King-Sized Candy Edition

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome the Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. And today we're gonna be delving into the always mysterious and more category. Who are we Well, we are your deans of dessert. You're governors of glucose, your sugar plums, sweethearts, serving up bond bonds of banality alongside our bond monts. Yes, we're like chocoholics, but for trivia and also chocolate.

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Speaker 1: My name is Jordan run Tug. I hate you. It's an onion thing. It was the onion reference. Just oh, I'm Alex Heigel.

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Speaker 2: And you know, folks, as the Wise Man once said, life is like a box of chocolates, and so is the show.

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Speaker 1: You truly never know what you're gonna get.

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Speaker 2: Today we are going deep into one of my favorite topics of all time, candy, with all the sprawl that that implies.

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Speaker 1: You get comfortable. Now.

00:01:11
Speaker 2: I don't know if you know this about me, folks, but I have the biggest sweet tooth of all time. I have the dietary habits of an elf setting that line out to perhaps our most stylish friend of the Pods, Siggy, who introduced me to that line. I don't discriminate when it comes to my love of candy, and we'll be taking a similar approach on this episode, which is just a massive scattershot look at all types and brands. I have a confession to make. The original idea was to have this episode out in time for Halloween as a trick or treat special, but as some of you may have noticed, things were a little slow going for a while, and that was my fault and I'm sorry my friends. That iHeart had me working on some other short term projects that sort of took over, including one, if I may, a little plug called Stones Touring Party, which is a deep dive into the Rolling Stones and they're epic nineteen seventy two North American Tour, which is widely regarded as the first tour of the modern rock era. It's the tour that taught multiple generations how to party like a rock star. But that show is now done and we are back to our regularly scheduled program here, which I'm so happy about. And now we're gonna banje on candy stories which I am just beside myself about. I'm so excited, Higel, I'm about to ask you one of my very best first date questions. Tell me about your favorite candies. I've never asked them on a date.

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Speaker 3: I'm gonna clarify, you know, Yeah, I mean as much as I love Halloween, like, I kind of grew out of having a sweet tooth like at one point, obviously, like trick or treat is a big thing, but like I don't, I just don't really reach for candy as much as I reach for like, you know, I lean more towards the savory side of the trash food park rounds. It's been getting a lot of Pennsylvania. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I've been getting a lot of well we're talking Pennsylvania. I'm a big sour dough pretzel.

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Speaker 1: Oh oh yeah.

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Speaker 3: Okay, just carve up the roof of my mouth like a cluster bomb and you know, uh, just suck all the moisture out and then choke that down with a yingling. Put on some steelers. Head down town. Uh, I'm not gonna do any more Pennsylvania accents. Go down to the creek. Now, I can't. I haven't gotten to Pittsburgh one. That's gonna shame my dad.

00:03:26
Speaker 1: He's gonna be upset about that. Yeah, I did I say funions already.

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Speaker 3: I've been eating a lot of fun I've.

00:03:31
Speaker 1: Never had a fun in my life.

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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I'm just so much more of a chips And because it's like the repetitive motion thing where uh candy, Well, yeah, but I guess I think of like like a Snickers bar is like a discrete, single serving option.

00:03:50
Speaker 1: That's like, yeah, like two twix's.

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Speaker 3: You know.

00:03:55
Speaker 1: Now, obviously when you're.

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Speaker 3: Talking about your multi part candy experiences, your skittles and so forth, that's that's a different story. And you know, I used to do all the kinds of weird what you do in your kid where you put a bunch of skittles into like a like a sprite.

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Speaker 1: I did, see, I respected the candy too much to do that. I don't. I'm not familiar with that.

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Speaker 3: And then did you have state fairs? What's a Boston state fair? Is that just like like racism in baseball.

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Speaker 2: I'm far enough outside of Boston where it's just like a good old fashioned like farm fair we had. I'm from a place called I went to High school in a town called Bolton, and they're famous for having an annual fair called the Bolton Fair that's been going on for I want to say, like one hundred and twenty years. And they do things like they have pigs that race. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean that kind of thing.

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Speaker 3: So well, my segue there is I you know, I had a lot I had like deep fried Snickers.

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Speaker 1: I never had that candy apples. That was more of a New England.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:04:50
Speaker 1: I do like a candy apple.

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Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean as far as if I'm still reaching for candy, well, it's like a movie thing for me too, Like I'll get red vines or I started out on Twizzlers and now I've moved over to red redes are better, I agree, because they're better because they're worst, you know what I mean. But then otherwise I'm I'm very vanilla in my my candy flavors. I like it Snickers like a Twigs. I like a payday obviously are good.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: I love a pay day. You know, we have content in here.

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Speaker 3: Sour Skittles are really good. You know what it might have been. Honestly, at one point when I was like twelve in our like class, bingo thing that we had. I won like a CBS sized thing of warheads.

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Speaker 1: Oh wow, and no taste buds left.

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Speaker 3: No, it literally burned an ulcer in the roof of my mouth. I like, I ate so many of them, and because after the intense sourness, they're just disgusting little little nuggets. It probably burned out my sweet tooth too. So yeah, I don't know. I'm not as it's not It's not a big passion project for me, but I'm so excited to learn.

00:05:59
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you this.

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Speaker 2: So how long did you go trick or treating for? I'm asking people this a lot lately. Or what age did you stop? I should say what age did I stop?

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Speaker 3: Uh?

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Speaker 1: Probably like eleven? Okay, yeah, ten or eleven?

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Speaker 3: Yeah?

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Speaker 1: Is that reasonable? Oh?

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Speaker 2: I know, I think that's extremely reasonable. I you almost struck me as somebody that would have kept it going.

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Speaker 3: I wanted to do No, I mean I would, uh you know, I would like I was invested by that point as I got older and just doing weird shit on the house, like like creeping around my roof at kids and like while my well, my dad handed out candy below, I was like stalking on the rooftop and like a wig and cloak.

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Speaker 2: I I've never heard of anyone doing that.

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Speaker 3: That's did your dad know this was happening when he was handing out candy. Sometimes we didn't put in like a big production for like Halloween values, like the way that some houses what like. We never did, like I had. One of my core memories is of a guy who had a full scale like mock electric chair set up on Halloween and he as the kids would approach his house, his wife would whoever his accomplice was, would throw the switch and he would be electrocuted and it was this big flashing strobe light thing and he would die, and the candy was in his lap. You would have to go up and take that kids, And then when you went to take a piece of candy, he screamed and it like you know, I saw God, and it's like burned into my cortex as like a Halloween memory. And so I was always like, oh, I want to do that, but I was too lazy to like actually put in production value. So I would always just like skulk around my own property, like peering out from behind trees and stuff, just to try and creep people out. Although like would never never coordinated any of this or made it any larger. It's always just you know, being weird.

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Speaker 2: My friend Chris Fleming is a brilliant comedian. Definitely look him up if you have any As a special on Peacock now called Hell, he just had a whole bit about his neighbor in California. The only Halloween decoration they had was just caution tape, and so he spent days thinking that something awful happened at his neighbor's house and then finally like kind of confronted them about it.

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Speaker 1: So, yeah, that's on Instagram. Definitely check that out.

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Speaker 2: I don't remember people decorating for Halloween as a kid. For me, I guess they must they decorate. I don't remember that, but again I never liked that's messing man. Well, I mean part of the thing with Halloween for me was that I looked like this at like age nine. So I mean I would be getting I would be in like fifth grade and you'd have people like handing out candy sandn't you a little old for this?

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Speaker 1: And it'd be like I'm nine or what it's glandular.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, so it kind of instilled for a guy who was confused because they had always been told not to take candy from strangers except for this one night of the year when you're told to take candy from strangers. I was already socially awkward and sort of uncomfortable by the whole premise. Anyway, Having open scorn from the people handing out candy kind of put me off the whole thing. But now I can go to CVS and buy my damn own.

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Speaker 3: Exactly. There you go. That's the true journey to adulthood.

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Speaker 2: Well, folks, from the candy that Frank Sinatra was buried with, one of my favorite facts of this entire episode, to the iconic candy bar that nearly destroyed a family, to the time Skittles spent millions of dollars on an advertisement that only one person ever got to see, to the wanton acts of animal cruelty at the heart of a gummy classic. Here is everything you didn't know about candy.

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Speaker 1: You know what I like?

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Speaker 3: Is it Sweetwater sends me candy with my petals, thought I buy, yeah, they put in but it's like old tiny candy. It's like bidd o honey. I'd like biddo honey, honey.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: Destroy your feelings, But yeah, I do.

00:10:03
Speaker 1: Honey, how do you feel about Mary Jane's, which are there?

00:10:05
Speaker 3: I have a Dad's root beer in right now?

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Speaker 1: Do you really it's in honor of this episode?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I got a pedal. Oh, I've just been eating a candy? What is a mary Jane? How does that different from.

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Speaker 1: A bit of honey?

00:10:19
Speaker 2: Is honey and Mary Jane's I think has peanut butter in it, but it's a similar like taffy thing.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: That's fine.

00:10:26
Speaker 2: Well, while we're on the topic of old timey candy, we got to start with kind of the granddaddy candy. Really, if you're thinking about it, it's also so heroine. It's also the worst candy, so it could only go up from here. We're talking about candy corn, arguably the most divisive candy on this list. That you pro are anti candy corn.

00:10:45
Speaker 1: I'm fine with it, I'm not doesn't offend me. I bet you are, I'm not. No, I don't like candy corn. Yeah. Well, in order to understand the origin of this honey and vanilla flavored treat, let's cast our minds back over one hundred and thirty years ago. Go to the eighteen eighties.

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Speaker 2: Now, this was an era when a large part of the population lived a very rural existence and worked in agriculture, and around this time confectioners marketed to this demographic with candies that looked like crops, basically pumpkins, turnips, and corn. It's believed that candy corn was invented, or at least popularized, by a man named George Renninger, using sugar, corn, syrup, marshmallow, and other ingredients. And way back when when he first debuted his candy, it was called chicken feed rather than its more familiar name because you'll recall that chickens eat dry corn, and the boxes were illustrated with a colorful rooster logo and the tagline something worth crowing for.

00:11:43
Speaker 1: Now.

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Speaker 2: Before automation, making candy corn was a very difficult process do, in large part because of its three colors white, orange, and yellow. This is hard to imagine now, but it was really revolutionary to have candy that was three different colors. But it made the process of making it really labor intensive. The ingredients were heated until they were melted, and then the hot liquid was poured into buckets, and then employees would have to walk these heavy buckets around it hand pour the liquid into corn kernel shaped molds, and since candy corn is multi layer, they would have to repeat this process three times, once for each color. And it was such hard work that candy corn was only made several months out of the year for many, many years around around now around Halloween and Thanksgiving. Now, of course, that the process is automated, candy corn is made all year. In fact, in one eight hour shift, Jelly Belly, the company that now makes candy corn, can make twenty eight thousand pounds of candy corn, which translates to nine billion pieces of candy corn a year.

00:12:44
Speaker 3: You know how they have those grain siloe drownings that happen in the Midwest, What if that happened with candy corn.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: I told you about my friend who almst suffocated on a barrel of rainbow sprinkles that we're talking about.

00:12:59
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

00:13:00
Speaker 2: He's trying to like lift this barrel and everyone was telling him not because it was too heavy, and he wouldn't listen, and he lifted it up. He was a big guy, and he became top heavy and he fell backwards in the barrel as he fell, and all the it was filled with rainbow sprinkles, which I don't think he knew, and they just went up his nose in his open mouth because he was falling backwards, and yeah, what a way to go. But candy corton didn't really catch on until after World War Two, when trick or treating became entrenched in the American psyche, presumably as a way to celebrate the end of wartime sugar rations. That's something I saw come up again and again was that trick or treating was kind of a the candy equivalent of Thanksgiving, if you will. But nineteen fifty was a bad year for the Golitz Confectionery Company, who makes candy corn. On September ninth, nineteen fifty, while preparing for the Halloween season, the factory in Midland Park, New Jersey, caught fire when one of the kettles dripped some of the molten candy batter on the floor, and the result was the biggest candy factory fire in history, as the entire block long building went up in flames. Thankfully, all twelve workers who were in there at the time managed to get out unharmed, but the fire burned for days, drawing thousands of onlookers and nearby residents were forced to hose down their homes in order to keep them cool and vaguely flame retardant. The Golitz Company lost two thousand pounds of candy corn that year, but this was possibly for the best, because six weeks later, during Halloween, kids across the country were stricken with bad diarrhea as opposed to good diarrhea and also skin rashes. And these symptoms were actually linked to the consumption of orange dye number one, which was used as a food coloring in many products at the time in the fifties, including candy corn and also hot dogs. I don't like the thought of candy corn and hot dogs sharing an ingredient. Orange dye number one is considered a coal tar dye, which is derived from byproducts of process coal and also contains benzene, which is toxic. So the diet ended up getting delisted from the FDA and eventually consumers stopped having violent diarrhea. But fun fact, there is still a kind of gross ingredient in the present recipe of candy corn. The smooth coating on the outside of every piece is made from lac resin and lac resin is an insect secretion from lack bugs. It's not the actual bug itself, but insects secretion is close enough. These parasites secrete a resin to protect themselves, which is then scraped up and used to give candy corn its shiny look. And it's listed in the ingredients as confectioner's glaze, which is just vague enough. Now there's a debate about candy corn, well, it was two debates whether not it's good or bad which But the other debate is how do you eat it. According to a survey by the National Confectioners Association, forty seven percent of people just pop the thing in their mind of wholesale go bunny style and start with the narrow white end first and that's weird.

00:16:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know that that's for people. Wow.

00:16:11
Speaker 2: And then another ten percent, the true weirdos, begin eating the wider yellow end first. But the one thing I want you to take away from this segment, most importantly, I had no idea about this. If you stack candy corn up, if you put it in like a little circle and stack it up, it really does look exactly like an ear of corn. I could never figure out For the longest time, I couldn't understand why candy corn was candy corn. I didn't realize it was like individual kernels until until very recently.

00:16:37
Speaker 3: I want to ship you so much candy corn. Really, it's like one of the only candies I don't like. But as we're we're working our way up from the list of worst candies in the world.

00:16:48
Speaker 1: We got to talk about tutsi rolls.

00:16:50
Speaker 2: The I always thought of them as the stems and seeds of any trick or treaty bag.

00:16:55
Speaker 1: I liked the colored ones.

00:16:57
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the fruit flavored ones, although not of alla, not of vanilla, vanilla cherry ones are good well. Tutsi rolls were invented by Austrian immigrant Leo Hirschfeld, who started selling the candy for one cent in Brooklyn in eighteen ninety six. He traded up to a proper factory a decade later, but still delivered the candy via a horse and buggy, which might sound like a gimmick, but how the hell else were you supposed to do it? In nineteen oh five good point prior to inventing the tutsi roll, which he named after his daughter. Clara's nickname is he fat shaming here. TUTSI oh oh, I thought it.

00:17:32
Speaker 1: Was like a roll. He was like, you're rolls. I don't know. I don't know.

00:17:42
Speaker 3: The old timey nicknames were lucky. It's not racial.

00:17:50
Speaker 1: Anyway.

00:17:50
Speaker 3: Prior to inventing the Tutsie roll, Leo Hirschfeld also invented something called bromangulin. That sounds like that's what I call when we record this podcast. Yeah, bromangellin, bramangulin. Brahmn galon. How are you supposed to pronounce it?

00:18:13
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:18:14
Speaker 3: So. Regarded as the world's first commercially successful gelatin dessert, coming in flavors like raspberry, cherry and orange. I really thought it was gonna be like an orange melon flavor combination, not just a gelatin thing.

00:18:25
Speaker 1: You know what. I look this up. You keep reading, they'll see if I find anything.

00:18:29
Speaker 3: So it's essentially a precursor to jello, which makes mister Hirshfield responsible for Jordan's two least favorite sweet desserts in history. The interesting thing about Tootsie rolls, other than the fact that Jordan hates them, is that they were supposedly among the very first candies to be individually wrapped, which was a major hygienic breakthrough at the turn of the century. Another revolutionary element of their design is the fact that they don't melt. In the early nineteen hundreds, confectioners struggled to make candy, especially a chocolate based candy that could stand the heat. Tutsi rolls were godsend for chocoholics once warmer weather descended. Long time Tutsi roll ceo Melvin Gordon, who died in twenty fifteen at the age of ninety five, insisted that tutsi roles were essentially indestructible, telling the Associated Press in nineteen ninety six, nothing can happen to a Tutsi roll. We have some that were made in nineteen thirty eight that we still eat. If you can't bite it when it's that old, you can certainly lick it.

00:19:27
Speaker 1: Worse to live.

00:19:27
Speaker 3: Wise words, Wise words coming from that old guy.

00:19:33
Speaker 1: I got a bro bromangelon update. Here wait, I have.

00:19:38
Speaker 2: Something in my ear right now, I'm getting a bromancholon update.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: Okay.

00:19:43
Speaker 2: The origin of the name is unknown. It was claimed i representatives of the manufacturer that it's name meant angels food, but in a nineteen oh three edition of the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record, They reported a significantly different etymology. A foul spirit from bromos, a stench an angelus, a messenger angel or spirit.

00:20:09
Speaker 1: Your dessert after an evil fart in some avat.

00:20:17
Speaker 2: In some advertisements, the name was broken up as bro man gel Ah one of us.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: This may have been in order to make the long name easy to remember or pronounce.

00:20:30
Speaker 3: Romangel on biblically accurate dessert, be not afraid. The Tutsi rules freakish chemical endurance and bizarre quasi wax like consistency would later lead to their use in the army not as weapons. Beginning in World War Two, the Tutzi Rules became semi officially contracted to the US government to produce the candy for inclusion in GI rations, since their deurbility and packaging made them well suited to be eaten in all manner of US interventionist war. They were like a primitive version of an energy bar. During the Korean War, these little gobs of chocolate idol ns actually saved lives. American soldiers were caught stranded by the chosen reservoir nearly out of mortar shells. So the troops called for an air drop using the code name they'd established for their artillery Tutsi rolls.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: Because they look like they're in the Korean War and they looked like bullets Jordan, let me finish.

00:21:28
Speaker 1: Sorry.

00:21:29
Speaker 3: To their surprise, when the air drop arrived, it was filled not with ammunition, but with actual Tutsi rolls, which is bad and making matters worse, they arrived frozen. They were still able to be eaten, though, and presumably were probably efficient weapon at that point if you used them in some kind of a like a sling, like a David and Goliath kind of situation.

00:21:51
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Yeah.

00:21:52
Speaker 3: But some enterprising soldier who honestly deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor for this, came up with the idea of heating up the Tutsi rolls in their mouths and transforming them into a kind of paste which could be used to patch bullet holes in trucks, hoses, and other equipment. According to Ripley's Believe it or not anyway.

00:22:09
Speaker 1: But just like, oh this stuff sucks, oh god, oh god.

00:22:14
Speaker 3: Oh oh wait a minute, okay wait, we could use this, uh with their vehicles thusly fixed with the waxy salival chocolate paste. The men collected their injured and frostbitten comrades, broke a hole through enemy lines, and retreated to safety. The men who survived the battle started calling themselves the Chosen Few. And that is not bullshit. That is verified by the way. Uh AS has the story of Frederick Arnold, who was a US pilot shot down over the Sahara, who survived for three days on rations of Tootsie rolls. Ah wow, but nobody's ever used one to kill someone.

00:22:53
Speaker 1: Well there are, okay, there's two kinds of tutsi rolls.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: There's the little bite sized ones that are like, you know, an inch or whatever, and aren't there like long stick like almost like jerky ones too. Yeah yeah, Now I'm confused, Like, which is what we're talking about here? I guess if they were individually wrapped as probably the tiny ones.

00:23:13
Speaker 3: Um wow, man, Sometimes I really do love this country.

00:23:18
Speaker 1: What did you just look up? Has anyone killed anyone with tutsie rolls? Uh No?

00:23:23
Speaker 3: But I did just find a guy who uh loaded on YouTube who loaded a tutsi roll into a shotgun shell cool and is now using it to punch holes in what appears to be Oh, it's a plank of wood.

00:23:39
Speaker 1: It will at least go through a plank of wood.

00:23:42
Speaker 3: That doesn't surprise me. And a beer can. What else is he shooting? Is it intact the Tootsie roll? No, does not survive the impact. But holy man, he did a number on that Miller like can.

00:23:54
Speaker 1: Wow? Um? God bless America. Ah.

00:24:00
Speaker 3: There are numerous famous fans of tutsi rolls discussing, though they may be. According to tutsi roll industry's big wig Ellen Gordon, Jackie Kennedy Onasis used to like to keep a bowl full of the candies around the office at Double Day Publishing House in New York City because they served as a good icebreaker.

00:24:15
Speaker 1: How do you feel about that?

00:24:17
Speaker 3: I don't give a about anything anymore?

00:24:20
Speaker 1: Uh? What that is a weird foible? Man? Is it's like the Reagan thing or the Nixon thing? Jelly beans? Yeah? I think he just jelly beans? Okay?

00:24:33
Speaker 3: Well, as we mentioned in the Thriller episode, Jackie Kennedy Onasis was editor of Michael Jackson's autobiography Moonwalker, which means it's not a real stretch to imagine that he might have had some of her Tutsie roll Frank Sinatra also insisted on Tootsie Rolls as part of his backstage rider, which also included a color TV, various liquors, and an assortment of sandwiches. In fact, he loved the candy so much he was allegedly buried with a few Tutsi rolls tossed into his coffin, along with a few other choice effects, including cigarettes, a lighter, and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: Who would you like to be buried with you? It doesn't matter which it was Dita's first, It's gonna say the company is.

00:25:22
Speaker 3: The company that produces Totsy Rolls is shrouded in secrecy. According to The Wall Street Journal, They're infamous for turning down press inquiries. It also neglects to hold quarterly earnings calls per Slate. The company's succession plan became the topic of news headlines when then CEO Melvin Gordon died in twenty fifteen at the age of ninety five. Eyewitnesses to his death reported that his eyes had gone completely black. He was levitating three feet above the ground, speaking in a language that seemed to them older than time.

00:25:50
Speaker 1: Itself.

00:25:53
Speaker 3: Sorry what Control of the company went to his wife, Ellen, who told Joel Glenn Brenner for his book Emperors of Chocolate Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars, we want Tutsi to remain independent. Hopefully our children or the employees working in the company will be able to run it someday. The Tutsi Rolls Corporation has not forgotten the old gods. According to Bloomberg, investors think Gordon may eventually sell the company. The Wall Street Journal noted that shareholders are the only ones who are privy to the succession plan, and there has been no sign that any of Gordon's four daughters will take over. Gordon and her children combined own more than sixty percent of the company. According to Forbes, what if suddenly they like break down the Tutsi role factory or like explodes or something, and it's revealed that they have some kind of hideous stigy and Eldridge Lovecraftian demon chained up in the basement that just poops these things out like a like a queen bee.

00:26:51
Speaker 1: And it's just been.

00:26:55
Speaker 3: Cover Yeah, al yeah, exactly, it's Oh, they eat it each CEO. That's the last act of any Tutsi roll ceo. They strip naked, they paint sigils on themselves, and then they go down and are ritualistically devoured by the Tutsi beast. Fifteen years of plentiful Tutsi roll production, the harvest hard. The Tutsi must roll sixty four million Tutsi rolls get made. That's more than forty four thousand, four hundred and forty per minute, seven hundred and forty per second come out of the Tutsi monsters sphincter.

00:27:37
Speaker 1: That is incredible. He cut into like the botto thing.

00:27:40
Speaker 2: It's like every time I snap my fingers, yeah, thousands.

00:27:44
Speaker 1: Out, Stop snapping your fingers, Stop bleeding, snap, stop bleeding clapping.

00:27:49
Speaker 3: What is the origin of that? But it was first of all, it was Bona right, And was that supposed to you've asked me this before. I don't know, I don't care. Tell me about the Tutsi roll pop, which as I hate tutsy rolls, I love tootsy pops. My hatred of tutsy rolls. It's a disgusting candy. It's a lollipop. And then you have the Tutsi roll at the center.

00:28:12
Speaker 1: I' mean the tuttsy roll at the center. I could take leave.

00:28:13
Speaker 2: But oh the cherry tootsy pops great, what are you talking about? Well, it's your favorite lollipop.

00:28:19
Speaker 3: I don't have one because I'm not six. You like lollipops, don't you? Ring pops, ring pop and son of a bitch? I like chupa choops? Actually, oh actually I do like ring pops. Yeah, goops are good. Oh that that's like fancy. It's an import yeah at m point. Yeah.

00:28:39
Speaker 2: Wow see you can't just find those anywhere you see that.

00:28:43
Speaker 1: Wow. I I you know, I didn't expect that of you.

00:28:45
Speaker 2: I thought you were like a like a charms blow pop kind of guy. You're more of a man of the people. The chupa chips I did not expect.

00:28:54
Speaker 1: Well.

00:28:54
Speaker 2: I love totsy Pops, which were first introduced in nineteen thirty one. It was invented by Luke Weiss Graham, who was an employee at the then named Sweet Company of America, which produced Tutsi roll, and he and his colleagues were asked to pitch ideas for a new candy at a meeting, and the idea came to Wis Graham because he had tasted his daughter's lollipop while chewing a chocolate tutsie roll at the same time. He thought this flavor combo went well together. Uh. Linguistic fun fact, the word lolly in lollipop derives from the Old English dialect term for the tongue.

00:29:28
Speaker 1: Did you know that? Gross?

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:29:30
Speaker 3: Kind of lollapalooza isn't lollapalooza originally refers to a lollipop, right, It's like the comically large, old timey spiral lollipop that like your little uh, you know, little Lloyd Eloy would have you know, enjoying on his way to kick the kick the pores.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: I didn't that. I don't know. I've never heard that. Yeah, really, I believe So why did they call it that?

00:29:57
Speaker 3: Because Perry Ferrell was on god knows how many dry uggs?

00:30:00
Speaker 1: Uh? Yeah, eh, suppose I was incorrect? Wow? Where did I get that from? What does it mean? Yeah?

00:30:09
Speaker 3: Strike all that anyway, Lollapalooza apparently means an archaic word meaning extraordinarily impressive, and he heard it in a Three Stooges short.

00:30:24
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing that you think about when you think of a tutsi pop is that professorial Owl in the animated ad. That commercial was designed in nineteen sixty eight by the Detroit based Donner Ad Company in an effort to get people to eat Tutsi pops like literally eat them. Premise being if people bite the Tutsi pops that means it would last a lot shorter than they would they would have to buy more. This gave birth to the age old advertising question how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tutsi pop?

00:30:53
Speaker 3: Oh?

00:30:53
Speaker 1: On, it's two. That's the voice of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, Paul Winchell. Huh yeah.

00:31:03
Speaker 2: One big fan of mister Owl from those ads is Pete Davidson. He is a massive tattoo of the tootsy pop owl on his back.

00:31:12
Speaker 3: Did you know that that guy throws darts at a book of idiot things? Wow, I'm suffering today. I'm off my game. See that's how he picks his tattoos from the Dictionary of Stupid. Opens a page and my name's right next to it. Cut all this. I'm off my game, stupid.

00:31:35
Speaker 2: That's good that the first part was good, although I guess he's getting them all removed now because now that he's getting into you know, inverted Komma's serious acting. It takes roughly three hours to cover up his tattoos with makeup, so I guess he's decided that. So no word on whether or not the Tootsy Pop owl remains on his back more than eleven. When it comes to answering that in from his question, the mysterious Tutsi Pop manufacturers aren't any help. According to the company's website, the real answer to how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Totsy Pop quote depends on a variety of factors such as the size of your mouth, the amount of saliva.

00:32:17
Speaker 1: Et cetera. What could the et cetera be heat? Yeah, this is also potentially r rated.

00:32:29
Speaker 2: The Toutsy Pop website also offers a PDF for a clean stick certificate on their website.

00:32:38
Speaker 3: I got one of those ones. Clean stick certificate. Yeah, really had to go to the doctor.

00:32:48
Speaker 2: Many studies have attempted to find the exact answer of how many licks it takes using volunteers and.

00:32:55
Speaker 1: Even and even what Jordan.

00:33:01
Speaker 2: I can't there's some things even I am unable to say, customized licking machines I go but you asked, Yeah, those things, Yeah, yeah, I know.

00:33:12
Speaker 1: You know, uh, the results.

00:33:14
Speaker 3: They have one of those at the Tutsi roll factory to to moisten the Tutsi beasts hide.

00:33:21
Speaker 1: That's that's one of the boys.

00:33:23
Speaker 3: You have to clean them off, you know, when they're when they're when the new Tutsi beast is born from the corpse of the old one. You have to clean them off like a mother cat does to the kittens. So that's where the customized licking machines come in there, maybe with cow tongs.

00:33:35
Speaker 1: I can't tell if that last part serious or not.

00:33:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's basically you just take a cow tongue and you stick it on a like on a possible stick, yeah, like a robot arm, you know. And then they you know, because this is many miles underground, because they can't let it get too close to the surface or else it tastes freedom. Yeah, and then the it's remote controlled. Obviously this is OSHA has rules about how close you can get the Tutsi beast, so you know, your higher level executives are rotated in to pilot the customized licking machines to clean off the new Tutsi beast. It does cause a bit of a hiccup in production. You know, well, no, I actually it's not about Osha. They go that far underground because it's like going out in the international water. So the only company that actually goes so far deep underground that it no longer.

00:34:25
Speaker 2: Technically counts as the United States. It's actually part of the Earth's mantle.

00:34:30
Speaker 3: That's where Jimmy hoff is buried. They fed Jimmy Hoffa to the Tutsi beast. It was a good five year period where you could get a little bit of Hofa in every Tutsi role.

00:34:39
Speaker 1: Amelia Earhart, Anastasia.

00:34:44
Speaker 2: It's about a thousand licks. Okay, that's stiped. I don't know how to cut around that. So yeah, it's somewhere between four hundred and a thousand licks to get the set of a Tutsi pop. Sure, now, okay, this actually I am very excited about this. So if you're like me, which I pray to God you're not, you still get excited when you have a Tutsi pop. I'm thirty five years old, and you unwrap it and you look at the wrapper and you see a Native American, a First Nation individual shooting a bow and arrow at a star because for generations it's been ingrained in our minds that if you get a Tutsi Pop wrapper with a star on it, you bring that rapper to the store, a corner store in my mind, not like a CVS, and you get a freebe Tutsi Pop. That's like the thing that was just I don't even know where I heard that. It's just we're all born with it. Now, this is apparently a lie and that rapper is worthless. No one knows how this rumor got started, but Tutsi Rol Industries have never in the history of Tutsi pops honored this. On their website, they actually have a section called the Legend of the Shooting Star, which gently debunks this legend. Says, in fact, the Shooting Star appears on one in every four to six pop wrappers, just as frequently as the other images appear. However, we do believe the star is a sign of good luck to come and a good harvest for the Tutsi beast.

00:36:12
Speaker 3: And a clean death for its next meal.

00:36:18
Speaker 2: Okay, well, now we're moving on to candy bars and we're going to start with the Milky Way. The Milky Way was the first major success for Frank Mars of Mars Incorporated, and it would eventually tear his family apart.

00:36:31
Speaker 1: But more on this in a moment. The creation of the Milky Way.

00:36:35
Speaker 2: Can be linked to the popularity of milkshakes, specifically malted milk. In the late eighteen hundreds, milk farming was scaling up, but the pasteurization regulations hadn't yet passed in most states, so it is believe that milk wasn't safe to drink, so malted milk tables were marketed as a good substitute for your health, especially for babies, and the popularity of malted milk rose in the eighteen eighties do in large part to the temperance movement, so malted milk, specifically chocolate malted milk became a hit at soda fountains across the country, and before going hard for the whole celestial thing, milky Ways candy bars were billed as a double molted milk in a candy bar, hence the name Milky Way, so it wasn't named after the galaxy at all. Was actually named after a very specific famous malted milk drink from the nineteen twenties, so the Milky Way was born, as you might guess, during father son time at a local soda fountain. But this story is not as sweet as it sounds. These two men were Frank C. Mars, the founder of Mars Incorporated, and his son Forrest. Now the official version of the story told by the company is that father and son developed it together while sharing a molt at a soda shop.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: That's very sweet.

00:37:45
Speaker 2: In truth, the pair were not close and would spend the remainder of their lives arguing about who is responsible for the family fortune. Forrest, the son, was born during Frank Mars's failed first marriage, and when his parents split when he was sick, he was sent to live with his grandparents, and father and son didn't see each other for twenty years. In fact, it was apparently not until Frank had to bail Forest out of Chicago jail. I'm not sure why, so chances are they were not having an adorable Norman Rockwell father son moment at a malt shop when they dreamed up the Milky Way, and throughout his life, Forest Mars would claim that even though his father had been the one that actually manufactured the Milky Way bar, it was his idea and he came up with the name himself. They would have a falling out and Forrest would move to England to try to start his own competing confectionery business, and while there he actually created the Mars Bar and Malteesers, which is another chocolate malt balls, and he quite possibly got the idea for Eminem's when he was living in England when he stumbled across a British candy called Smarties, which they still have over there. It's like the British equivalent of Eminem's. Eventually, Forest Mars returned to the US, started Uncle Ben's Rice brand in the interim, and then finally took over Mars Incorporated.

00:39:04
Speaker 1: So that guy was definitely racist.

00:39:06
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. The pair were feuding because the Milky Way Bar was a huge hit upon its commercial release in nineteen twenty four. Sales of the bar skyrocketed to eight hundred thousand dollars in its first year, and that's nineteen twenty four, so in today dollars that would be well over ten million dollars. By nineteen twenty nine, the Milky Way become the most popular candy bar in the United States, and this was partially because it was also the biggest. Today's milky Way bar is just over one point eight ounces, but the original milky Way weighed more than three ounces, which.

00:39:42
Speaker 1: Is pretty hefty, pretty deep, prettyep efty.

00:39:47
Speaker 2: As Forrest Mars explained, people would walk up to the candy counter and see this flat, little Hershey bar for a nickel, and right next to it a giant milky Way. Guess which one they'd pick. Now, we know that moulten milk is not a exactly a universal panacea, but the ads for milky Way continued to tout the supposed health properties for years. Back in the sixties, Mars ran a TV ad that linked milky Way bars the wholesome farm ingredients like fresh eggs and corn, and the most egregious example of this was an ad that depicted a picture of milk transforming into a milky Way bar, and the FTC felt that this technically constituted false advertising and issued a consent order in nineteen seventy basically saying that it wasn't okay to equate a candy bar with a glass of fresh milk. Despite this, Mars kept linking milky Ways with milk. There was a nineteen eighty four ad that continued to claim that each milky Way has the equivalent of a quarter cup of milk.

00:40:45
Speaker 1: Trying to find out who Uncle Ben was. He lives in all of us?

00:40:51
Speaker 3: You mean like the model or yeah, yeah, yeah, I actually have no idea. It can't be good, can't be a good story.

00:40:59
Speaker 1: No.

00:41:00
Speaker 3: According to The New York Times, it was not actually the Mars guy, Forest Mars.

00:41:05
Speaker 1: It was Texas food broker Gordon L. Harwell. He had basically.

00:41:14
Speaker 3: Supplied the armed forces with rice during World War Two and was looking for a way to expand it in the post war boom years, and during a meeting in Chicago, which would lend credence to it being Forest Mars is.

00:41:31
Speaker 1: The Chicago based company of Mars.

00:41:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, he just saw a portrait of the restaurant's major d, Frank Brown, and decided that will be the mascot of my new rice company. Did this maderd get some kind of resarve? Oh my goodness, no, you fool. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.

00:42:14
Speaker 1: All right, where are you?

00:42:15
Speaker 3: Where?

00:42:15
Speaker 1: Where the are we? Oh? Okay, sorry, snickers. One of my favorites.

00:42:20
Speaker 3: Uh, this is all but a preamble for Mars, the Mars chocolate h bomb that blasted away the competition Snickers. It is, per you, citing other sources, the best selling candy bar in the world, with global sales of three point six billion. See that's what I mean when I said I'm basic bitch, I like Snickers. The initial idea came from a pre existing snack consisting of nougat, peanut and caramel. Frank Mars, that wildly old bastard, added chocolate, put it in bar form, and started selling it wholesale. By this point, he was already wildly successful thanks to the Milky Way bar, and so he named his greatest creation after the trapping of his success. He had been so poor that it's generally understood that this is why his first wife, Ethel Forrest's mom, left him When he became a candy Titan. He married a new wife, also named Ethel, which is weird, and together they purchased a three thousand acre farm in Tennessee that they dubbed, of course, milky Way Farms. With a staff of over one hundred. Ethel's favorite animal on the farm was a racehorse, named Snickers, and when the creature died shortly before this new and improved version of milki Way with the peanuts went into production, the Mars couple decided to name it after Snickers in tribute, and they still use a tiny little portion of him in every Snickers bar that goes out today. When Snickers was first released, there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding its price. At the time, candy bars cost five cents, the Snickers bar was sold for a whopping twenty cents, and this could be because, like milky Way, was physically larger than most of the competitors, and plus each bar boasted sixteen peanuts. In twenty twenty, to celebrate the bar's ninetieth birthday, they upped the ante and earned themselves a place in the Guinness Book of World Records by making a Snickers bar with three thousand, five hundred pounds of milk, chocolate and twelve hundred pounds of peanuts, caramel and nougat is the equivalent of forty one thousand regular Snicker bars and would be consumed by these six hundred Mars Wrigley workers in Waco, Texas who helped make it that's just a weird thing that I just said and then pictured in my mind's eye.

00:44:33
Speaker 1: It's like a car, a Snickers bar the size of a car, just like what are your marching? What do you punch into work?

00:44:41
Speaker 3: You know, you're trying to just send your kids to school, and you find out you got to make a Snicker's bar the size of a car and then eat it. You already got diabetes because you work for because you worked for Mars, and you know, doctor said, you're probably gonna lose your foot, but you can't lose this job. You got kids to feed. You know, one of them was go to NYU, just study screenwriting.

00:45:03
Speaker 1: So so you make the giant chocolate bar, and chocolate.

00:45:07
Speaker 3: Bar, your your salty tears mingle with the peanuts. Here's what I don't look down at the lines on your hands and think what happened to that young man who used to swim in the streams outside of Waco and play baseball. I don't even recognize him when.

00:45:22
Speaker 2: I look in the mirror at night, I'm not recognize my hands with the hands of an old man.

00:45:27
Speaker 1: Grandma's hired man. The way that this giant Snickers bar was divided up. You have to almost cut it like a cake.

00:45:38
Speaker 2: And the thought of eating a giant Snickers bar with a fork a knife, he's gross.

00:45:43
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Do you have stuff in here about the dick Van?

00:45:48
Speaker 1: Yeah? Okay cool.

00:45:50
Speaker 3: Unfortunately for Snickers, they did not hold the record long. Poor Jim Bob lost his foot for nothing. Reese's take five, So the record just a couple of weeks later. That's a good candy bar. Oh love me to take five.

00:46:04
Speaker 1: Let's take five? Take five?

00:46:06
Speaker 3: An animal?

00:46:07
Speaker 1: You absolute rube, you fool, you full of a two? Is that like five alive?

00:46:14
Speaker 3: It's a it's a take it's take five. It's five layers of sweet and salted goodness that doesn't ask you to compromise. It's crunchy pretzels, smooth peanut butter, salty peanuts, and sweet caramel, all covered in chocolate coating. Grab this snack the next time you want to mix things up. That that veers too close to savory for me. That's why it's good. What is your aversion to the salty sweet combination? That's what we are, Papa. Wait the tagline for to take five. Okay, this is just validating me. The tagline, at least according to a Wikipedia page, the best bar You've never heard of?

00:46:53
Speaker 1: They're great.

00:46:55
Speaker 3: Ah, Take five stole the record just a couple of weeks later.

00:46:59
Speaker 1: On the other they're extreme.

00:47:01
Speaker 3: You read a report that Milky Way and Snickers were the first proper fund sized chocolate bars, and a scourge on Halloween that has remained unaddressed. Baby Ruth, which we will get to, had been released as a junior version in the thirties, but the fun sized version of Milky Way and Snickers, released in nineteen sixty eight, were slightly bigger.

00:47:20
Speaker 1: And I think they were the first ones that actually used the term fund sized.

00:47:23
Speaker 3: If you hand out fun size at Halloween, you know you're part of the problem.

00:47:28
Speaker 2: Wait, really, you handed up full sized candy bars? That was like only like, yeah.

00:47:34
Speaker 3: In twenty twenty three, No, I would have to mortgage my house with the way inflation is I'm talking about back in the day.

00:47:40
Speaker 2: Oh, that was like just a one neighborhood in my town that you knew how to copple houses that handled yeah, full sized candy bars, and.

00:47:46
Speaker 3: You went there, obviously, but that was by and large. You got the fun size yeah, yeah, but scaling down the size of their candy bar in a nod towards the then novel health consciousness sweeping the nation. Must have had the folks at Snickers feeling cocky, veiny, vascular swollen, engorged and gorged on the sense of their own self importance, because in nineteen eighty four they ponied up four million dollars a load of free candy to become the official snack food of the nineteen eighty four Olympics. Was that the one that Munich happened at or is that eight two? What happened to eighty four?

00:48:24
Speaker 1: Anything?

00:48:25
Speaker 2: I think the Russians boys the one the Russians boycotted?

00:48:29
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Health experts were not pleased. Dietitian Edward C. Goudstein said at the time the present labeling is misleading in that it leads consumers to believe that these candies are endorsed by the Olympic Games as a nutritious snack food choice. He and the other nutritionists were concerned that the promotion would lead quote little kids to figure that if they eat Snickers or m and ms, they will become athletes. Who's to say they won't. This sounds absurd. But there were commercials airing at the time that had professional alpine skier Carl Anderson saying that eating a Snickers allows me to concentrate on downhill. First of all, pick a real sport. Second of all, concentrate on downhill. That is the entirety of your sport. Snickers doubled down on the bad press enlisting their own candy nutritionists. Is that like being a concentration camp? Doctor, Holy Snickers doubled down on the bad press and listing their own candy nutritionists to defend the sponsorship. Athletes do have greater demand for energy, and candy is one way to get it, a mister doctor Daniel Rosenfield said. However, spurred on by public health campaigns like Michelle Obama's twenty twelve Let's Move initiative, MARS decided that it would work to combat the childhood obesity epidemic by reducing the size of the standard two hundred and eighty calorie Snickers bars by twelve percent. That's when the woke war began. All this being said, at least one Snickers bar somewhere was credited with saving a man's life. Colorado outdoorsman Christian Jor was on a sowmobiling trip when he got separated from his group and buried in an avalanche. According to Steamboat Pilot and Today, the only things he had in his pockets at the time were two cigarette lighters and a Snickers. When I stopped for gas in the morning, I picked up a little pint of orange juice at a king sized Snickers bar, and unfortunately I left a pint of orange juice in my car.

00:50:20
Speaker 1: George told CBS. He freed himself, though.

00:50:23
Speaker 3: And spent four days crawling through the waist deep snow until he was spotted by a helicopter, and in order to keep his strength up, George rationed his Snickers bar one bite at a time. Though he did lose twenty three pounds during these ordeal, he likely would have starved to death without the Snickers, and in a pitch perfect coda to this story, George was reportedly busted for illegally growing weed a week later. Cannot make this stuff up well.

00:50:49
Speaker 2: In addition to the controversy at the Olympics, there was also controversy for Snickers.

00:50:53
Speaker 1: On the small screen.

00:50:55
Speaker 2: Snickers as have an uncanny knack for generating a furr most notably the ad that aired on February fourth, two thousand and seven, during the Super.

00:51:05
Speaker 1: Bowl Roman Numerals forty one.

00:51:09
Speaker 2: The commercial showed a pair of mechanics accidentally kissing while sharing a Snicker's bar. After quickly pulling away, one mechanic sheepishly says to the other, I think we just accidentally kissed, and then the other mechanic frantically exclaims.

00:51:21
Speaker 1: Quick, do something manly.

00:51:24
Speaker 2: In three of the four versions of this commercial, the manly thing takes the form of an injury, including tearing out chest hair, striking each other with very large pipe wrenches, and drinking motor oil and windshield washer fluid. However, in the fourth version of this ad, a third mechanic pops up and asks is the room for three in this love boat? The ad drew complaints from gay and lesbian groups who felt rightfully so, that the ads were homophobic. Human Rights Campaign president Joel Soomones is quoted as saying, this type of jeering from professional sports figures at the sight of two men kissing fuels the kind of anti gay bullying that haunts countless gay and lesbian school children on playgrounds all across the country. Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation President Neil Giuliano said that Snickers, Mars and NFL will promote and endorse this kind of prejudice is simply inexcusable.

00:52:17
Speaker 1: The ad was later.

00:52:18
Speaker 2: Pulled from Snicker's website and presumably the airwaves. But Snickers apparently didn't learn from this incident because there was a similar response to an ad that aired just the following year in the UK. This two thousand and eight spot featured mister T. Even just describing this, I've watched it.

00:52:37
Speaker 1: It is wild.

00:52:38
Speaker 2: Features mister T trailing an effeminate speed walker in his tricked out truck and shooting Snickers bars at the speedwalker from a gun like a gatling gun, while calling him quote a disgrace to the man race and screaming at him to quote run like a real man. And the slogan for this campaign get some nuts cause it was too subtle a point?

00:53:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was the ad agency responsible for this?

00:53:05
Speaker 2: I I who are the adwizards who came up with this one?

00:53:10
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:53:10
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. Presumably they have high profile lawyers, so I might even probably best not to mention. Shockingly to me, this advertisement only received two complaints in the UK from viewers, but it was also criticized by the Human Rights Campaign as a portrayal of violence against the lgbtqu community. Also, other related Snickers had caused controversy in the UK from the very beginning for a whole other reason. When the product was first launched across the Pond, many in Britain felt that the name Snickers sounded a little too much like Knickers, which was rude. So it wasn't until nineteen ninety that it became known as Snickers in the UK. Until then, Snickers was known as the marathon bar. I possibly because of the thing we talked about at the Olympics where it gave people with a nutscape people energy.

00:54:08
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:54:09
Speaker 3: I mean that ad was BBDO, which is like what one of the big Yeah, some guy got made more money than either of you and I make combined in a year.

00:54:22
Speaker 1: Oh but our entire lives for that ad. I'm sure.

00:54:25
Speaker 3: What's that Bill Hicks Linemitt in the audiences tonight is works in marketing or advertising?

00:54:32
Speaker 1: Kill yourselves? Not a joke, just a public service announcement.

00:54:38
Speaker 2: Well, in addition to the UK Snickers has inadvertently offended people really all over the world. Some of these offenses were relatively minor. Case in point, the Welsh into friend of the pod the Welsh. In twenty twenty, the Snickers UK brand tweeted a pla in Wales or someone sat on the keyboard a thread and commented with names like I'm not even gonna try this.

00:55:07
Speaker 3: So we all know that Welsh's is an interesting language. We all know it. It was low hanging first, yeah, come on.

00:55:16
Speaker 2: The tweet was quickly deleted, but not before causing an outrage on Welsh Twitter, which apparently is a thing. Some Twitter comments called this tweeted insult to the Welsh language and culture, while others planned to boycott Snickers entirely. Meanwhile, some comments stood up for the Snickers brand, calling the tweet a harmless joke. Hours after the tweet was deleted, Snickers UK posted an apology on Twitter, praising the loyalty of their Welsh fans. But that was nothing compared to what happened just last year in twenty twenty two, when Snickers inadvertently offended the Chinese government when one of their ads for a collaboration with K pop band BTS referred to Taiwan as a country independent from China. Mars quickly apologize for the misstep, adding that the brand quote respects China's national sovereignty and traditional and territorial integrity, and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory. This, according to the Taipei Times, for those who don't know, that is a hotly contested matter within the Taiwanese community who are struggling to be recognized as an independent nation.

00:56:29
Speaker 1: China. This is such a ridiculous thing to sell.

00:56:32
Speaker 2: China read It accepted Snicker's apology, but other members of the international community were irate. Fans on Twitter slammed Snicker's parent company, Mars Wrigley for caving into the quote bullies and not acknowledging the loaded pass between China and Taiwan, and his controversy came just as US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was visiting Taiwan, thus straining ties between US and China on this very high stakes visit which was poised to discuss things like climate change.

00:57:03
Speaker 3: So Speaker Belosi, Speaker Blosi, what do you have to say about Snickers?

00:57:11
Speaker 2: But shockingly, this would not be the first time that Snickers played a semi major role on the world stage. In twenty nineteen, Snickers joined a movement to officially make Halloween the last Saturday in October for trick or treat purposes. In addition to pledging their support, they also put money and chocolate where their mouth is. They shared a tweet that read a Thursday Halloween not satisfying. Halloween on the last Saturday of October satisfying. If the federal government makes it official, We'll offer one million free Snickers to America. This was not enough to get the federal government to change the official day of Halloween.

00:57:49
Speaker 3: Can't fight Halloween. It's bigger than all of us.

00:57:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, higo, do you want to talk about the Snicker veins? I sure do.

00:57:58
Speaker 3: Two things about Snickers that offend your veins and salad, aside from its nuts. Ahiers, you rocked this right. You go fawing at your own jos.

00:58:10
Speaker 1: She delivered so much better.

00:58:12
Speaker 3: Snickers is famous, Stinkers are famous. Snickers are famous for what their fans have dubbed the veins or decorative chocolate twizzle drizzle. We'll get to twizzlers, decorative veins or drizzles. This is the grossest combination of words I've ever heard you say.

00:58:27
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read it again.

00:58:28
Speaker 3: Aside from its Aside from their nuts, Snickers are famous for what fans have dubbed the veins or decorative chocolate drizzle on the top of the bar. In twenty twenty two, a photo of a shockingly veinless bar smooth like a baby's bottom, went viral on Twitter, leading to rampant speculation and, in many cases, outright disinformation. Someone even created a fake screenshot of conservative commentator Tucker Carlson slamming the so called woke mob for insisting that the allegedly sexually suggestive veins be removed. Some fans thought it was real, not a big stretch, because Carlson had recently gone on a rant about the desexualization of the eminem's mascots.

00:59:10
Speaker 1: I thought it was sexualization of the eminem's mat Again.

00:59:15
Speaker 3: We're not saying I thought they were upset that they made her not sexy, the green emagy.

00:59:19
Speaker 2: I thought they were upset that they made her sexy, which is completely contradicting his problem with making Snickers not sexy.

00:59:27
Speaker 1: I've gone crossing the van. In response to the.

00:59:30
Speaker 3: Outcry, Snickered assured fans that the veins were as engorged as ever going nowhere, able to be seen through the thickest of gray sweatpants. Uh. In response to the confusion, a former Mars regular plant worker explained that the iconic veins are made using a decorator belt, and sometimes a bar might miss that process. Agender Snickers just a non vascular Snickers, flaccid Snickers, and god, speaking of state Fair food, Snickers salad, there's no segue for this. I'm just gonna say it. Snickers salad in Iowa, of course, consists of whipped cream pudding, Granny Smith apples, and chopped up Snickers bars.

01:00:22
Speaker 1: What kind of pudding? Vanilla?

01:00:25
Speaker 3: Either banana or vanilla one the other. Yeah, oh, you know, that's fine. I would eat that vanilla. I would eat vanilla. I don't try know if it has to be it's massive, maybe because it's otherwise it's it's too much chocolate.

01:00:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's not chocolate. It's not chocolate pudding. Okay, it's it's some kind of But it wouldn't sound bad if it wasn't called salad. Yeah, but salad is.

01:00:43
Speaker 1: Like is as you edge into the Midwest.

01:00:46
Speaker 3: They call anything that's just got like more than yeah and more than three ingredients salad. You ever had ambrosia? That's like yeah yeah, like the gross canned mandarin oranges and like marshmallows and all whipped into a disgusting lather.

01:01:02
Speaker 2: As much as I like exotic, gross desserts, that's kind of where I dow the line.

01:01:06
Speaker 1: They don't call that salad though, they call that ambrosia. Shut up.

01:01:12
Speaker 3: You.

01:01:13
Speaker 2: Let's move on to to one of my all time favorites, KitKat bars.

01:01:18
Speaker 3: Now, the name KitKat has a surprisingly high brow pedigree.

01:01:22
Speaker 1: You like kitkats? I love Kitkats? Why they don't? They're just so boring? You mean they got waifer z them. That's it. Chocolate's good. Okay, I don't know.

01:01:36
Speaker 3: I'm learning all kinds of things about each other here in this Bromangelan first a quest Romangolin, in this Bromangolin excursion we're having here.

01:01:47
Speaker 2: Well, okay, I mean, so you like Snickers see Snickers, I don't like because there's too much going on. It's it's just too it's too chaotic. It's the same reason I don't like beat it On. Michael Jackson's thriller It's just too It's too loud, same reason, and put skittles in with sprite.

01:02:02
Speaker 1: I just gotta let's do the one at a time. Okay, all right, fine, fine, fine, I know.

01:02:07
Speaker 2: But the KitKat was named after the kit Cat Club, which was a seventeenth century assembly of British Weak Party supporters, artists and literary figures who met at a pie shop run by pastry chef Christopher Katling, which is the most British sentence I've ever read. The club's name, KitKat Club, was a reference to Katling's famous mutton pies, which everyone called kit kats, an abbreviation of his name. Kit is diminutive of Christopher and cat for Katling. The name kit Cat Club ultimately became synonymous in Britain with political and social discourse. Two centuries later, at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, British candymaker Joseph Rowntree, co founder of the famous Rountree Candy company, trademarked the name, and no one's really sure if it was a nod to this bit of British history. There's also a rumor that he liked the name because it was a reference to his wife's sorority days and was actually an acronym for keep in touch. Kit Kappa alpha theta her sorority cat.

01:03:11
Speaker 1: KitKat.

01:03:13
Speaker 2: Regardless, kitcat became a popular phrase again in jazz age London. There was a nightclub named after it, as well as a band, and eventually, in nineteen thirty seven, kitcat was used to re christen Round Trees chocolate.

01:03:25
Speaker 1: Crisp bar now.

01:03:27
Speaker 2: The distinctively shaped bar was first made in nineteen thirty five after an employee put a note in the chocolate company suggestion box requesting, quote, I love this a chocolate bar that a man could take to work in his pack up or lunch bag. This was an era when candy was basically seen as meal replacements and marketed as quote good food. You would see that phrase and a lot of ads and rappers would boast fresh and greedy. It's like milk away we talked about earlier boasted fresh.

01:03:56
Speaker 1: Eggs and milk.

01:04:00
Speaker 2: Basically, candy bars were viewed as early energy bars, and so for workers who didn't want to take the time to sit down and have a full lunch, especially if they're getting paid hourly, a candy bar was the solution for just a quick, cheap.

01:04:13
Speaker 1: Easy lunch.

01:04:15
Speaker 2: Round Trees marketed Kitcat bars as quote the biggest little meal in Britain, but they also made an attempt to appeal to people who just preferred it as a snack and not as a meal replacement, and they came up with a slogan the best companion to a cup of tea. So there's thoughts that when they rebranded the chocolate crisp to KitKat, that phrase of you know, people in a club all gathered together having discourse. The camaraderie was meant to signify the enjoyment of a shared break, so that's what's believed to be the meaning of the name KitKat. The way for filling in KitKat was not just for taste. Since biscuits were cheaper than cocoa, it helped keep the cost of the Kitcat bar down, which meant that it was an affordable working man's chocolate bar is baked in rigidly controlled environment to ensure proper crisp and rejected bars are ground up and used as filling in new bars, which makes the manufacturing process surprisingly eco friendly and zero waste.

01:05:13
Speaker 1: Or like a human centipede.

01:05:16
Speaker 2: Making its third appearance on today's episode. Kitcats were always a very socially conscious candy bar. During World War Two, a shortage of milk force Round Trees to switch from milk chocolate to dark chocolate and it's Kitcat bars, and to signify the change, the company changed the wrapper from red to blue with a somber message on the front that read, this product is made with plain chocolate. Our standard chocolate crisp will be reintroduced as soon as milk is available, and they even change their ad copy at this time to very kind of dour things like no more chocolate crisp until after the war, which is kind of like an anti advertisement really. In the fifties, manufacturing innovations helped get the Kitcat bars firm enough so that the little fingers could be broken apart with a distinctive snap, and this inspired an ad man with the J. Walter Thompson firm in London, who combined the breaking sound of the company's long running t break theme to develop the slogan have a break, have a Kitcat. This was first used during a television ad in nineteen fifty eight, and the phrase is still used in British ads today, but American fans will be more familiar with the version that has been playing in this country since nineteen eighty six. I'm afraid to even say it because it'll put that earworm into your head. Give me a break, Give me a break, break me off a piece of that kit Cat bar. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati polled several hundred subjects to discover that that song is ranked one of the highest earworms in history, alongside Ymca who Let the Dogs Out and the Mission Impossible theme.

01:06:57
Speaker 1: Kick Catfisionados or anyone who ever studied abroad, and jury's still out on which of those two are more annoying.

01:07:04
Speaker 3: As a subgroup will know that there's a huge difference between European and American kit cats. That is because they're made by two very different companies. Round Trees licensed the kitcat name for the American market for them. This was a win win since round Trees got exposure for their candy bar and Hershey's got a new product. This deal is contracted in perpetuity, so when Nesley acquired round Trees in nineteen eighty eight, it honored the original agreement, but with one stipulation. Nesli would regain the rights to the kitcat if Hershe's ever attempted to sell itself to another business. In essence, Neslie would steal back the recipe if her She's ever joined a bigger company. It was and has continued to be an effective way to stop Hershey's from going into business talks with a competitor. If Hershe's lost Kitcat, it would lose one of its biggest products, ultimately lowering the company's worth. Most people say that the European version is better and prearly has higher quality ingredients, but Jordan, for the record, prefers the American one. It's the red vines versus twisters. Red vines are worse, but they're better, very good.

01:08:07
Speaker 1: We can't talk.

01:08:07
Speaker 3: About four and kitkats, though, without discussing Japan. I don't think that there's ever been a country that has loved a candy product more than Japan loves KitKat bars. The headline for a twenty eighteen New York Times piece says it all. In Japan, the KitKat isn't just a chocolate, It's an obsession. I would have sent that one back. Isn't just a chocolate? Who says that New York Times Paper of Record, My ass.

01:08:30
Speaker 1: In Japan, KitKat breaks you there, it was, now we're talking. It began in the nineteen seventies.

01:08:37
Speaker 3: KitKat two Electric Boogloo It began in the nineteen seventies. But the brand had a stroke of good luck because the phrase KitKat is very similar to the Japanese phrase kitchu katsu, which translates to surely win. This led the candy bar to be embraced as a sort of good luck charm, especially among students. One tradition involves sending special Kitcat post cards to college students just before big exams. Leaned into this marketing, the bars a gift for encouragement and luck. Now, almost fifty years later, it's become firmly lodged in Japanese culture. Japan moves about four million mini kit Cats a day in a range of over two hundred flavors, among them with sabi yubari, melon corn, green beans, sweet potato, cherry, miso, green tea, and soy sauce. Even so kit Cat flavored cough drops, which I'm not even sure how that works. Limited edition Kitkats become highly sought after in Japan, but some traveling across the country in order to obtain them. And they've even switched from plastic to paper packaging that can be folded into origami.

01:09:38
Speaker 1: That's great. I love that for them.

01:09:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, and now we're moving on to skittles. How do you feel about skittles? Like skittles like sour skittles?

01:09:47
Speaker 1: Oh? Yes, yeah, I like. I like uh.

01:09:50
Speaker 3: I like to get in a bunch of skittles and and mashing them into a big uh an uber skit an uber skittle in my mouth and then putting in my lip like a like a you know, like shawl. Yeah, just walking around with that all day. You know, you didn't do that like you ever do that with when you had an airhead, and you would do that thing where you'd whip the airhead in its package down all the way until it was just like a like a marble sized thing of airhead.

01:10:16
Speaker 2: No, and I genuinely want to know more about what you're talking about. For some reason, I feel like I was not exposed to airheads as a kid.

01:10:23
Speaker 3: You would just take the airhead and because it was taffy and it was semi soft, you know, you would just whip it repeated. This is what just I don't happen elementary school. In middle school, like whenever we get airheads, you would just see all like all the boys doing this for like the next six hours. Just take your airhead, hold it by one end and just keep whipping it back and forth, and eventually the momentum forces the entire airhead from a long, thin strip into a single mass of sugar at the bottom. That's like this, you know, the like a little ball, and then you just hork down on that. I don't know why we did it was somebody to do. Also, you could just whip it at people.

01:11:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow.

01:11:06
Speaker 2: I never well, Skittles, in my money, always seemed like the highest sugar content, so I always appreciated Skittles. The Mars Company started to produce Skittles in nineteen seventy four for the British market. Actually wasn't available in the United States into nineteen seventy nine. The name Skittles actually has a kind of complex origin. There's a lengthy article about it on Vice. It seems to originate from a game called skittles, which is considered a forerunner of bowling. It's a traditional lawn and target game from Europe dating back to three thousand BC, and then over the millennia it gradually morphed into an indoor pub game. The name Skittles is actually thought to be from an Old English word skotin, meaning to shoot. Since the player shoots balls at the pins, why name.

01:11:55
Speaker 1: A candy after this?

01:11:56
Speaker 2: Well, there are some who believe that the Skittles the candy were so named because the candid resembles the pins that were used, but some believe that it might be a little more vague than that. Charles Dickens used the phrase beer and skittles in his eighteen thirty seven book The Pickwick Papers as basically euphemiser for jovial, fun and pleasurable.

01:12:15
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the forerunner of Netflix jerk and off, Oh sorry, what goonin the forerunner of Goonin.

01:12:26
Speaker 2: Considering they were initially an English candy, it makes sense that they would choose this very English expression for its name. Now, the folks at Mars are very serious about the s that can be found on Skittles, which fun fact, if you submerge a skittle in water, the letter just floats off.

01:12:43
Speaker 1: Intact, try it sometime.

01:12:46
Speaker 2: They are so serious about the presence of this s that their chief quality control metric is whether or not there's an S on every skittle.

01:12:54
Speaker 1: And so, because so many millions of skittles are.

01:12:56
Speaker 2: Made every single day, people in charge of quality control simply you know, one representative skittle out of so many thousand produced, and if it's lacking an S, the entire batch of thousands of skittles will be destroyed. And to be exact, they get crushed down and sold as animal feed.

01:13:15
Speaker 3: Oh, that's funked up. Should not be feeding animals to that. Then what do they do to the guy who is asleep at the wheel. They shoot him and take them out into a field like in Casino.

01:13:24
Speaker 1: No, they take them to the Tutsi. He gets fed to the Tutsi beast. That's another five years.

01:13:31
Speaker 2: But on the upside, apparently skittles are marginally better for you than I initially believed. I was always under the impression that Skittles had a shockingly high amount of sugar contained in it, But apparently it's not the case, or at least no more so than other brands of candy. But even more shockingly, a small bag of Skittles supposedly contains fifty percent of the daily recommended amount of vitamin C for eight year olds and twenty.

01:13:59
Speaker 1: Five percent for an adult.

01:14:01
Speaker 2: Huh, so there's actually a quantifiable benefit to eating Skittles.

01:14:05
Speaker 1: Did you know about.

01:14:06
Speaker 3: The all the NBA players who were like deeply in love with Skittles? No, Oh, this was a thing like ten literally ten years ago. I mean it was in the Arizona Republic wrote this thing with a sports reporter wrote it in twenty thirteen where this guy was there then forward Michael Beasley was talking about eating six or seven bags of Skittles daily and was padded down for them before he made it to the arena because they team doctors and dietitians were so worried about this. Wow. Yeah, well my favorite bit of Skittles apocrypha.

01:14:50
Speaker 1: Everyone knows the whole thing about Reese's Pieces in ET.

01:14:53
Speaker 2: It was one of the most successful examples of product placement in history. Seed to Spielberg wanted to use M and M's and them said no, They went with Reese's Pieces instead. Apparently there was I read as much as a three hundred percent increase in sales following the release of ET. Mars didn't want to get screwed again, so they jumped at their next movie tie and opportunity. Unfortunately, it was for a legendarily bad et knockoff called Mac and Me, which seemed to really only exist solely as a platform for product placement. There's a lengthy breakdancing scene set in a McDonald's. There's a character who inexplicably wears a McDonald's uniform in every scene. There's an alien who refuses to drink anything but cokes.

01:15:40
Speaker 3: It's just a very bad movie. It's the butt of a recurring joke with Paul Rudd, who would appear on Conan O'Brian's late night show for twenty plus years, claiming that he had a clip from his new movie he wanted to show, and then he would just show the same absurd clip from Mac and Me of a kid in a wheelchair flying down a hill, on off a cliff into a river. Well, the producer had worked on advertising campaigns with McDonald's and also the Ron McDonald House charities, so he was not The film was not paid for by McDonald's, but he did get money. Well, he did get money to make the movie from Golden State Foods, which is a food service company that is closely primarily serves McDonald's. So, how far does the rabbit hole go?

01:16:25
Speaker 1: Very far? Have you seen mecamee?

01:16:30
Speaker 3: No, I've seen the clips. Yeah, that Paul rudbit is pretty funny. So yeah, this didn't exactly help the sale of Skittles. They're great candy. Yeah, but the candy brand made up for it in nineteen ninety four with their Taste the Rainbow campaign, which is still going strong almost thirty years later, making one of the longest running ad campaigns ever. And truly insane stuff has graced the Taste of the Rainbow campaign. Arguably their most infamous ad was the twenty eighteen souperuper Bowl. Don't remember it? Well, there's a reason for that. Only one person ever saw it.

01:17:06
Speaker 1: Do you remember this?

01:17:07
Speaker 3: No, this is something called the exclusively the Rainbow Project. The super Bowl is one of the most watched sports events on planet Earth. The super Bowl is one of the most watched events period on planet Earth. It's probably the last bit of monoculture that we actually have as a country. Upwards of one hundred million people tune in.

01:17:29
Speaker 1: That sounds low now that I actually hear that out loud.

01:17:32
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm sure it's been declining true or twenty What was it this year? One hundred and fifteen million, one hundred and fifteen and twenty twenty three? Yeah, okay, one hundred and thirteen. I actually see here according to Nielsen, But fine, we'll go with your numbers. So that year advis we're going for five million dollars for a thirty second spot. Skittles decided to take the piss on this entire concept by filming a big budget cinematic ad and showing it to just one person. They hired Friends star David Swimmer to film a series of four commercials, one of which was chosen and shown only once, to seventeen year old Marcos Menendez of Canoga Park, California. The ad itself was never shown on TV, but on Super Bowl Sunday, fans were invited to go to Skittle's Facebook page to watch Mendez's reaction to seeing it for the first time, viewing it on an off screen monitor. The only details he shared at the time were that it featured Swimmer shooting laser beams out of his mouth. Schwimmer told Parade, when they first told me what they were doing in the premise, I thought, well, that is absurd to put all this time and energy into these spots that only one teenager was going to see was inherently really funny and subversive. At the time, he hadn't yet met the boy for whom he would be making the commercial, but I hope I do, he added, It would be kind of weird if I didn't meet him at some point. Maybe Marcos will have to make a video for me in turn. That's weird, David Swimmer, or he'll shoot his own commercial with his friend Trudeau Skittles word. Menendez remains the only person to have seen the ad the campaign worked. The Super Bowl twenty eighteen ad remains the most talked about Skittles ad ever and is considered one of the best Super Bowl twenty eighteen ads in general.

01:19:08
Speaker 1: So how do they top that? Well?

01:19:10
Speaker 3: The next year, instead of an ultra exclusive Super Bowl ad, the mad Men at Skittles staged a Broadway style of musical on Broadway, written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Will Eno. The script for the extremely met up production was entitled Skittles Commercial The Broadway musical copywriter Nathaniel Lawler. Prolific composer Drew Gasparini wrote the songs and In the forty five minute musical, Michael C. Hall plays an actor about to star in a Skittles ad in the form of a theater piece. Plants in the audience yell at Hall, and then his character runs away, dies and meets the spirits of Amelia Earhart and Winston Churchill and wonders if this whole musical ad is a bad idea. This premise is telegraphed through songs like this might have been a bad idea. This was definitely a bad idea, and advertising ruins everything. You can hear these songs on the original cast album, along with four minutes of Haul eating Skittles. The Skittles Commercial Musical opened on Broadway on February third, twenty nineteen, the night of the Super Bowl, doubling down on the theory that there is zero overlap between theater kids and football fans. The music will also closed that night by design. That's incredible. That is the best use of advertising dollars. I'm sorry, that is so good. Skittles, In case you hadn't guessed by that insane series of commercials that were just related to you, is notable for having one of the better corporate social media accounts. In twenty sixteen, Donald Trump Junior famously tweeted out a photo of a bowl of Skittles in order to make an ill advised point about immigration policies, writing I think.

01:20:40
Speaker 1: He even wrote it. It was like a was it a met It was a man. I didn't right.

01:20:44
Speaker 3: If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? Needless to say, for those of you who know how social media works, the public once they were done dunking on Donald Trump Junior quickly turned its eyes to Skittles, who responded as diplomatically an elegantly as they could given the circumstances. Skittles are candy and refugees are people, and we don't wish to comment further. That was graceful, But the same cannot be said for a campaign that they launched in two thousand and nine. Early in Twitter's lifespan, they opted to change the landing page of their official website to display tweets that people sent to the company. So what happened next became known as Taste the Failbow. Naturally, people started tweeting various forms of obscenities at the company, usually with the hashtag Skittles fisting, which were then splashed across the brand's website. So many thousands of people tried flooding the Skittles homepage with profane content that for a brief moment they actually crashed Twitter as a whole. Incredible stuff and yet somehow not the worst thing to happen to the Skittles brand.

01:21:50
Speaker 1: That is true.

01:21:51
Speaker 2: In July twenty twenty two, a lawsuit was filed in a Northern California federal court alleging that Skittles contain a quote known tocsin called titanium dioxide, which renders them, according to the lawsuit, quote, unfit for human consumption. Janeal Thames, a resident of San Lorendo, filed suit against Mars Incorporated, seeking class action status, alleging that people who consume Skittles quote are at heightened risk of a host of health effects for which they are unaware, stemming from genotoxicity the ability of a chemical substance to change DNA. The case was dismissed that November twenty twenty two, and people went back to shoveling Skittles down their gullets. Now this brings us to a deeper question, how do you eat Skittles? According to pr Newswire, a twenty nineteen survey conducted by Mars Incorporated uncovered a lot.

01:22:45
Speaker 3: Of data about how people eat Skittles. Slightly less than half of Skittles consumers eat them by the handful, like my dear friend Alex Eigel, while thirty one percent eat a few at once and twenty percent savor them one by one or Strawberry is the most beloved flavor with thirty three percent of fans making that choice, and the least popular flavor with only six percent citing it as their favorite, is yellow or lemon. Ironically, according to Skittles factory footage analyzed by UK's The Sun, there are more yellow pieces than any other type of flavor in the Levitch bag of skills.

01:23:22
Speaker 1: Bull it really is.

01:23:28
Speaker 2: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information.

01:23:32
Speaker 1: In just a moment.

01:23:46
Speaker 2: This brings us to another fruity candy classic that has its roots of my beloved UK Starburst. It was introduced in nineteen sixty by Mars and it was called initially, I don't know why I have such a visceral reaction and how much I hate this name. Starbursts were originally called opal Fruits.

01:24:06
Speaker 1: I hate. I don't know why.

01:24:07
Speaker 3: It sounds like British slang for testicles. I hit me in the old opal Fruits he did. I know, he's a day fire down in the old East Stand. He did whack me around the ople Fruits.

01:24:22
Speaker 1: It's like Eliza Doolutle. That's haunting.

01:24:29
Speaker 2: So this name that I hate so much was the result of a contest. The winner, a London copywriter named Peter Feffer, came up with the name opal Fruits, which netted him the princely sum of five pounds are about two hundred dollars in today's money.

01:24:44
Speaker 1: For those of you who.

01:24:45
Speaker 2: Have a head for numbers, you'll notice that is significantly less than the hundreds of millions of dollars the candy brand pools in each year. The candy was introduced to the United States in nineteen sixty eight under the name Eminem's Fruit Chewies, before they finally yeah, it's really ye that that did not last long before they changed it too. It's more famous Moniker Starburst.

01:25:08
Speaker 1: Now. The origin of this.

01:25:09
Speaker 2: Name is unknown, but it's believed to be both a reference to the burst of flavor, and also a somewhat cheap ploy to get in on the space race fever that had gripped America at this time. The UK version remained Opal Fruits until nineteen ninety eight, during which point it fell victim to globalism and was changed to Starburst, much like how the Marathon bar was changed to Snickers in the nineties. This was apparently hugely controversial to candy loyalists in the UK, and there was a lot of celebration when Mars released a throwback version of the candy and original opal Fruit style packaging.

01:25:46
Speaker 3: You like that a lot, just the phrase candy loyalists taking heavy losses and the portions of the city controlled by the candy loyalists.

01:25:58
Speaker 1: The long slender, jerky like packaging. You wrote this, what's your footstool problem? I wrote this all like one day.

01:26:09
Speaker 2: The long slender, jerky like packaging was supposedly made to resemble mini space food sticks. Are you familiar with space food sticks?

01:26:17
Speaker 1: It's just all dehydrated crab, right anything. I mean, it's like worse than that. It's like.

01:26:26
Speaker 2: It was like kind of barely food. It was developed in the late sixties by Pillsbury's chief food technologist, the guy by the name of Howard Bauman, whose team had worked closely with NASA in the past. He'd created the first solid food consumed by a NASA astronaut. They were just bland food cubes, eaten during Scott Carpenter's trip on the Aurora seven in nineteen sixty two. I think he was the third American in space, and John Glenn had famously consumed the fruit flavored Tang drink in space three months earlier on the friendships. But space food cubes were followed by other space friendly foods created by Pillsbury. There was a non crumbly cake, a relish that could be served in slices, almost like cranberry sauce, and then there was meat that needed no refrigeration. So in nineteen seventy Pillsbury trademarked a quote non frozen balanced energy snack in ROB form containing nutritionally balanced amounts of carbohydrate, fat, and protein, which is just space level like this will keep you alive. I guess non frozen balanced energy Snack in ROD form wasn't quite snappy enough, so they changed it for consumers to space food sticks. I was widely considered a forerunner of energy bars. They came in six flavors, including peanut, butter, caramel, and chocolate, and in nineteen seventy two, astronauts on board the Skylab three space Station eight modified versions of space food sticks to test their quote gastroine testine capability, but they were generally an Earth based product. But the packages were almost identical with the long, slender ones that we know today as Starburst, which was likely not an accident because again, this candy has its roots in the space race. Now, the original opal Fruit flavors that were launched in the UK included strawberry, lemon, orange, and lime, but the lime was later replaced with cherry in the early eighties, which on one hand I find kind of weird because there's cherry and strawberry. But everyone knows that the reds are the best and the pink is the best of the two, including the folks at Mars.

01:28:35
Speaker 1: They know this.

01:28:35
Speaker 2: That's why they released all pink packages of Starbursts.

01:28:39
Speaker 3: I still just can't get over the phrase non frozen balanced energy snack in rawed form. I got one of those for you, buddy later. You play your cards right, freestied ice cream, though whips ah, sure we'd ever missed to discuss Starbust without mentioning the berries and cream guy. This TikTok phenomenon began life as a two thousand and seven commercial for Star Wars to launch their berries and cream flavor, and starred actor Jack Fervor as a little lad with a bowl haircut and Nickers, who performs as little jig with jazz hands about how he much he loves berries and cream. It's completely nonsensical and unhinged, but became extremely popular due to its randomness and when TikTok blew up. The audio was posted to the platform by podcaster and former video games journalist Justin McElroy, who captioned the video, please make great art with this sound. It's what we all need.

01:29:34
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with it? That's what people did. I don't remember.

01:29:36
Speaker 3: I remember the original commercial because I'm old, but I don't remember blowing up on TikTok.

01:29:40
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I know, I got huge. Yeah, all right. Well.

01:29:44
Speaker 3: There's a YouTube tutorial that dates back to the commercial's debut in two thousand and seven, which involves running in place, clapping your hands, tapping your left hand to your right heel and your right hand to your left heel and gesturating to yourself.

01:29:54
Speaker 1: Got that savvy.

01:29:58
Speaker 2: So from fruity taffy of starburst, we go to something even softer, gummy bears. Before we delve into the creation of gummy bears, we should touch on the origin of gummies or jelly candies.

01:30:11
Speaker 1: These were first made with flour.

01:30:13
Speaker 2: Or starch and had a softer, more bouncy texture, and initially they used boiled down grape juice in lieu of sugar, and the most famous example of this is likely Turkish delights or locum in the original Turkish, which has been around for centuries. A confectioner named Hachi bakirra Fendi opened the candy shop and what is now Istanbul in seventeen seventy seven to sell Turkish delights, and today the store, which is still in his family, is the oldest business in Turkey and according to the BBC, one of the one hundred oldest still operating businesses on Earth. Turkishtoyes became popular all over the globe, but Europeans, for whatever reason, had a difficult time making these candies with starch, so instead, by the late nineteenth century, they had turned to gelatin, which is in canney making so generally regarded as cheating. In nineteen oh nine, the British candymaker Charles Gordon Maynard debuted wine gums, which is one of the first commercially successful suitets made with gelatin. These candies don't contain actual wine, though Maynard got into fights about this with this teetotaler dad. But they did combine chewy gelatin with sweet flavoring, and they still exist today. You can find them in the import aisle at your local supermarket usually. So we got little gummy coins, these wine gums. Where are the damn whimsical animals? Enter Hans Regal, a whimsical name if I've ever heard one, who left his job at a German candy factory in nineteen twenty to start his own Horribou. The name is a portmanteau of his first name, Hans, his last name Regal, and the hometown of Bond, Germany, ha Rebo. Harribou's first products were colorless hard candies that Regal made in a copper pot at home and sold at local street fit. This met with middling success, but in nineteen twenty two.

01:32:03
Speaker 1: He had a new brain wave.

01:32:05
Speaker 2: Why not model these fruit flavored bits of gelatin into bears? That was sure to make his candy stand out? And you know, it was just crazy.

01:32:13
Speaker 1: Enough to work, So he unveiled Harrabo's signature.

01:32:16
Speaker 2: Product, the gold Bears, or Dancing Bears, as they are originally known. They've actually never been branded as gummy bears, only gummy candy, as the package says now Zoolander voice.

01:32:27
Speaker 1: But why bears? That is the big question.

01:32:32
Speaker 2: The bears were homage to the festivals in Germany that featured dancing bears. And dancing bears, for those who don't know, is a tradition that goes back centuries, apparently to the Middle Ages, and like most antiquated traditions that go back to the Middle Ages, it's fairly inhumane. Bears were poached from the wildest cubs and taught to dance by being forced to stand on metal plates over fire while music played, and as the plates heated up, the bears would hot from foot to foot to relieve the searing pain. After a time, a sort of Pavlovian effect would take over and these bears would begin to hop or dance at the sound of music being played because they associated it with pain.

01:33:14
Speaker 1: Heigel, don't you associate music with pain?

01:33:17
Speaker 3: Yes, but that's only because I've been doing it so long. Despite this horrific conditioning, Oh you got no nothing, I got nothing. That's so fucking grim.

01:33:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. Isn't that what they used to do with Britney spears?

01:33:30
Speaker 2: Oh, Michael Jackson, seriously, Yeah, Despite this horrific conditioning, dancing bears were a beloved part of German festivals until well into the twentieth century, which is what led Hans Regal to base his gummies on that shape. But to remove that horrible image of your mind, I want to present you with this wholesome fact. Every October since the nineteen thirties, little kids have been invited to visit the Horribor headquarters trade in acorns and chestnuts for free gummy treats.

01:34:03
Speaker 1: Does that make it a little better? No, No, it does not.

01:34:10
Speaker 3: By the nineteen sixties, these dancing bears or tanzbarn A the last thing many an American gi saw before dying, face down in the mud, squad of tans baron coming for him or a man our boys. We lost a lot of good boys to the tans barons. We're a mainstay of German candy stores and how did you sit one up me with that line without even knowing what I was going to go?

01:34:43
Speaker 1: Riff on? Yeah, you you're going to riff on.

01:34:48
Speaker 3: Like so many Germans before them, Harry Bow sought to expand their reach a gummy libens realm if you will, to prepare to expand into an international market. They changed the look of the Bears for more slender and naturalistic, to delightfully chubbier, teddy bear like figures with piercing blue eyes blonde hair. In nineteen sixty seven, they also expanded their flavor palette from just gold, which was all that they made for fifty years, to the multicolored pack we're familiar with today, featuring strawberry, lemon, orange, pineapple. After slowly expanding across Europe, harrybo brought Gummy Bears to the United States in nineteen eighty two, a year after the American company Trolley introduced to gummy worms to kids, and before long the gummy craze had begun. The Gummy Bears arrival was heralded, not unlike the Beatles in nineteen sixty four, with a major television debut, Disney made their first animated TV show based on the candy, an idea that came to Disney CEO Michael Eisner one day when his son requested a gummy bear. Disney's Adventures of the Gummy Bears aired from nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety one on NBC. And this show does not exist.

01:35:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have no memory. Did you know of this?

01:35:56
Speaker 3: Nope, not a real thing. Do they get eaten? What are they trying to battle?

01:36:01
Speaker 1: It's like care bears.

01:36:02
Speaker 2: I mean it kind of looks like if I recall yeah from what I Oh. No, They're not like care bears at all. I have no idea because there's nothing about them seems especially gummy either. They just seem like bears.

01:36:13
Speaker 1: We should have given the worms.

01:36:15
Speaker 3: They're a special oh man, just a bunch of worms, animated worms, just running around, causing getting into high jinks. Yeah, there's nothing about them. There's no candy involved in this show, which offends me deeply. It marked the end of Disney's policy of staying out of animated television, which is funny. This was the shot across the bow their annexation of Poland.

01:36:41
Speaker 1: If you will so in a.

01:36:42
Speaker 3: Sense, the adventures of the Gummy Bears paved the way for Darkwing Duck Duck tails Chipendale Rescue Rangers, goof Troop Tailspin. There's been an astonishing assortment of shapes and flavors of gummy goodness over the years. Your personal favorite is a limited edition produced in Germany known as our meek Odin, which translates to a German insult meaning ass with ears. Sure, sure, yeah, they're the scat.

01:37:12
Speaker 2: Porn people though, right, oh wow, yeah, do yourself a favor in Google.

01:37:18
Speaker 1: Don't? No, you should, you should right now? What is it as a racist cartoon?

01:37:22
Speaker 3: No, it's just it's exactly what I don't it's it's the arrested development bit.

01:37:27
Speaker 1: I don't know what I expected.

01:37:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, huh think about that's like.

01:37:33
Speaker 1: The most offensive to me is that the ears are so red. Uh.

01:37:39
Speaker 3: There was another version of gummies by trolleys called Roadkill, which were shaped like flat animals with tire marks across them. Ultimately, the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals complained that it would encourage children to be cruel to animals like.

01:37:53
Speaker 1: Jersey's The one who stepped up to the play for that. Yeah right.

01:37:58
Speaker 3: There's a restaurant in Japan that offers Sstomer's life sized gummy models of themselves, which.

01:38:04
Speaker 1: I would I would do?

01:38:06
Speaker 3: Can you pick the year? Can I pick my my younger self, my more spelt self. I'd like to have my stick thin twenty seventeen version immortalized in in in gumming gelatine. And then I put it, I put it in my I put it in my attic, and then for every sin of hedonism and gluttony, I gets slowly ravaged gummy portrait of Alex Hegel. There's an interesting phenomenon to play when it comes to the flavors of the Harry Bow Bears, the Tansen Baten.

01:38:42
Speaker 1: File, Tansen Baden.

01:38:45
Speaker 3: Ah. The flavors don't always match it what we think of the colors. Some people have report that hairbos green Bear tastes like apple or watermelon when it's actually strawberry flavored, and this is due to the fact that our brains are extremely suggestible. Just seeing the color yellow is enough to convince us that what we're tasting is lemon, even if we're eating something that's been flavored with a different fruit. This effect was demonstrated and experiment of the influence of food coloring on taste perception. Researchers had college students sample clear fruit flavored beverages that had been dyed random colors. Even when the experimenters asked their subjects to ignore the color of what they were drinking, they still reported tasting flavors that were merely suggested by the food dye. So while Harry Bow claims to use unique flavorings for each gummy bear colors, they might be damn liars.

01:39:35
Speaker 2: Speaking of unusual gummy flavors, this brings us to Swedish fish.

01:39:39
Speaker 1: I like Swedish fish.

01:39:40
Speaker 2: What do you think The fact that figure ship like fish kind of throws me though. I don't like the idea of like small and goldfish or something, and I can't deal with that.

01:39:48
Speaker 1: Fish freaked me out, though, okay noted. Oh I told you why.

01:39:53
Speaker 2: I lived on a lake, and when I was a kid, the neighbors would take dead fish on rakes and like fling them at me.

01:40:01
Speaker 1: I will tell you this. Oh yeah, that's what a bizarre life you've led.

01:40:08
Speaker 3: Sometimes I just think about what it's like deep in the cages of your subconscious.

01:40:13
Speaker 2: Yeah now here, I am half till midnight talking about Swedish fish. Swedish fish, as you may have imagined, have their origins in Sweden. They're created in the nineteen fifties by the Malaco Company, who were attempting to expand into the US market, and they opted to shape their gummy product like fish because that was one of the Sweden's largest exports at the time, and they figured Americans would associate Sweden with fish. By the nineteen sixties, their multi flavored variety bag began to take off, and soon it was an international hit. Swedish fish do exist in Sweden, but the candies are a little different than their American counterparts.

01:40:49
Speaker 1: For starters, they're called pastagisis.

01:40:53
Speaker 2: Pasteifiscod it translates to pale colored fish, and instead of the words Swedish printed on the side like in the US, the Swedish candies have the brand Malaco printed on the side. But in the US, the flavor that's most famous is the og red version of Swedish fish, which you'd be forgiven for calling cherry. In fact, there's quite a bit of debate over what the flavor of the red Swedish fish is supposed to actually be. Many people think it's meant to taste like cherry, other strawberries, some say raspberry or even fruit punch. And there are others who think that the red Swedish fish are meant to taste like lingenberry, which is a berry native to Scandinavia. To date, the manufacturers have never issued a statement on what the flavor is actually meant to be. I'm going to go out on lemon say it's lingenberry.

01:41:40
Speaker 3: Might be hard pressed to describe what a lingenberry tastes like or even looks like.

01:41:44
Speaker 1: Could be anything. I could have had one this morning, It.

01:41:46
Speaker 2: Could be anywhere, could be right behind you. I mean, that's what because it's like, I know what all those other things taste like, and Swedish fish doesn't taste like that.

01:41:54
Speaker 1: So that's kind of why I'm thinking lingenberry.

01:41:56
Speaker 2: And if they were leaning so hard into like the Sweden national identity to be like oh yeah, like X, fish is our biggest export, so it's like let's make it ship like fish, they would probably want something that's you know, uniquely their culture, like this berry.

01:42:09
Speaker 1: So myth busted.

01:42:11
Speaker 2: I'm gonna call that one and now a candy that kind of gets a bad rap because I never think about it, but whenever I have it, I enjoy it. Milk Duds a lot of people handing, even more than tutsi rolls. In a recent poll, they were voted the worst Halloween chocolate, with a healthy twenty six percent of the vote. I would say that the name milk Duds doesn't do it any favor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean milk eat this suck bar. What do you call your candy duds? It's like I was reading about Howland Wolf the other night. They had like a Howland Wolf album that they cover Leonard Chess's genius Masterstroke. This in the sixties or like late sixties when they were trying to make all those og blues guys like psychedelic, and they were like, uh, like electric mud is the famous Muddy Waters one. And they did one for Holland Wolf and the album cover was just white and then black text that said this is Holland Wolf's new album.

01:43:11
Speaker 1: He doesn't like it. He didn't like his electric guitar at first the right.

01:43:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then Leonard Chess was conceded that later it may not have been a genius marketing move to put that the artist did not like.

01:43:24
Speaker 1: The album on his album.

01:43:26
Speaker 3: Really, Oh, I thought it, like is generally agree that that was like a good idea.

01:43:31
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. I don't think you well go ahead, But.

01:43:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, milk Dud's the name they got. They got some blowback from that. A former executive at the Holloway candy co admitted to the Chicago Tribune that they quote got some flak about the name, but it was supposed to be duds as in fancy duds, not duds as in non winners. But the creator's own son would later say nobody liked it. Everybody thought it would be a loser. So I guess the creator of milk does, Edwin Holloway, He was trying to make chocolate covered caramels into little perfect spheres, and instead he got what we now know as milk does these little shriveled bits of chocolate like almost like a rock like shape.

01:44:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, colored duds.

01:44:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it was apparently the truth of where that name came from, and I think it was just an unflattering nickname that's stuck. And then they tried to spin it unsuccessfully. However, the candies big break came amid the Great Depression. Milk Duds thrive during this time of economic crisis due to poor relationship dynamics.

01:44:42
Speaker 1: I guess.

01:44:44
Speaker 2: The afore mentioned milk Dougs executive explained to the Chicago Tribune, I don't know why the Chicago Tribune was doing such an extensive expos.

01:44:52
Speaker 1: On milk duds.

01:44:53
Speaker 2: He said, a lot of men were out of work during the Great Depression. Rather than go home and hear the wife complain about being unemployed, a lot of men would go to a movie for a nickel, and for another nickel that could buy a box of milk Duds and that would take care of them for a couple hours. A theater business was the backbone of the company.

01:45:11
Speaker 1: That is true.

01:45:11
Speaker 2: I feel like I've never seen anyone eat milk duds outside of a theater. So that's all very surprising to me, and to me, so is its association with Major League Baseball. In the early seventies, milk Duds made a major play to be associated with the sport, presumably because of some sort of blood feud with the Cracker Jacks. In nineteen seventy one, they were named the official candy of the Major League Baseball Players Association, and the back of the boxes were decorated with pictures of then famous Major League Baseball players as sort of milk Dud centric versions of collectible baseball cards, which I think are relatively sought after these days as collectibles. And speaking of both baseball and chocolate candies, that no one in twenty twenty three actually seems to.

01:45:56
Speaker 1: Like Baby Ruth.

01:45:58
Speaker 2: The one fact that everyone knows, or at least things they know about this candy bars that it was named in honor of Babe Ruth. That is sort of true, but the real story is a little less cut and dry. In nineteen twenty one, the Curtis Candy Company re christened their candy cake bars as Baby Ruth. At this time, Babe Ruth, the baseball player star was on the ascent, but the company would officially claim that they got the name from former President Grover Cleveland's daughter, who had died tragically at age twelve. This is a sweet story, but it sort of falls apart when you realize that Grover Cleveland had been out of the White House for twenty four years and his daughter, Ruth had been dead for seventeen years. So this is like, I don't know, naming a candy bar after Chelsea Clinton. If Chelsea Clinton had died a tragic premature death in the nineties, like that would be the Equally, it's a weird marketing move. So my theory is that this candy company had tried and failed to get into horsemen deal with Babe Ruth himself, and when that failed, they kept the tie in without paying royalties and made up a sob story that would make anyone who pursued them legally look like a real jerk. That's like that, That's plausible, That's my theory. Hilariously, they wound up in court anyway. George Hermann Ruth Babe Ruth decided to create his own candy bar, and the Baby Ruth Company had the goal to sue him for copyright infringement due to the similarity of the name, despite the fact that it was his own name. Shockingly, the court ruled in favor of the Curtis Candy Company, the makers of Baby Ruth, and Babe Ruth never got to produce his own candy bar, which is a damn shame. The Curtis Candy Company then proceeded to basically mock Babe Ruth in their advertising campaign for years. Not only did the company put up a billboard near where Babe Ruth's World Series ball landed, but they also continued to sponsor baseball teams for years, notably the Chicago Cubs.

01:48:01
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven.

01:48:03
Speaker 2: A more unique ad campaign took place in nineteen twenty three, two years after the Baby Ruth candy bar was launched, The Curtis Candy Company hired a plane to drop thousands of individual Baby Ruth bars over Pittsburgh, each tied to a mini parachute, and the plant was so successful that they repeated it in several other cities in forty states.

01:48:26
Speaker 1: It's raining.

01:48:28
Speaker 2: Arguably Baby Ruth's greatest culinary legacy is the fact that they were one of the first brands, in fact, I think the first brand to make a miniature version of itself.

01:48:38
Speaker 1: They debuted the junior version of Baby Ruth Chocolates in nineteen thirty two, predating the fun sized versions of Snickers and Milky Way by I think thirty five years. But for my money, Baby Ruth's biggest influence is on the big screen. Not only was the candy bar featured to my beloved eighties classic The Goonies, but it also made a truly iconic show going in nineteen eighties Caddy shack in the infamous floater scene. Need we provide a recap?

01:49:08
Speaker 2: No?

01:49:08
Speaker 1: You know, somebody throws it in the pool and everybody thinks it's no. I said, we don't have to do that, not a candy bar, okay.

01:49:15
Speaker 3: The movie was co written by Brian Doyle Murray, Bill Murray's brother and partially inspired by his memory working as a caddy at the Indian Hill Club in when Necka, Illinois, and there were some who have claimed that the Baby Ruth prank in the pool was inspired by a.

01:49:29
Speaker 2: Real event at the Murray's high school. To my immense regret, however, I must share that this scene is not technically accurate. Since Baby Ruth bars are unable to float in water. The scene is essentially the anti product placement, considering the product is being linked to human fecal matter. As a result, the candy bar has been somewhat stigmatized, and I have to admit I kind of fall for this as well.

01:49:57
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of Baby Ruth, and.

01:49:59
Speaker 3: It's probably because of memories of either sloth eating it.

01:50:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, watching him eat it did a lot to sweep me from wanting to do it. Yeah, we haven't done sours You what do you, Jordan?

01:50:15
Speaker 3: What do you?

01:50:16
Speaker 1: But what do you make them? To the sour candy variety?

01:50:21
Speaker 2: I mean, I are I feel like they're always made as like the second string version of you know, like sour Skills for example. I feel like there's very few than candy brands that are loud and proud.

01:50:35
Speaker 3: We are a sour candy. Oh, I'm so glad you said that. Because Sour Patch Kids began life in Canada as mars Men, which was intended to capitalize on the UFO craze sweeping the countries, sweeping the continent, Sweeping the continent, sweep the glow, sweeping the globe.

01:50:54
Speaker 1: Baby.

01:50:55
Speaker 3: By the time the company sought to expand into the United States in nineteen eighty five, they decided to hop on a new bandwagon, Cabbage Patch Kids. They rebranded themselves based on the famous toy, and shockingly, no intellectual property suit was filed when these men became boys. There's not a ton that's interesting about Sara Patch Kids, but they did take on an interesting marketing tag back in twenty fifteen, when they leased a house in Austin, Texas to use as a crash pad for traveling bands. They supposedly also got a place in Brooklyn too. I don't know that any of our friends ever stay there.

01:51:27
Speaker 1: I've never heard of it.

01:51:29
Speaker 3: Dubbed the Patch, bands were allowed to stay for free as they passed through town exchange for instagramming pictures of the house along with the appropriate sour Patch Kids hashtags. Presumably in addition to destroying the social media integrity of said bands, the arrangement also managed to piss off the neighbors. According to Austin Culture, several neighbors complained about the noise coming from the patch house and the disruption it caused to the community. One local threatened legal action, arguing that in the East Austin area, per the current short term rental ordinance, you're required to pay city and state hotel taxes for any rentals less than thirty days. If there's one thing that's scarier, though, than real estate legal squabbles, it's candy laced with drugs. According to WFLA, in twenty fifteen, officials found a synthetic drug called flakka similar to bath salts in a candy that looked suspiciously like sour Patch Kids, likely an intentional move to persuade young people to try the candy, get hooked on the drug, and come back for more. So I don't know, don't pick up stray sour Patch kids you find on the ground. Isn't the whole thing about drugs in Holling candy? Like a complete statistical like nothing burger like that's never once ever actually happened. I thought I saw that it did a few times, but not often enough to warrant the terror you see Washington Post the history of the drug laced candy myth. Oh well, I guess it has to do with trafficking. I mean, for example, there was at Lax the Sheriff's Department seized twelve thousand presumed fentanyl pills last year that had been stashed inside Skittles, Whoppers and Sweet Tarts boxes and bags. So that's it. But I don't think people. I mean, the general diffusion of this idea is that people who sell drugs generally want to make a profit, not give free drugs to children. It's a bad business move. At the end of the day to kill your customers. Yeah, yeah, oh, I think it dates back to the tailenl killings in nineteen eighty two, seven people died when somebody had gone and tampered with tynyl bottles and laced them with cyanide. But Joel best At, professor of sociology at Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware, told NPR just this year that I have data going back to nineteen fifty eight and I have yet to find a report of a child that's been killed or seriously hurt by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick or treating. He did find one case in of a man in Texas murdering his own son with poisoned candy Jesus Christ. But I guess so, yeah, I don't know. All right, that's great.

01:54:09
Speaker 1: What are you talking about.

01:54:10
Speaker 3: Well, we've come to the Crown Jewel in the Candy Crown, it's.

01:54:20
Speaker 1: Running on empty. Allow myself to introduce myself.

01:54:30
Speaker 2: We have come, of course, to Reese's Peanut Butter Club, which is I like it. I don't subscribe to the cult that's around it, but I appreciate that a lot of people do.

01:54:42
Speaker 1: It's created by HB.

01:54:43
Speaker 2: Reese, who was a four minute the Hershey Company's milk operation known as the Round Barn way back in the nineteen tens. When a Round Barn closed, he decided to branch out and start his own candy company, which would later be bought and distributed by hers She's again So Rise Sunsets. According to the Hershey Community Archives, Reese's earlier chocolates were named after his children. They were called things like the Lizzie Bar, which is a chocolate covered caramel and shaved coconut candy bar, and the Johnny Bar, which is a molasses bar. Ooh, Johnny got screwed in that one. No, it's from Johnny Cakes. Still crappy dessert. Lizzy got the better one, okay. But it was Reese's invention of a chocolate peanut butter cup in nineteen twenty eight that made him an icon, and he named those after himself. Actually, they were originally known as penny cups because they sold for a penny.

01:55:38
Speaker 1: As the name was.

01:55:38
Speaker 2: Suggest they weren't even available for purchase individually, but were included in five pound bags of candy that were sold to stores in bulk that were just on a sort of variety pack. Reese began selling the cups as a free standing item at some point around nineteen thirty five, and by some estimates, Reese's cups earned the number one spot among Holler Alloween candy brands year after year after year. In fact, Hershey sells more than five hundred million dollars worth of Riese's annually, and it's a pretty sweet success story, considering that Riese's first attempt at a chocolate brand went bust after the public didn't take kindly to his chocolate covered raisins and nuts. One of the factors that aided in the success of peanut butter cups was actually World War Two. As we mentioned it several points during this episode. Both sugar and chocolate were rationed during the war, which made it tough for candy companies to keep up with demands for sweets, but peanut butter was never rationed, which meant that Reese's could continue manufacturing of these cups relatively unimpeded. And from World War two we go to Japan. Did you know, Heigel that for nearly ninety years, the only place you could get Riese's peanut butter cups in Japan was on American Army basis.

01:56:50
Speaker 3: I sure didn't.

01:56:52
Speaker 2: Apparently that's because there's a preservative that isn't allowed in Japan that we used to make them, of course, all over the stuff that we make, that's in everything. That's like other countries are like, no, you can't. But most recently, Walmart branches in Japan, which is something that I really want to google and see a picture of because those things just so don't go together in my mind, began to stock Reese's Peanut butter cups because it's Walmart. And in nineteen seventy eight, as Reese's Brands celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their flagship product, the peanut butter Cup, they introduced Reese's Pieces. This is where we insert the et anecdote, which we've already touched on. We didn't need to get in that again. Now we're about the head of an Odds and Ends segment. But some of you may be wondering why we haven't really mentioned Eminem's much on this episode. I have a funny feeling that Eminem's could potentially be its own standalone at some point later on, so shave that for later.

01:57:54
Speaker 1: Chalky disgusting. Who pines for M and m's really not even not even the peanut ones.

01:58:01
Speaker 3: I'll give you the peanut ones, but that's because it's mostly peanut.

01:58:04
Speaker 1: Actually, I like the almond ones. The almond ones are good.

01:58:08
Speaker 3: This is how I know your associopath. Almond EM and m's. Yeah, that's just Jordan almonds. Well, first of all, why wouldn't I like Jordan almonds? Second of all, no, Jordan amos doesn't doesn't have chocolate in them. It's just like sugary mm hmmmmmm.

01:58:30
Speaker 1: You know it would be really good. MS cash you eminem's.

01:58:33
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, now you're talking right now, Come on and see we're spitballing here. Regular eminems aren't bad though, Yeah, they are not good. Why would you do that?

01:58:44
Speaker 1: Did you ever go the M and M store?

01:58:48
Speaker 3: Yes, Jordan, I went to No I think think I've ever been doing. Times Square is the world's largest Applebee's.

01:58:57
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, didn't you write You wrote a story on that.

01:59:00
Speaker 3: I never saw an editor. I just published it right to the back end.

01:59:04
Speaker 1: Wasn't it on Thanksgiving? The day before Thanksgiving? Because that's the biggest bar night of the year.

01:59:09
Speaker 2: What was Applebee's in Times square, like on the night before Thanksgiving. I should probably read the piece, but I know I did at one point, but yeah.

01:59:17
Speaker 1: That was it.

01:59:17
Speaker 3: I was just saying, I'll go to the world's largest Applebee's on the day before Thanksgiving, which is the biggest bar day of the year. That's it was this like a we tried it. Uh, maybe I don't really remember. You know, I was drinking a lot.

01:59:30
Speaker 2: All right, So we've reached our odds and ends section of this episode. Why is bubblegum pink? The short answer, it was an accident. The recipe was created by an accountant named Walter E. Dimer who worked at the Fleer Company in nineteen twenty eight. According to gumball dot com, Deemer was playing with the recipe of this gum to make it less sticky. When it came time to add food coloring, pink was the only color he had. Oh yeah, everyone knows that life savers look like a life saver as an a flotation device. There's a popular rumor that life savers as a hole in the middle as a method to prevent choking, thus making it upon in multiple ways, but that is just an urban legend and truth. The whole is simply there because it's easier to manufacture. I researched Almond Joys for this episode. There was nothing interesting about them, but I would like to add that an early version of the Almond Brothers band was known as the Almond Joys, which is medium funny. Yeah, oh, Pez, we got to talk about PEZ. PEZ is getting harder and harder to find it. I've discovered it was invented in nineteen twenty seven. Is a breath mint for smokers. The name Pez refers to feffer Mint's means is the German word. Yeah, it's the German word for peppermint. And the first PEZ dispensers were called box Regulars were shaped like cigarette lighters and came with notes encouraging smokers to quit, and the FlipTop was designed for people to only need one hand in case they were driving. It wasn't until the fifties that PEZ, who were eager to expand into the US markets, came out with fruity flavors and dispensers that were targeted to kids.

02:01:10
Speaker 1: Oh, here I go. You like liquor? Is you did this next one? No?

02:01:12
Speaker 3: No, no, I'm gonna I want to get something out of the way.

02:01:14
Speaker 1: First. Okay, I'll read the next one. We'll come back to that one.

02:01:18
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, you stop. Do you know what the most expensive Pez dispenser is in history?

02:01:26
Speaker 1: That's a great question. Is it electric? Now? Guess? Is it old? Yes? I don't know.

02:01:37
Speaker 3: It was sold for thirteen thousand dollars. It was a custom made red democratic donkey Pez dispenser created as a gift for John F. Kennedy, presented to him in Vienna, Austria in nineteen sixty one. After the trip, the Secret Service ordered the return of the Pez dispensers to the company, presumably for safety reasons, and the Pez management gave one away as a gift, which is the one that went to auction. I kept the other two in storage. One of them has never been sold and remains on display in the Pez corporate offices. The second most expensive one was a foghorn leghorn one why, sold for just over seven thousand dollars.

02:02:26
Speaker 1: Why? Wow? Good? Fine? Yeah, there you go.

02:02:30
Speaker 2: The three Musketeers bars we haven't touched on that in this episode. They were so called originally because the package originally contained three small candy bars in a single package, and each was a different flavored nugat. There was a chocolate nugat, vanilla nugat, and strawberry nugat.

02:02:46
Speaker 1: However, when sugar was being.

02:02:47
Speaker 2: Rationed duror of World War Two, the company decided to narrow it down to just a single chocolate flavor, which was found to be the most popular, and that's how it remains to this day. Nugat was often chosen to be used in candy bars at the turn of the century due to his similarity and consistency and flavored to ice cream. It was common and popular to freeze nougat based candy bars in order to mimic ice cream when eaten. I've seen that on multiple websites, and everybody says it tastes very very good. Nugat feels like a slur, maybe because we're both Italian and yeah nugat, yeah, yeah, Hey.

02:03:26
Speaker 1: You gotta do the Twizzers one, I know you like Twizzers. Each year, about one million miles of Twizzlers are produced, the equivalent of seventy six times the length of the Great Wall of China. And you actually do the math on that.

02:03:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't realize that the Great Wall of China was thirteen thousand miles long big wall.

02:03:46
Speaker 1: Man. Yeah, I don't know.

02:03:49
Speaker 2: Somehow a million miles sounds more impressive than seventy six Great Walls of China, though, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. Oh, we got a Simpsons one on here you go do the Simpsons.

02:03:58
Speaker 3: Butterfingers were actually the follow up to Baby Ruth Bars. Their commercials in nineteen eighty eight featured an early version of The Simpsons. Prior to the premiere of their own show on Fox, they were already unknown quantity for their shorts on The Tracy Omens Show Nobody better layer finger on my butterfinger.

02:04:15
Speaker 1: I love butterfingers.

02:04:17
Speaker 3: They will fillings though, yeah, oh your fillings why oh, because like when you actually bite into them, that peanut combination stuff really just lodges in there.

02:04:28
Speaker 1: But man, yeah, I love a butterfinger. Oh.

02:04:30
Speaker 2: This next one's got a Titanic fact in it, so I gotta take this one.

02:04:32
Speaker 1: Please.

02:04:33
Speaker 2: Hershey's Kisses were produced in nineteen oh seven, and Milton Hershey apparently never explained why he chose to give it that name to me. Maybe I'm just so used to it. I just thought it made total sense. It looks like a little keep its bow.

02:04:48
Speaker 1: I don't know.

02:04:49
Speaker 2: It just seems to work, but apparently it's a big mystery and was a closely guarded secret that he took to his grave. But a popular theory as to why they're called kisses is because it was the sounds motion of the chocolate being deposited during manufacturing onto the tray.

02:05:05
Speaker 1: So I don't know, there you go.

02:05:07
Speaker 2: But more relevant to my interests, Milton Hershey has a Titanic connection. He and his wife Kitty had a deposit down for a room on the Titanic for its one and only voyage from Southampton to New York in nineteen twelve, and they ended up skipping the sailing, although the reasons are unclear. I've heard that either Kitty was sick or Milton had business that meant he had to travel back to America earlier than expected. I think the latter is probably the accurate version, because the story goes they took a German ship called the America, who actually was traveling in front of the Titanic and sent the ship ice warnings because they said, you know, going through ice fields right now, slow down, which was a warning the Titanic did not heed.

02:05:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually find her.

02:05:52
Speaker 3: She's really interesting, not just because I grew up outside of it, and most of my family worked there in.

02:05:57
Speaker 1: One capacitator to that.

02:05:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, my cousin worked at the part, my sister was a lifeguard at the hotel pool, I worked in the country club kitchen all at various times. And Hershey's the reason that the chocolate is not good is because his big gambit with this, uh was he originally wanted to make caramel, and caramel's much trickier to work with. So he attended the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which is like, you know, the big World's fair thing, and so he gave up on caramel, returned to the Lancaster founded of the Hershey Company in eighteen ninety four, and basically his strategy was to buy cheaper beans and roast them longer to you know, mask the fact that they were cheap, and this produces the quintessential Hershey's taste, which people have described as chalk like, but you know, it's it's it's He was doing it with a stated goal of democratizing it because it was such a luxury item at the time. It was just absolutely not affordable for you know, common folk and using fresh milk and doing cheaper other raw ingredients. UH made it, you know, really affordable. And I don't know, something about that is still really uh weirdly admirable for me. You know, I don't really I don't. I have like no other dog in this fight. I don't give a shit about Hershey or Pennsylvania.

02:07:34
Speaker 2: But you know that's not what you said during our episode of Food Court when we debated the merits of milk versus dark chocolate.

02:07:40
Speaker 3: That's true, of death, that's true, but you you kind of sprung that one on me.

02:07:46
Speaker 2: On you.

02:07:46
Speaker 3: I didn't really I thought that was going to be like an actual debate, and I woke up at like six a m. To tape that and it was like you had like a written oral argument out and I winged that whole thing off the top of my dome.

02:07:59
Speaker 1: Is it really? Yeah? Your research, I don't know. I feel like your research was better than mine.

02:08:05
Speaker 3: I was googling that live. That was very impressed. I brought the passion though you did.

02:08:13
Speaker 2: I did get angrier than you, which was so pretended to get angry.

02:08:20
Speaker 1: I get actually angry. No, I know.

02:08:24
Speaker 2: Anyway, unlike people in England, the candy loyalists who were pissed off who took to when the fruits were turned in the Star Wars. I'm fascinated by the different names in England for the same candy. We've talked about how the Snickers were Marathon in the UK, Star Wars were Opal fruits, Twigs were Raider bars, and the UK version of Mars bars are basically an American milky Way, and there's also a European version of the Milky Way, which is basically a Three Musketeers bar. And rather than mounds, the coconut dark chocolate candy bar I think it's dark chocolate.

02:08:58
Speaker 1: Uh.

02:08:59
Speaker 2: Stores and can to Australia and the UK sell coconut bars called bounty.

02:09:04
Speaker 1: So there you go. Which six son of a bitch out there actually likes mounds over all my joy?

02:09:10
Speaker 2: I like all my joy, but given the choice, yeah, it's like, why would you not just have the almond or do you hate them both?

02:09:17
Speaker 1: I just don't like coconut. Oh oh yeah.

02:09:21
Speaker 2: And we're going to end where we came in from candy corn to another ancient candy that no one likes but is still inexplicably produced. I'm talking, of course about Neco wafers. They've used the same recipe since eighteen forty seven, the same flavors orange lime, clove, chocolate, cinnamon, licorice, and winter green at one point, so weird, no, I know, I know. At one point they attempted to change the ingredients, but this sparked outrage among their dedicated fans. And you know what, I think that a lot of people taking a gross candy way too seriously A perfect note to end on me too.

02:10:02
Speaker 1: I think we've did it. We did it.

02:10:04
Speaker 3: We have tasted the rainbow twenty one pages of candy. You son of a you six son of a bitch, You've did it.

02:10:13
Speaker 1: Well.

02:10:13
Speaker 2: My sugar rush has worn off and I am crashing its past one in the morning.

02:10:19
Speaker 1: My time.

02:10:20
Speaker 2: Well, Ohio, thank you for bearing with me on this. You can you can have the most gruesome horror movie of your dreams.

02:10:26
Speaker 1: For the next episode's off set.

02:10:28
Speaker 3: It's finally time for me to be fed to the Tutsi beast, and with it I leave.

02:10:34
Speaker 1: I leave.

02:10:34
Speaker 3: I leave with the traditional benediction that we give to it as it subsumes us in its tentacled mare. Roughly translated, thank you for listening folks, this has been too much information.

02:10:50
Speaker 1: I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Tag. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtogg. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

02:11:09
Speaker 3: The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtgg and Alex Heigel.

02:11:13
Speaker 2: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

02:11:17
Speaker 1: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.

02:11:19
Speaker 2: For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.