Thursday, January 27, 2005

Air Heads - Watermelon


Air Heads are a pretty powerful candy creation, with fans everywhere arguing in effort of defending their own individual favorite flavor, and afterwards eating a lot of taffy.  Now, as a kid I kind of missed the boat on these things.  Most of the other kids in the neighborhood were pedaling their bikes haphazardly to the local convenience store to score some more Air Heads.  I just watched the craze from afar.  When I finally succumbed, I found out that I too had particular favorites.  The “White Mystery” was really cool; I liked the taste and thought the gimmick was neat.  Now as a young adult, I think the term of “white mystery” is funny for other reasons altogether.  My other favorite was the “Blue Raspberry”, because it reminded me of the Slush Puppie drink of the same flavor.

Let’s take a look at the packaging and some other minor details.  I like the shade of green on the package, and the odd Air Heads character continues to baffle me.  I mean, it’s a big red balloon with George Foremen’s nose, people, come on!  The phrase “Out of Control” is also prevalent on the package, which stumps me to no end.  If this is taffy out of control, than what’s taffy like under control?  I like the bubble letters used in Air Head’s main logo, and the drawing of the watermelon gets no complaints from me.


OK, my first impression when revealing the taffy was that this looked like a limp sea mammal sexual organ.  Then, when I removed my mind from the proverbial gutter, another thought struck me.  Why is this candy green?  No, really, think about it for a minute.  The actual edible part of a watermelon is the juicy pink interior, not the green exterior.  This threw me for a loop.  But, I must admit, once I gave it a try I found myself pleasantly surprised.  Now, I don’t particularly like watermelons.  Yes, they taste pretty good, but they’ve always irritated me by leaving my throat feeling scratchy.  And when it comes to watermelon candy, more often than not I find that flavor to be the one I’ll usually pick over when making my selection.  I didn’t find that the watermelon Air Head had too strong of a taste, in fact, it was really sweet and reminded me of another green fruit, the delectable honeydew.  Now there’s an idea for a taffy flavor!

Overall Grade: B- 

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