Strawberried Peanut Butter M&M’s..?

Okay, this is just getting out of hand. The candy and cookie companies have given up on “good taste”. For the past decade, hey’ve been throwing every food imaginable in a blender (literally), coming up with some of the most off the wall flavor combinations. It’s always the licensed products promoting the next blockbuster that seem to get stuck with the weirdest “limited edition” treats too.

Really, was ANYONE dreaming of someday being able to crunch through a M&M candy shell and ending up with a strawberry peanut butter filling? I know I wasn’t. And what does this have to do with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? I’ll admit, I haven’t paid attention to those robots in disguise since the cartoon aired in the 80s, but am I missing something with the “strawberried” and these new M&M’s characters called “The Twins”? Where’s the connection?

Strawberry & peanut butter. How odd. I suppose someone out there eats peanut butter & strawberry jelly sandwiches and thinks this candy is a great idea, but I haven’t met a person yet who does. The strawberry taste isn’t too strong, the peanut butter overpowers it, but it’s best to just stick with regular peanut butter M&M’s. Besides, if you wanna combine FRUIT with peanut butter, why not just go for the obvious and gives “Graped Peanut Butter”? That actually sounds decent to eat, even though someone somewhere right now is thinking “Raped Peanut Butter”. Shame on you.

Oh, and yes, I shamelessly ripped this image from MMs.com but only because the pack I bought at work was torn into and pulled apart like wolves on a lamb by my co-workers. After downing the whole pack like the last drop of water in the desert, the merely conceded they were “okay”.

NBC Saturday Morning!

The Godzilla/Dynomutt Hour
The Flintstone Comedy Show
The Space Stars:
featuring Space Ghost, The Herculoids, The Jetson, Astro and the Space Dogs and Teen Force)
The Daffy Duck Show
Drawing Power

Yecch!! What an awful looking line-up. Sorry, kids, I was never a big fan of Hanna-Barbara cartoons outside of Scooby-Doo and the 1982 Christmas classic Yogi Bear’s All Star Comedy Christmas. Birdman and Space Ghost were decent, but they were just too old and campy for me to enjoy fully.

This ad is from 1980, so I’m assuming this was to promote the 1980-1981 season, though it’s very possible these shows may have aired in 1981 sometime before the 1981-1982 season kicked in. I can’t seem to find any site that confirms all of these shows airing during the same time period.

Being circa 1980, it’s a bit before my time (I wouldn’t rear my head until November 1981), so I don’t have any nostlagic ties to these shows, but hey, saturday morning cartoon ads are always fun to look at, right?

I’ve never heard of Astro and the Space Dogs (later officially called Astro and the Space Mutts) or Drawing Power though and I’m familiar with Teen Force in name only.

And yes, that is Astro, as in the Jetsons’ dog, Astro. Apparently, he fought crime throughout the cosmos… just like a Green Lantern!

FREE M&M’s Painter’s Cap

Only 10 UPC labels from bags of M&Ms and a M&Ms painter’s cap could be yours!

For a spell, painter’s caps were actually cool to be worn by people who weren’t actually painters. I had Hulk Hogan and neon green puffy paint painter’s caps myself.

Jolly Rancher Print Ad featuring the Art of Don Martin

Don Martin is one of my favorite cartoonists. He is best known for his work in MAD Magazine, where he drew strips from 1956-1987 (!!!). I know him from the great work he did after that with the MAD-imitator CRACKED Magazine (which I always preferred over MAD).

After leaving CRACKED in 1993, he released his own short-lived humor magazine, filled with MAD work that he owned the rights to. I had one or two of those issues and if I remember correctly, it had a fairly small page count and was rather pricey for that era.

As for the candy itself, Jolly Ranchers bring back great memories of going to a cool old-timey candy store that was near the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. I remember paying five cents a piece and getting my fill of those green apple “stix”. It’s a darn shame they don’t make those JR Stix anymore.

While I’m on the subject, it’s a darn shame you can’t get a full bag of green apple or even strawberry anymore and I don’t care about these Double Blasts or Sour Blasts flavors either! I want my lemon Jolly Rancher back too, not that raspberry-lemonade they’re trying to squeak by with these days.

You want to know the original Jolly Rancher flavors? Grape, lemon, watermelon, green apple, strawberry, peach, orange, and cherry. We didn’t have blue raspberry years ago and we didn’t want it in the first place!

But just like McDonald’s peppermint sundae and S’mores Crunch, I guess we’ll never see lemon Jolly Ranchers again…

Even More Examples of Bad NES Box Art

Since the first two posts were so well received, why not a third?

Castle of Deceit (1990, Bunch Games)

Such an evil looking cover that looks like an old British horror movie that you would see as the cover on one those old clam shell cases.