LARGETONY Blog

Okay, it’s official. I’m getting old. As I enter the last nine months or so of my twenties I have found myself wondering what happened to the way things used to be. What happened to a simpler time?

This was triggered by a recent visit to mega-merchant Wal-Mart (which I am discovering is a microcosm for everything that’s wrong with the world, but that’s another blog.). As I maneuvered my way through the barely shopping cart-wide aisles, I came upon the mother ship of Halloween candy. I could not believe the trillions of varieties of candy ready to be hurled into the bags of greedy miniature Spidermen, Frodos, and Snow Whites come October 31. It’s really not the number of varieties that got me as it was the number of varieties of varieties. Who knew there were 63 options to the Reese’s Cup?

When I was a kid (this is the old man part) if you asked a buddy to come back from the store with a Reese’s Cup, that’s what you got: a little pie of waxy milk chocolate filled with a gritty paste of of peanut butter flavoring and sugar. If you did that today, you’d probably find yourself having to go look for your buddy after he has not returned within an hour, only to find him still at the store scratching his head in conflict over whether to get the classic Reese’s Cup, the white chocolate Reese’s Cup (with dark chocolate filling), the inverted Reese’se Cup (Peanut Butter outside, chocolate inside), the Reese’s cup with peanut butter AND jelly, the Reese’s cup with the oreo cookie bottom crust (hidden inside with the peanut butter), or perhaps the inexplicable Reese’s Sticks. Sticks??? Isn’t the thing that set Reese’s apart from any other chocolate and peanut butter confection was its little cup/pie design? It tastes like any other peanut butter/chocolate thing. So why buy it? Because it’s a cup! That’s its schtick. A stick has no schtick. What’s appealing about a stick? All things being equal in the candy world, it’s form over function that spells success.

Take the Hersey’s Kiss. The most perfect form in all of candydom. That perfect little bite-sized bell-shaped drop of milk chocolatey goodness. And the Kiss is better than a candy bar. For a couple of reasons: If you don’t finish a candy bar it’s always difficult to wrap up and keep it fresh. Kisses are bite-sized so you have as many or few as you want. Candy bars are basically the same shape. Either flat rectangles or nubbly turds. Unwrapped, you might have to taste it to know what it is.

But a Kiss…Even if it trades it’s silver foil dress and paper scarf for theholiday red or green, you still know what it is. Even in the dark, you recognized that sexy little shape and know that inside is pure milk chocolate and nothing else. When I was a kid Hershey started playing with fire. They added to their standard silver and Christmas red and green wrappings, a variety of pastels at Easter. OK. Fine. But still a Kiss inside. Several years later came the Autumn Brown and Orange wrappers. What the FUCK?? Fall is a season. Not a holiday. Why do we need Fall themed candy? It’s not like they needed a way to bring candy into the Halloween market. Candy IS the Halloween market. Perhaps Thanksgiving then? What’s the derivation of that? Did the Pilgrims cross the Atlantic with stashes of bon bons? Did the Native Americans offer them a bountiful harvest of chocolate? I’ve never seen so much a Tootsie Roll spilling forth from a cornicopia. But even with the questionable color scheme, inside it was still a Kiss. Well, that was the old days. Days gone by.

Hershey’s first real step down that slippery slope of tampering with perfection came with the introduction of the Kiss with Almonds. Granted there was at least a precedent established with their candy bars. There was the plain Hershey Bar and the one with Almonds. But you no longer had the safety of eating a naked Kiss and being secure in what you got. Now there may be a surprise inside. Just make sure you are aware of the gold foil wrapper first.

These almond-loaded Kisses became very popular. So much that it gave Hershey license to completely destroy the artfulness of the Kiss. They rolled out the Hug. Yes, the Hug. A perfectly wonderful Kiss destroyed by an outer layer of white chocolate (which is not even really chocolate) and a tiger stripe of milk chocolate around that.

I can remember being handed what I thought was a Kiss, in Biology class one day, by a frizzy haired girl with raccoon mascara. The silver foil with the brown stripe was different. But I figured it must be for Columbus Day or something. I naively popped the Hug in my mouth without looking at it, got that initial candle-wax like flavor of white “chocolate” on my tongue (no I have never tasted candle wax. It’s a simile) and spit that shit out faster than teenage boys cum with their first hooker. “What the FUCK is this???? This is not a Kiss!”

“No,” the rodent-eyed bitch respond, “It’s a HUG”

What the FUCK…? A HUG? It looks like a Kiss. Hugs should not look like Kisses. Kisses and hugs are not the same thing. They should not look alike. Kisses are more special. I’d let a lot of people hug me that I would never even consider kissing. Hugs are not kisses and Kisses should not look like Hugs.

The popularity of this albino Kiss known as the Hug opened the floodgates for what will be and endless bastardization of the original Kiss. Not only can you choose the orginal silver foil plain kiss– which gets redressed for so many holidays that there are barely any silver months left (pink and red for Valentine’s Day and red, silver, and blue for Independence Day are now available. What, no red, black, and green for Black History Month?) or the gold foil almond Kiss, or the deceitful and hideous Hug, but the menu of Kisses now includes, but is not limited to the Dark Chocolate Kiss (purple foil), the Caramel-filled Kiss (Orange and Gold tiger striped foil), the Chocolate Mint Kiss (green checkerboard foil), and the vomit-inducing-just-at-the-sound-of-it Strawberry Creme Kiss (pink checkerboard foil). This last one no doubt looks like aPepto-Bismol colored drop.

That’s it! With options like this, why stick to just candy? Hershey’s should just forget about developing Kisses with Raisins, Kisses with Crunch, Peanut Butter Kisses, or Reese’s Kisses (you know all these ideas are sittting on some boardroom table in Pennsylvania) and aim their sights on life candy—-drugs! That will be the next generation of Kisses. Hershey will team up with some big pharmaceutical (sp?) company to produce bags and bags of medicinal Kisses. Besides the Pepto Kiss, there could be the NyQuil Kiss (blue foil), the Alka-Seltzer Kiss (can’t you hear the jingle?…”plop, plop, Kiss, Kiss, oh what a relief it iss.”),or even prescription Kisses of Benadryl (red spotted foil) and heavy-duty stuff like Codine and Morphine. Imagine the wacky potential mix-ups at hospitals across the nation. Is that a suppository or a Kiss? Neither! It’s a HUG!

See why somethings are best left alone? I know people will argue that change is progress. But it’s only progress when its an improvement. Brooms were not capable of cleaning the dirt from carpets so the vacuum cleaner came along. That’s progress. Turning a candy inside out is pretty much a lateral move.

So why couldn’t Hershey stick with the simple, pure, milk chocolate kiss? It’s simplicity was it’s beauty. Simplicity was it’s success.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2004 at 10:57 pm and is filed under humor, observations, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.