Ocean Creatures Crackers!

The real world kept me from Dino Drac for a week, and now I’m all rusty. I have longer posts waiting to be written, but today calls for something breezy and brainless.

How about cheese crackers shaped like squid?

Ocean Creatures! I found them at Dollar Tree, and was immediately enamored with the concept, the sea life shapes, and the fact that it was all promised to taste like delicious phony cheese.

They’re obviously inspired by Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, which is literally the only food on the planet that I’d be willing to eat exclusively for the rest of my life. I love those fish. Choosing between the Parmesan and Cheddar flavors is my own personal version of the Judgment of Solomon. I’m not sure what I mean by that.

There must be a hundred different Goldfish ripoffs out there, and you know they’re ripoffs, because even with the thousands of animals begging to be immortalized as fun-shaped cheese crackers, these companies always pick some kind of fish.

So why am I covering Ocean Creatures instead of some other borderline-bootlegger? Because they picked six different fish, dummy.

(Okay, three fish, a marine mammal, a cephalopod and an echinoderm. But this is a case where clarifying only makes things better.)

Guys, they’re dangerously good. I’m about to show my age here, but do any of you remember Quackers? They were variously-flavored duck shaped crackers, which ruled my world in the mid ‘80s. Here’s the commercial, if you need a refresher.

When Quackers went away, I was devastated. They were delicious, and there was nothing else on the market quite like them.

At least, not until now. These Ocean Creatures are the spiritual descendants of Quackers, with the same level of grease and crunch. Thank heavens. Now when I reminisce about the time I fed Quackers to seagulls on the Wildwood beach, it won’t be as bittersweet.

(As a kid, I thought feeding birds to birds was outrageously hysterical.)

I mentioned that they’re dangerous. THEY ARE. You won’t settle for a handful of Ocean Creatures. You just won’t. You’re going to eat Ocean Creatures until you have no more Ocean Creatures to eat. So I guess the trick is making sure that you only stock them in short supply? Otherwise you’ll eat six pounds of cheesy starfish, and unless you’re trying to reach the next boxing class, no good can come of that.

The animal shapes are fantastic. Not a dud in the whole batch.

I was most excited about the squid, because under typical circumstances, squid-shaped crackers taste like real squid. Uncultured swine that I am, I can’t say that I’ve ever been down with squid-flavored squid.

I’m also digging how they gave us two distinct types of sharks. Sure, you could argue that the second shark is a completely different fish, but if you’re that sort of dream-crusher, I must wonder why you read such a bright and happy website. I bet you used to watch Lost just so you could complain about it afterward.

I have too much loyalty to Pepperidge Farm to ever name another fish-shaped cracker “#1,” but these come super close. They’re oily cheddar fuckers that let me play Jacques Cousteau whenever I’m hungry. My French accent sounds even better when my mouth is full of crackers.