October 27, 2005:
From Dictionary Dot Com...
yo·gurt also yo·ghurt or yo·ghourt
n. A custardlike food with a tart flavor, prepared from milk curdled by bacteria, especially Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, and often sweetened or flavored with fruit.
I've been writing about Yoplait's Go-Gurt for several years now, and I'm sort of proud to be one of the few people on the planet capable of saying that. Really. But, I'm still not totally sure how I feel about it. "Kids today," I guess. I'm surely repeating the sentiments of a past article, but I just don't get it. I mean, I do, but this whole dairy-in-a-tube thing...it's unnatural. I have really weird feelings about dairy products. I don't drink milk, as even at the tail end of childhood, I couldn't even deal with having milk in my cereal. I was a dry eater. A gerbil, more or less. Yogurt ain't far off from milk, and I've seen my nieces and nephews eat these Go-Gurt things a zillion times. They'll take a swig, lay it down, play video games for an hour and take another swig. It's that kind of behavior that'll skew evolution and make future generations all look like Cap'n Crunch Soggies.
Last year, Go-Gurt arrived in an all new Halloween edition. And they've done it again for the 2005 season, which rapidly nears its close. While most foodstuff companies simply "rerun" the previous year's holiday promotions, I'm shocked to say that this is a totally new look, with a different gimmick than the 2004 edition.
Our central theme is, as you can see, 3-D. Before I go into how everything works, and really, it could take days to explain it, I've gotta give credit to Go-Gurt for pretty much being the Crayola of the dairy world, seemingly privy to an endless array of new flavors to introduce. When I first spotted Go-Gurt, it was all cherries and grapes. One of the Halloween boxes I picked up featured strawberry milkshake and banana split Go-Gurt tubes. Swirled, with the two colors of each flavor kept impossibly separate. It's shocking enough for a room full of thirty people to each come up with a different reason why it's shocking. Sold on the merits of being "portable yogurt," I do question just how "unportable" regular yogurt actually is. Those cups ain't heavy.
Assuming the children in your life are allowed anywhere near a pair of scissors, Go-Gurt eaters are to cut the 3-D glasses right off the box, and then spend a half an hour complaining about how they don't fit on their face. No, I'm serious -- nobody's head is this small. From the edge of one lens to the other, it's practically the length of three tightly lined dimes. And there's no handles! Then again, I guess if you're being nice enough to give away 3-D glasses with a product that has so little veritable reason to make such concessions, you're not going to concern yourself too much with the idiots who shit on your gift horse.
Though it isn't easy to hold tiny 3-D glasses to your eyes while eating Go-Gurt, the tubes have all sorts of monster pictures that pop out at you. Or so says the box. I'm not just being dicky when I say that the effect does not at all work. It just doesn't. There's no "popping" to speak of. Keep in mind, I'm not comparing this to Captain Eo or anything. Nothing happens. You're seeing it through the tweaky deaky sneaky powers of red and blue sheets of plastic, yes, but that's all you're doing. Course, that's probably good enough for most kids, because kids generally don't grow brains until they're too old to eat Go-Gurt without being made fun of by their friends at school. Say what you want about Yoplait, but they've done their demo research.
Each box also comes with two 3-D "monster cards," and admittedly, the 3-D gimmick works a lot better with those. There's eighteen cards total in the set, thus requiring the average completist collector to eat 72 tubes of Go-Gurt. I'd pay to see it. The card-backs give brief descriptions and biographies of the different monsters, and some of them are alarmingly creative. "Psycho Cyclops' favorite way to eat Go-Gurt is with his eye closed." And you said there wasn't enough love in the world? To me and to you, they're just monster cards. Let's assume we're both male. To me as a third grader and to you as a third grader, they're not just monster cards -- they're your life's work for the month of October, 2005. I'm sure there are a great many kids pining to complete their collection at this very moment, steadfast in their belief that the world will never truly be their oyster until they've nailed the rare "Frightening Frankenstein" chaser. If Beckett would stoop so low, the Frightening Frankie card would have an upways arrow next to its cash value.
From Dictionary Dot Com...
No entry found for go-gurt.
Did you mean go-cart?
- Matt (10/27/05)
More Go-Gurt!
2004 Halloween Edition! -- Shrek-Gurt
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