As Halloween fast approaches, one’s thoughts turn to candy…and the hope that not every house will cheap out by giving mini-boxes of Chiclets. Which makes this the perfect time to look back on the candies you probably won’t get this year, either because they were banned, resemble rotting carcasses, or could destroy your life.
Candy Cigarettes
For years, candy cigarettes were a little kid’s first step to an adult life of lung biopsies and hacking up black tar. Many of the candy cancer sticks even featured a red tip to make them look lit and were packaged to resemble actual cigarette brands with such names as “Marboro” and slogans like “Now you can look just like dad!” While some states did ban the candy, the real reason they disappeared from shelves was growing public awareness that filling your lungs with smoke was the reason people were usually pulled out of burning buildings. Although no longer as popular as they once were, candy cigarettes can still be found in some stores (stores that probably also sell toys like “Fistful of Nails” or “Only Toxic When Touched”), leading many to ask, “What’s next? A candy crack pipe?”
Lollipipe
This is that candy crack pipe. No doubt meant to be sold only to adults who apparently weren’t getting the desired results from “Skittles in Absinthe,” “Hash Twinkies,” or “Capri Sun But With Gasoline,” the fruit-flavored Lollipipes were advertised as the “100% edible actual candy pipe,” a marketing slogan that couldn’t get it pulled from store shelves faster if it featured the words “best if used while living under a highway overpass.”
Road Kill Gummis
There have been countless variations on the gummi over the years, from “gummi bears” to “gummi frogs” to even the short-lived but very long “gummi tapeworms.” But feeling all the happy, living creatures had already be turned into tasty treats, one company decided to claim new territory with their “Gummi Road Kill,” complete with shapes of run-over raccoons, cats, and possum for a candy that couldn’t be more wrong unless it was a called “Biscuit in the Shape of Your Sideswiped Mom.” Naturally, animal rights groups declared “Road Kill” was in remarkable poor taste and could encourage cruelty to animals, and so the candy was pulled before the company had a chance to roll out its next product, “gummi illegally harvested internal organs.”
Kinder Surprise
When is a potential choking hazard delicious? When it’s a chocolate egg with a tiny toy inside, apparently designed in the belief that three-year-olds always carefully inspect their candy instead of blindly shoving them down their throats seven or eight at a time. To this day the candy has never been allowed in the United States, which prohibits the sale of any confection featuring non-digestible ingredients, like metal figures or jigsaw puzzles that maybe reassemble themselves in your esophagus. In fact, in January 2011 a women was threatened with a huge fine for bringing a single Kinder egg into the U.S. from Canada, which only heightened tensions between the two warring nations and explains why both countries are stockpiling nuclear weapons on the border as we speak.
Valentine’s Candy
What harm could come from little candy hearts with such cutesy sayings as “Love You,” “Be Mine,” and the less popular “I Think We Should Just Be Friends Who Don’t Really Hang Out or Call Each Other Ever”? Well, some elementary schools have banned kids from handing out the hearts in classrooms on Valentine’s Day, believing all that sugar could make them hyper, harder to control, and almost certainly likely to get involved in whatever the third-grade equivalent is for bar fights.
Maoam Candy
And finally we come to a candy that caused a huge uproar in England not because of what it contained or resembled but because of packaging that could best be described as “hot and sweaty cherry sex.” Of course, how the picture of a lemon clearly pleasuring what appears to be a bean (who also seems to be engaged in a foot fetish with an orange) can be taken seriously (or not result in mass purchases) is anybody’s guess. But the company has refused to change their marketing tactics and so it’s probably only a matter of time before a giant banana makes its curiously delayed appearance.
What do you plan on banning the public from consuming when you're older? Let us know in the comments below!
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