08.07.05
Shigekikkusu Candy
[Editor’s note: It’s still August and we are still deep into the JSFR Guest Review Time Period, or as deep as we can be with only two installments so far. Hey! This is sort of like a game to you JSF junkies, isn’t it? You all have no idea how many Guest JSFRs are lined up for JSFR Guest Review Time Period, so it’s got a suspense thing going for it. I could slosh well over into September with the guest reviews or this could be my last one. Who knows! (actually I do but I ain’t tellin’…muahahaha!)
Today, the JSFR welcomes Badmovie to Guest Review day 2. What can I say about Badmovie that I or anyone else hasn’t already? I mean, he has a patented (or at least well known among all of us) state of mind called Badmoviespace and if you’ve ever been caught there then you know that once you come back, you’re never quite the same. Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: Not only is he one of the Smithee Supreme Committee members but I’ll bet my pinky toe that he replies, “Every time you wash your dishes” if you happen to perkily say “Good News!” at him. Try it, it’s pretty funny.
OK, without further ado and with a hammer, here’s Badmovie.
Let me start with the irrelevant part and work my way to the review. Full disclosure: I hate wasabi peas. Don’t like wasabi. Don’t like peas. Tends to bias me against them together. But I will use Boo’s ranking system because it’s well established at this point. Although know that when I say “wasabi peas,” deep down I really mean “strawberry Tohato.”
So … today I am reviewing a series of Shigekikkusu candy. Pretty much four of the same thing, except for the flavor. And the color. And the packaging. And the ingredients. But it’s all Shigekikkusu candy, distributed by True World Foods Inc.
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The ingredients of these little things are interesting. They come in four flavors (grape, super soda, super cola, and meron soda). All of them except the grape start out with these ingredients: sugar (aka sugar), fructose (aka sugar), glucose (aka sugar), liquid sugar (aka you get the idea). The grape only has sugar and glucose (of these), but also includes condensed milk powder, and spice. Why? I don’t know. It’s candy. Sugary candy. Very sugary candy. And me a diabetic.
In a way, it’s the perfect candy for a diabetic. The candies were all these hard little gum-drop things. They were so hard that chewing them was actually painful. They hurt my teeth. Not the soft underbelly of my teeth, or the part where the cavities hide, but the strong chewing surfaces of my teeth were in pain. And they’re sour. I like sour candies, but these were very sour.
They also stuck together. Probably this was my fault. I did let them sit (in the Michigan humidity) for a while before opening the packages (see picture of clustered candies). They were also particularly difficult to pry apart (see picture of hammer). Once separated from each other, they liked to stick to my fingers. And the taste stuck in my mouth. Come right down to it, I had to cleanse my palate between flavors to give them a fair taste. Speaking of the flavors … let’s get to them.
I started with meron soda (in the green & shiny packaging). It was just exactly like I had envisioned meron soda would taste. Not knowing what a “meron” is. It tasted vaguely melony, and there was a miscellaneous other fruity taste which I could not identify. And pain, which is always tastier when it’s someone else’s.
Then I moved to the red package, the super cola. You know those gummy Coke bottle candies? This tasted like those, except a lot more sour. I hate those Coke bottle candies. These hurt more when I chewed them, I think because I just wanted the flavor out of my mouth as quickly as possible, so I really chowed down hard.
Palate cleansing. A lot of palate cleansing.
The blue package was the super soda. This tasted kind of like the super cola, but with an extra flavor. A mysterious flavor similar to the mysterious fruity flavor in the meron soda. That made these distinctly better. They also hurt less, as I realized the trick was to hold the gummy concrete blobs in my mouth to let them absorb saliva and soften.
The purple package was grape flavor. These actually tasted like what I expected of a sour grape candy that required some suction to become palatable. These I might have paid for and eaten knowing in advance what they tasted like.
I give the super cola on one wasabi pea. It was pretty much yuck all the way around, although I kind of liked the boxer guy with the earring on the front. The super soda gets a pea and a quarter. The meron soda gets two peas. One point four for the flavor, and the other point six for the goofy packaging. The grape? The grape I will actually give two and a half peas to. For an absolute average of 1 and 11/16 peas. But I will charitably round this up to two because I liked the packaging, and on the weighted average, I ate far more of the grape than any other flavor.
And if the melon ass balls get a full wasabi pea, then these deserve two. Because these were far, far better.
Rating: of 2 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
