September 24, 2007:
Halloween seasons can kind of blur into one big ball of black latex and blood, but one of the few things that helps us remember them on a strict year-by-year basis is...candy! When you get right down to it, candy defines each and every Halloween season, and if one year bears better fruit than another, then that's the Halloween we give the longer ribbon to. Hm.
I'd call 2007 a banner year so far. What's really striking me is that the top players aren't at all of the typical "fun-sized whatevers shoved in a big plastic bag" variety. This year's best stuff breaks the mold in every way possible, and I feel it's my duty to hunt, hoard and write about as many eerie edibles as possible. Or, in this case, just five of them.
Mr. Yummy Skeleton Pops: I'm mostly unfamiliar with the "Mr. Yummy" brand, but there are like seventeen thousand different kinds of Halloween candy under its umbrella, and they're most often found at dollar stores. Cheese value aside, I've never really been into dollar store/generic holiday candy, either for my own sake or as article fodder. I'm just turned off by it for some reason. I guess it has a little to do with the notion that everything sold in a dollar store was sold at ten other places before it got there, and it's hard to consider their holiday candy "fresh" when it's sharing shelf space with cans of Hunt's Zestmania Chili, a brand that hasn't been produced since 1937.
Whether "Mr. Yummy" is a bigger brand than I'm giving it credit for isn't relevant, because they had it at Dollar Tree and that made me look at it with crooked doubty eyes. I only mention this because it proves just how amazing Skeleton Pops are -- they had to jump through my haunted hurdle of bloodcurdling bias to even get a second glance, and here I am now, proudly proclaiming them as my favorite thing in the whole universe. Sorry, Ghost Dots.
The pops are cherry-flavored and skeleton-shaped, and if our story ended there, there would be no story. Where Skeleton Pops shine is in their "stick," or in case, their lack thereof. Replacing the plain old boring hard paper stick is an exciting seven-inch plastic skeleton, giving the cherry skull pop a body to call its own, and the rest of us an excuse to film YouTube videos starring dancing lollipops.
As a curiosity item, they're great, but put yourself in the shoes of a trick-or-treater. I'm not saying that lollipops can hold a candle to a pack of Twix or anything, but they're serviceable, and if you attach a skeleton body to them, they're pretty much the perfect thing any trick-or-treater could get.
Peeps Spooky Friends: The people at Peeps, who as I understand it prefer to be called "peeple," have truly mastered the holidays. Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day...they can turn any occasion into our excuse to eat 500 sugarcoated marshmallow creatures. I've been covering Peeps' holiday ventures for so many years that it's almost gotten to a "why bother?" point, but lo and behold, they just keep topping themselves in more and more inventive ways.
The "Spooky Friends" collection is a new kind of Peep, finally giving the marshy masters a chance to take their slice of the trick-or-treat pie. You can't really pull out unpackaged, full-sized Peeps from a big box and hand them over to strange kids without raising questions, but you could certainly give out these -- fun-sized and individually wrapped!
And they're in all-new shapes, too! The trio consists of a tarantula, a happy skull and a bat. The tarantula is clearly the leader of the pack, as he's the only one who looks too ghoulish for some sappy Family Circle Halloween recipe collection. No, that spider is from hell, and he is taking us with him. I can't honestly claim that it's a realistic looking spider, but I still find myself a little tentative when it comes time for the first bite. Will he bite back? I don't want him to.
Kit Kat: The Ghoulish Collection: A few years ago, Nestle began making Kit Kat bars with orange coating for the Halloween season. I haven't checked, but I'm guessing that they still do. It's a pretty cool look, but after a while, it starts to feel a little played. "Oh, look, there's those orange Kit Kats again. October whooooo." Turning Kit Kats orange doesn't just happen by pulling one lever instead of another -- it's a miracle that Nestle can pull that shit off, and if people are bored by it, it's time to try something new.
The Kit Kat "Ghoulish Collection" etches spooky scenery on the top of each four-pack (which is to say, one pack with four sticks), and though this is not a new-for-2007 endeavor, Nestle has swapped out all of last year's designs with brand new ones.
When you buy a giant-sized Kit Kat, you're actually buying two regular-sized Kit Kats, and that means you get two spooky designs in one pack. The top design looks like some sad page ripped from a foreign Halloween coloring book found in an unlicensed dentist's office, but the bottom design is pretty inspired.
The bottom design has also helped me boost my list of "World's Greatest Pranks" to two. The first one: Changing someone's ringtone to Kramer's racist tirade just before they go on a job interview, and calling them during it. The new second one: Running around the city streets giving people one stick and one stick only of ghoulish Kit Kats, so they can be tormented for the rest of the day by questions left unanswered:
I've been WHAT?
I've been WHAT?
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Spider Web Cotton Candy: From Charms' "Fluffy Stuff" brand, here's a bag of cotton candy intended to look like spider webs. They accomplish this by making the cotton candy white, which is kind of a rip, because they do the same shit in December and call it "snow." That said, I like any company with the ballz to turn something as friendly and copasetic as cotton candy into one of Satan's many edible thralls.
Whether they want us to think "spider webs" when we look at it or not, white cotton candy just seems extremely clean. This is interesting, as your eyes will never tell your mouth to be forewarned when your hand decides to pick some up, and your mouth really, really deserves to be forewarned. This stuff is SOUR. The official title of the flavor is "sour apple," but that's a huge understatement considering what we've taken to mean as "sour apple" in the candy industry. Sour, yes, but nothing like this. It's so sour that the first thing you do after tasting it is find someone else to taste it, because you just can't tell if you were exaggerating when you did that wild-eyed spit-take a moment before.
You weren't. It really is that sour. I wouldn't say it's to the point of being inedible, but don't plan on plowing through a bag of this stuff in anything less than a month's time.
Gummy Zone Horror Bag: I'm well accustomed to Gummy Zone's wizardry when it comes to Halloween gummy candies, and though nothing in this pack is at all new, something magical happens when you throw it all in a package marked HORROR BAG. I'm pretty sure you could shit in a sack and get me to pay five bucks for it, so long as you wrote "HORROR BAG" on the sack first. And don't pretend like I'm alone in this. There is nothing that good in the HORROR BAG, and you know you're salivating right along with me.
Inside are a bunch of loosely related individually wrapped gummy candies, including a pair of eyes, two sets of gummy fangs, two boring orange pumpkin things, and the star of the show -- a big gummy skeleton in several parts! He's made of that gross kind of all-white non-translucent rough gummy meat, but it's not like you buy a gummy skeleton in several parts to eat. He's just there so you have something to play with.
His arms and legs are a little malformed, but I'm willing to forgive that since his ribs alternate between looking like a trilobite and looking like Link's shield. The more I look at that ribcage, the more it looks like whatever I want it to look like. Oop, there it goes again! I just saw Lincoln.
That covers five of this year's best varieties of Halloween candy. By October 31st, I hope to have covered at least 250 more. I want to set a world record. I want to be remembered. Remembered as something more than that guy who got arrested for shoplifting a couple of spiral-bound notebooks from CVS in the seventh grade.
