September 14, 2006:
When you're young, one of the best parts of Halloween is trick-or-treating. I know. "Duh." But it wasn't so much the end result of a sack full of candy that made it so special -- no, trick-or-treating was all about getting there. It was a chance to explore new parts of the neighborhood. An opportunity to see distant neighbors' houses up close after so many months and years of wondering what the insides looked like while peering through the window of your mother's car. Indeed, we can credit trick-or-treating for our early experiences in boys night out, girls night out and co-eds night out.
But yeah, candy was the heart of it. Not the candy itself, really, but the surprise factor involved with each and every house you and your costumed crew knock-knocked. What kind of candy would people give you? Would it be good candy or bad candy? How much would you get? Screw Halloween -- when you're young, one of the best parts of the whole year is trick-or-treating.
Then you get old, and you can't do it anymore. People start to look at you funny. Sure, there's a chance that you'll have kids and get to live vicariously through them as you chaperone their Halloween strolls, but mostly, once you get past a certain age and a certain shame, trick-or-treating goes buh-bye. That's when you make the switch. Where trick-or-treating was once one of the greatest parts of Halloween, instead, looking for Halloween-themed junk food at grocery stores now sits. If you're wondering where I'm going with this, it's obvious: Halloween tortilla chips.
It's "Fright Bites," made by Snak King, a company so obsessed with being royal that not only has it named itself after kings, but its company logo involves a crown graphic, and the tagline under the company logo christens it the "king of snacks." I am not arguing their points, because I've yet to see any other company willing to go through the trouble of making vaguely bat-shaped tortilla chips.
If your local grocer carries "Fright Bites," they'll be hard to miss. They come in the loudest bags in the history of potato chip et cetera marketing. That is one amazing bag, seeming like sort of a relic of a Halloween generation past, stuffed with too many pictures, too many colors and text bursts reading, "So Good They're Scary!"
Check out the parade of monsters chillin' like villains near the top of the bag. I'm particularly fond of the their attempt to make a sheet ghost look like a real ghost, but that "Kid Dracula" is also capable of making me hum happy songs. Since Snak King is as close to a generic store brand as you can get with a specific company name and profile, "Fright Bites" are on the cheap side. In comparison, a like-sized bag of Tostitos from Frito Lay -- whose sole, lame contribution to Halloween involves putting a couple of small graphics on its chip bags -- costs twice as much or more. When you can get this much hot Halloween action on the cheap, it's time to break out the celebratory maracas.
There's just one catch: The chips. They kind of suck. They're not as tasty as the bigger brands, which may just mean that they're not as salty, but a spade's a spade and they ain't as good. This would've been more forgivable if the assumed "shapes" of the chips -- pumpkins, bats and ghosts -- looked anything like pumpkins, bats and ghosts.
Making tortilla chips is easy, but it's a bigger challenge if you have intensely detailed chip shapes in mind. That's why most of them are triangular or round. That's the only reason. You don't think Frito Lay would love to make tortilla chips in the shape of margarita glasses? Of course they would. But they don't, because the labor involved would force them to raise the price of each bag to seventeen dollars, and I'm talking wholesale distribution costs here. Snak King didn't get the memo, and their chips came out looking like ass juice.
What's more interesting is that Snak King seems unable to even make basic tortilla chip shapes. From the way these pumpkins, bats and ghosts are negotiated, it's tough to imagine a successful attempt from Snak King to forge even circles or triangles. But we let them get away with it, because they tried so hard. They even went nuts and gave us real black bats, real orange pumpkins and...ah fuck, the ghosts went commando.
I kid you not: There was not a single entirely intact, well-shaped tortilla chip in the whole bag. Actually, these four were among the seven total that were, arguably, still in one piece. I've decided that this makes "Fright Bites" all the more charming, because from the baby-faced Dracula to the misshapen shapes to the lost shaker of salt, it's rare to find something so wrong on every count that still manages to be so right.
Hah, I love this. Read the above, and eventually, you'll get to the "scarrrrry" part. It's like Snak King's copyeditor was tasked with turning that word into a Halloween-related pun, but he realized that "scary" in of itself was kind of Halloween-related and settled on adding extra letters as a compromise. This blurb is also notable for being the first instance of someone using the word "parameter" in relation to the rim of a party dip bowl. Betty Crocker was a paratrooper.
They've got a point, though. "Fright Bites" are rarely purchased for the reasons I purchased them, and are more exclusively bought to provide ambiance for one's Halloween party festivities. When you invite people over and they see that you've got plastic silverware in orange and tortilla chips shaped like ghosts, they know you mean business.
Alas, since most large party bowls are trimmed either with nothing or with images of rose petals, the effect could be lost...unless you get the right kind of bowl, like say, a bowl that bleeds.
I'm including the "Bleeding Skull Bowl" with this entry instead of giving it its own, for two reasons. One, I don't have enough to say about tortilla chips, even when they're shaped like monsters. Two, it fits. You can lead a horse to ghost-shaped tortilla chips, but he's never going to believe that it's really Halloween if they're served in a white bowl with tropical graphics around the edge. "Fright Bites" deserve haunted housing, and the "Bleeding Skull Bowl" will deliver.
And what is a "Bleeding Skull Bowl," you ask? It's a fairly flimsy plastic bowl with an otherwise hollow center filled with viscous red liquid. When you hold the bowl up, the blood gushes around like crazy, which is an action feature I'd appreciate more if party hosts put out empty bowls more often. What, you're supposed to shake it up while it's full of chips?
Since the bowl isn't very deep and looks cool enough, I prefer to think of it as just another Halloween decoration. Something you put out on the coffee table and wonder how much ice it'll break when the awkward, silent neighbors drop by. On the other hand, I have to tie the "Bleeding Skull Bowl" to "Fright Bites" somehow, so here goes nothing...
I feel like Martha Stewart with big stitches and snakes crawling out of her ears. Only Martha would never serve onion dip with tortilla chips, because she's a dick.
The skullybowl is cool, but "Fright Bites" will go down as one of the 2006 Halloween season's best. If next year's Halloween season isn't as good as this year's, people will say that it's because Snak King discontinued "Fright Bites." Not that they're going to discontinue them, but I don't want count chickens.
