Garfield and Friends Fruit Snacks!

I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, duh. Got smacked in the face with several new gigs that required immediate attention, and will continue requiring attention over the next few weeks.

I guess this is the part where I remind everyone, but mostly myself, that Dinosaur Dracula is a hobby, and as much as I’d like to spend seven days a week babbling about Easy Cheese, it just isn’t practical. If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to afford Easy Cheese.

But, while I’ll need a day or two to get a handle on those gigs, the site won’t “pull an X-E” and grind to a screeching halt whenever I have other things to do. I’ll just need to budget my time more effectively and steer clear of, I don’t know, Bejeweled XXVIII.

Anyway, I did have a little time today, so I started digging through my Ludicrous Bins of Stuff to see what I might like to cover over the next few weeks. The first thing that grabbed me? Garfield and Friends Fruit Snacks.

You might remember ‘em from this old article, and yes, I still have them. In fact, I have more Garfield and Friends Fruit Snacks than ever. I’m quite positive that I never had this many before, and can only conclude that they’ve somehow multiplied, on their own.

I’m not complaining. The delicious bits of berry Fimo came out in the early ‘90s (the box above is from ’93), and were the absolute 100% best thing a kid could ever stuff in his or her lunchbox. These were unbelievably good.

If you’ve never tried them, I’m sure you’re assuming that they were no different from the thousand other fruit snack brands. WRONG. I can’t really pinpoint an exact reason, but between the flavor, the consistency and the fact that half of them were Odie-shaped, Garfield and Friends Fruit Snacks were narcotics-level addicting.

Thank God these arrived before serving sizes were such a hot-button issue, because nobody ate single pouches of these. You just kept going until you had no more. An hour later, you got the shakes.

Visually, they’re showing their age. Any fruit snack would after twenty years. Collectively, they’re looking a bit like Ursula’s garden of imprisoned polyps.

Also, they kind of reek. They don’t smell bad, really, but the odor is strong. Perhaps it’s a case of fruit snack pheromones, which would go a long way in explaining how mine managed to multiply. Really makes me wonder what else might be happening in those Ludicrous Bins of Stuff. I know I had a full box of Urkel-O’s in there. Do I have two now?

I totally ate some, by the way. Once I got past the mental issues involved with chewing twenty-year-old candy, they honestly weren’t bad at all. Not as good as fresh Garfield Fruit Snacks, but still better than anything I’m going to find in a supermarket today. At least, this is what I have to tell myself, otherwise I’ll feel like a real clown for having eaten food from 1993.

I’ve said it before, but I grew up in a time when kids respected Garfield. Today’s Internet lampoons him to no end, but I can’t do that. Look at what he gave us! Three great holiday specials. That killer Macy’s balloon. An awesome cartoon. Fruit snacks that still taste good after nearly two decades.

I will never, ever hate on that cat.