this round are "Berry Bolt" and "Very Berry Watermelon," but other boxes have flavors with even stupider names. My parents had to walk fifty miles in the snow to school where the teachers were allowed to beat them, but WHEN I WAS A KID, we didn't have yogurt that looked like mashed up poison dart frogs. I so envy members of the age demographic capable of eating Trix Yogurt without looking like assholes. There's just no way you can have a bad day if some part of it involved eating yogurt colored like that.
The cups have been revitalized with Halloween spirit, each featuring a spooky scene and a few brainteasers I didn't feel like inspecting. The "free tattoos" part was a bit of a rip-off: it comes with tattoos, but only two, and they're really small. Sadly, one cannot formulate a gruff biker Halloween costume from buying a box of Trix Yogurt. I really wish they'd stop advertising as such.
I covered Dannon's Halloween Sprinkl'ins last year, but couldn't resist checking to see if anything's changed for this season's batch. Though the least interesting kind of yogurt seen on this page, Sprinkl'ins have a decent gimmick -- the lids to each cup of plain sugary yogurt contain mystical sprinkles, and you never know which color you'll end up with until the second you're about to down the stuff in three gulps. It's a smooth trick on Dannon's part: kids probably go through boxes of this crud a whole lot quicker when they're so damn curious about what kind of sprinkles next await. They're similar to last year's crop, save for one small addition that justifies me writing about them twice...
Candy bits, ya freak, I'm talking about the candy bits. The colored sprinkles are familiar, and they still turn the yogurt all sorts of ungodly colors, but the one improvement this year is the addition of Halloween-themed candy BITS, arriving in every form from bats to what I can only identify as orange and black teeth. Pretty cool, but Trix and Dannon have some serious competition from Yoplait's Go-Gurt brand. They too have joined the ranks of Halloween Yogurt Squad Seven, but they've upped the ante by doing it twice over.
Yup, two different kinds of Halloween Go-Gurt -- and even more if you consider the boxes that carry alternate flavors. That's a whole lotta yogurt batonin' going on. The first variety, Glow-In-The-Dark Go-Gurt, features spooky Halloween images that only appear when you start eating yogurt from a well-lit position and finish eating yogurt in a dark place. The second variety is more of the same, but much cooler in name: Glo-Gurt, with tubes containing fortunes that only appear in -- you guessed -- dwa dwarwk. I'm really impressed by how far Yoplait's taken this negotiably insane idea; there's a hundred small children in my immediate family, and they all love Go-Gurt more than their parents.
G-I-T-D Go-Gurt keeps the old flavor names, but Glo-Gurt's gone balls out by shoving their tubes full of "Scary Berry Punch" and "Monster Strawberry." Assumedly, other boxes include Killer Grape and Orange Plague. Still can't say I've been persuaded to eat yogurt from a modified Flavor-Ice packet, but if I ever decide to try, at least I know said packet can predict my future. I hope it sees money and shiny cars.
You know, I took these pictures a few hours ago, and am just now realizing that all the yogurt's still sitting out on the table. Think it went bad by now? "But," you say, "the yogurt is dressed as Dracula's choice...clearly it was already bad." "To this," I say, "touche." Stop thinking you're right about my Halloween yogurt.
- Matt (9/30/04)
DROP A COMMENT?
RETURN TO X-ENTERTAINMENT!
|
|
|
 |
