Hubba Bubba’s Halloween Squeeze Pops!
I’m currently working on a big ass feature. It has the potential to be great, but it also has the potential to be terrible, so I’m gonna need some time to wrap that baby up. With panic setting in over the thought of a Monday with no new content, I dived into my stock of goodies and yanked out, uh, candy slime.
I don’t know if they’re new, and I even have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve reviewed them before. Googling around the old site brings up nothing, so I will assume I’m in the clear.
New or not, Hubba Bubba’s Halloween Squeeze Pops are some of the best candies available this season, wrapping everything we love about Halloween up in a couple of extremely strange packages.
Never had a Squeeze Pop? They’re filled with what’s best described as “candy gel.” Not quite liquid, not quite solid. The goo is messy, and eating more than a drop of it will make your stomach perform the Caribbean beguine, but Halloween is the exact right time for this kind of grossness.
On the left is cherry Vampire’s Blood, fronted by a yellow-eyed vampire who totally stole my trademarked placement of mouth blood.
The only weird thing is his pendant. It isn’t the typical evil cross, or even a bat. It’s just some big, purple dot. I can understand why Hubba Bubba wanted to avoid any religious connections, but still, a purple dot? It looks like he’s wearing a giant grape. That doesn’t work with a cherry Squeeze Pop.
On the right, Mummy Slime. Even if I’m loyal to blood and even more loyal to cherries, I have to admit, this is the more creative of the two Squeeze Pops. With a goofy, slime-drenched mummy as its mascot, the sour apple sludge is 120 grams’ worth of good good good.
It’s pre-jack perfection, and the stuff tastes great. Hubba Bubba likes to think of the contents as melted-down lollipops, and that’s pretty accurate.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to say about them. Even as I was taking the photos, it hit me that I was building towards a too-short review.
I had to think quickly. I had to find paint brushes and an easel.
Maybe they weren’t the most ideal materials, but there are so few candies that one can conceivably paint with. We need to grab these opportunities, no matter how imperfect.
The goal was simple. Use Vampire’s Blood and Mummy Slime to paint something Halloweeny. A monster, most likely. Kind of sucks that my color choices were limited to red and green, though. Christmas eats enough of the Halloween season as it is.
It wasn’t long before I cursed the moment I found that canvas, because this shit didn’t work like paint at all. Sure, Hubba Bubba never claimed that it would, but I need to blame somebody, and Big Business is an easy target.
The Vampire’s Blood applied decently enough. It brushed into a realm closer to pink, but it was visible, at least. The same can’t be said for Mummy Slime, which immediately lost its color and made it appear as if I was crafting art by sneezing all over the canvas. I swear, I wasn’t.
Eventually, I put away the brushes. They just weren’t helping. Instead, I simply squeezed the ooze right onto the canvas, straight from the bottles. That worked better. It was no more difficult than lettering the top of a cake, but it had to be a hundred times more fun.
Three-Horned Tony is a friendly monster, less about mayhem and more about shooting the breeze over glasses of cider. He dresses rather formally for a monster, probably to offset the uncouthness that is his dripping, horny head. Three-Horned Tony hates flies, but man, do flies love him.
My first impulse was to create an Etsy account and exploit the support of Dino Drac readers for a quick buck. But I’ve become honorable in my old age, and the honorable thing is to allow this to sit in the corner of my office, where it will ooze to the floor and summon every ant in the tri-state area.
But that’s fine. I still have an ant farm. An official Uncle Milton one. I never even opened it, because as much as I enjoy ant farms, I hate the idea of waiting 6-8 weeks for bugs to arrive by mail.
Now I won’t have to. They should be here any minute.
