As Halloween approaches, we celebrate by getting sick on weird candy. To kick off this recurring feature, here’s an article from October 31, 2007.
What, you thought I was too busy to hand out treats to you fine kids? Hell no! How could I show up empty-handed, with all the hard work you guys put into your costumes? Sure, maybe you’ll be a little disappointed with what I have to offer, but since I at least made an effort to please you nice kids, maybe you won’t huck eggs at my quaint little Web 1.0 home here.
I’ll be blunt; my choices aren’t very original, but I hope you nice kids won’t hold that against me. I can see the glimmer of apprehension in your eyes behind those clever masks, no doubt caused by the realization that my home smells like compacted ass. Perhaps my shambling and tattered clothes suggest a feral man easily spooked by traffic’s roar. I assure you the corpses on the lawn are decorations and not interns.
‘Tis the Season. Let’s eat some CANDY!
Colored White Chocolate Skull (Galerie)
I confess, this is the item that started this whole article. I-Mockery claimed it was too aesthetically pleasing to consume, so I was forced to eat one out of curiosity. At three bucks, it didn’t come cheap. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t decorate my desk for over a week before I opened it. That’s how good it looks.
While a lot of people consider hollow chocolate to be a rip-off, I honestly prefer it to solid chocolate. When I was a kid a relative gave me a Hershey’s kiss the size of a paperweight volcano. I’m not a huge chocolate worshiper (especially with how goddamned hard it is to type it), but I felt obligated to eat the entire thing so as not to seem ungrateful. It literally took months before I quit and threw it out. It looked like a beaver attack victim, and you bet your ass it turned white over time. I thought I was going to bust my front teeth out on it, and I was tired of using my then-virginal permanent teeth to file off slivers of stale candy. So I admit a touch of hesitation in fearing this thing would be solid, since by opening it I’ve more or less committed to eating it.
Sure enough, solid as a rock. Already I’m regretting this article.
I’m a little confused about “colored” and “white” both as descriptors, but upon closer inspection, the eyes and nose of the skull are jet black. Hell yes- black candy!!! I tried to pry one out, because I swear I tasted something other than “white chocolate”, but it might just be my imagination. But- what’s this I discover as I attempt to make out with the skull?
It IS hollow! Huzzah! It’s just thicker than your average Easter bunny! I may be able to eat this without getting sick! Plus, as you eat Mr. Skull (if you leave his eyes alone at first), he appears to be keening in the abject horror of being consumed! How perfectly appropriate! Especially since he doesn’t have ears you can start on, like a chocolate bunny. I was forced to deliberate over where exactly I would begin to chomp.
As far as flavor, I swear it’s a touch off, and I’ve been eating Honky Choc since wayback. There’s a sort of vague cinnamon taste that comes and goes. My guess would be that white chocolate isn’t as consistent a flavor as plain chocolate, so on a big piece like this, the components of the flavor vary slightly. Or, maybe it’s stale from sitting on my desk for over a week.
In any case, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to the experience of eating a skull, something I, like so many others, have always longed to do. For that I give it kudos… or rather, in the spirit of All Hallows’ Eve, I give it… BOOdos.
Ghost Dots (Tootsie)
Much like Ding Dongs in the wake of the recent Transformers mania, Ghost Dots were nowhere to be found for most of October, leaving massive shelf-holes in their place. I’m sure by now you’ve even been exposed to backlash over this candy, if such a thing can even be imagined. Sure, they don’t have adorable faces like they do on the boxes. No, they don’t actually glow in the dark, probably because most of us don’t like eating poison. But for the first time in Earth History, everybody was eating Dots. Everybody. Even people who hate them.
It’s hard to explain all this to someone who hasn’t seen the Ghost Dots in person. I would show you a picture, but I ate all of mine. Weeks ago. Oh, they taste just like regular Dots. But they look like the specter of Dots long since eaten (minus the teethmarks). Tootsie took something as now-common as blue candy and somehow reinvented it. God knows why, but people are crazy eager to eat something that looks like it has a spectral glow. Maybe Ghost Dots are coincidentally similar to a human soul, and by accident we’re all acting on some forgotten soul-eating reflex instinct. Or maybe deep down we all want to be Pac-Man. Take your pick. I think I’m all goofy from eating that entire skull before.
Anyway, I can’t help but recommend Ghost Dots to absolutely everybody. If you’re going to nitpick about them, here’s my quibbles with them:
1. Since they all look the same, you can’t save the red ones for last. The last Ghost Dot you eat may be orange or lemon or lime, truly the “low flavors”.
2. Clearly they should have been called ECTO-DOTS. I apologize if the brilliance of that name caused a Tootsie creative department head to jump out the window. There’s always next year, and you will sell EVEN MORE if you use that name. You have my explicit permission to do so, especially if you actually do it. You gotta buy me a drink though, and it damn straight better have Ecto-Dots in it.
Rest assured: Ghost Dots are worth the highest rating of BOOdos.
Strawberry Milkshake Whoppers (Hershey)
What, these don’t count? Wait… isn’t all candy Halloween candy on Halloween? Does it have to be Halloween-themed? Fuck, I didn’t think this through very well. Plus I think the skull IS making me ill.
If you’re like me and think black people are made out of chocolate, you welcome a candy that just might be the key to never biting another black person again. Personally, I dream of never having to exclaim “PLEASE I HAVE A LEGITIMATE PROBLEM FORGIVE ME GIANT CANDY PERSON” again after being caught with my teeth sunk into yet another black person’s forearm or shoulder. Making matters worse is black people’s penchant for applying liberal amounts of yummy-smelling cocoa butter to their skin, as though the rest of us aren’t going to ambush them thinking they’re an over-sized delicious cupcake. If you’re white, and you haven’t bit any black people recently, you must live in Idaho or Utah, or a similar place where the fabled “candy-men” Sammy Davis Jr. sang of are few in number. As for the rest of us, shit, I almost made off with a black baby this morning. If its mom hadn’t seen me creeping up, I’d be biting that baby’s foot right now, and I’d bet you my life savings it would taste just like a ginger snap.
So these Strawberry Whoppers were pretty nummy. They look like the testicles of adorable cartoon piggies. thanks to the fact that they’re Whoppers, they taste just like a strawberry milkshake, or, more specifically, Strawberry Nestle’s Quik mix from yesteryear, which I always eschewed the chocolate flavor for as a schoolboy. (Plus chocolate milk=liquefied black people=Racism.) Added bonus: two or three Whoppers were ruptured, and looked like pink Pac-mans. Because the inside was exposed to air, it dried up into a chewy texture unlike the crunchy Whoppers. I enjoyed these, as they represented almost another variety. You might spit ’em out though.
But overall they’re super good, better in my opinion than the Original. In the interest of proper comedy website integrity, however, I cannot give them a BOOdos rating, since they have about as much to do with Halloween as chop suey, but that is not at all their fault.
Food Court Gummi Candies (Frankford)
One of the tenets of a happy life: Candy should be fun, even outside of Halloween. Some companies still grasp that, but you must admit there’s almost a workmanlike quality to a broad strata of candy. Not that we need anything fancy about our Snickers and our 3 Musketeers (although that new Mint version is fab, and Butterfinger Crisp is to die for), but there is something to be said for candy that goes the extra mile for the status of a “treat”. I have a professional relationship with a Milky Way: I buy it, I unwrap it, I eat it. I craved a Milky Way (usually Midnight Dark), I ate it, craving satiated. I’m not going to gaze at it pensively and ponder whether it looks more like a poo or a turd. If it’s a Baby Ruth, maybe I’ll laugh about that scene in Caddyshack for about a second before I turn it into actual poo.
Now, when you’re still a kid, you’re something of a gourmand when it comes to sweets. It’s one of the only ways to feign sophistication at that age. So you go for the Big League Chews, the Fun Dips; hearty, interactive candy that will garner attention, awe and temporary allies on the playground. Nothing pacifies bratty hellspawn faster than fancy candy they’ve never seen before. Well, if I’d seen this when I was a kid, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have shared, but I probably would have joyed myself all the way to diabeetus.
Food Court is an assortment of Gummi “fake foods”, all of which are about an inch big, and come individually wrapped in a clear plastic cradle. We’re talking little Gummi pizzas, hamburgers, Philly cheese steaks, hot dogs, ice cream cones, french fries, club sandwiches, and probably something else I forgot. If you live under a rock or in the Middle East, or have no access to Gummi delicacies, all these things are comprised of separate pieces, depending on which type they are. Hamburger and hot dog “buns” are made of an opaque meringue-like Gummi, which looks like a bun and tastes like how you always wished Circus Peanuts would taste. “Meat” and “lettuce” are red or green Gummi. Some of the items are colored to make them actually look like meat, and all the different pieces have their own flavor, none of which I disliked. It’s like a dream. Holy shit- I just realized that I could combine parts from different ones to make “new recipes”!!! Holy shit I gotta try it now!!!
So there you have it in a nutshell- Food Court may not be Halloweeny, but they definitely fit the bill for a fun “treat”. So I give the highest possible BOOdos to the FOOOOOOOD Court: after all that is the place in the mall where zombies meet.
Okay, that’s it for the candy. In other spooky news, I got to be Tommy Ramone on Stomp & Stammer’s floatmobile (truck) at the Little Five Points Halloween Parade (that’s me with the anachronistic Mr. Bungle T-shirt):
We faked our way through a medley of Ramones favorites and the crowd totally ate it up. To anybody that saw us: I was drunk as fuck.
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