5 Ridiculous Movie-Themed Junk Foods!
Below are five ridiculous movie-themed junk foods that I’ve collected over the years. They were pulled from storage bins that I wish were airtight, but definitely aren’t.
Hostess Snoballimus and Chocwave Cakes!
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
I still rate these as the weirdest snacks Hostess has ever produced, and also the most beautiful. They’re out there by today’s standards, but they were impossibly strange in 2011. I’d say they were some of the first junk foods that seemed designed for hyperbolic reactions on social media.
The “Chocwave” cupcakes were severe, but nothing beat those “Snoballimus” monsters, with their blue coconut capes and blood red filling. They were admittedly more fun to look at than eat, because while many artificial food dyes are technically flavorless, using THAT MUCH DYE was gonna impart something. As I recall, the flavors seemed chalkier than usual, while the texture was oddly mealy.
Even so, they were gorgeous, and I will never knock an attempt to transform a Hostess Sno Ball into Optimus Prime. Even if said Sno Ball looked more like Man-At-Arms chewing Bubblicious.
Nabisco Royal Ooze!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (1991)
It was no big leap to go from mutagen ooze to Jell-O, or even Nabisco’s underachieving version of Jell-O. A tie-in with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, Nabisco’s Royal Ooze came in an assortment of colors and flavors.
The lime green and strawberry red versions were canonical enough, but once you got up to the orange ooze, you had to start thinking about offshoot mutagens with alternative properties. Like maybe orange was the antidote? Mikey could help transform Splinter back into Hamato, and follow it up with some “orange ya glad” joke? No?
The best thing about Royal Ooze was the packaging. Each box featured a different Ninja Turtle, and none of them wore expressions that were in any way suitable for product shots. In particular, Leonardo seemed to suggest that Royal Ooze was loaded with tryptophan.
Chips Ahoy Glow Blasts!
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (2002)
Remember the glut of E.T. merch that hit stores for the movie’s 20th anniversary? It was kind of a disaster. E.T. returned to theaters in 2002, but he didn’t really return to the zeitgeist.
For years, Toys “R” Us struggled to liquidate its too-enormous inventory of E.T. toys, which ranged from a sprawling action figure line to giant collectible statues. Even when the prices were slashed to 90% off, they still couldn’t completely clean ‘em out.
The best thing to come out of that fiasco was this package of Chips Ahoy “Glow Blasts” cookies. They were topped with chocolate candies in yellow shells, which I suppose were meant to resemble the business end of E.T.’s magic finger?
It would’ve made more sense to top the things with Reese’s Pieces, but I’m glad they didn’t. Between the shiny foil bags and the cookies themselves, Glow Blasts felt truly cosmic. I envisioned each cookie as an alien spacecraft, with my mouth acting as the organic hangar.
Kryptonite Doritos!
Superman Returns (2006)
As far as I know, Kryptonite Doritos — a tie-in with Superman Returns — were only available in this “Mini Doritos” format. Though the guacamole Doritos flavor has returned at least once since then, I believe the concept of “Mini Doritos” has been totally shelved.
It’s a shame, too. Bite-sized Doritos were so much fun to eat. I used to pretend I was a giant monster, with a name full of apostrophes and triple-vowels.
Kryptonite Doritos were only sold in these teensy bags, which added to their novelty. I don’t think you needed to be a particularly big Superman fan to appreciate Doritos based on a glowing mineral from a distant planet.
PS: If you’re wondering what thirteen-year-old Kryptonite Doritos smell like, the answer is Play-Doh.
Farley’s Lightsaber Fruit Rolls!
Star Wars: Episode I (1999)
I’m still amazed that Star Wars: Episode I was so freely licensed. Don’t get me wrong, it was an ENORMOUS movie that was probably expected to be even more enormous, but when you look at the sheer number of companies blessed with the right to throw Jar Jar’s face on whatever they produced, man, that license must’ve cost less than dinner at Applebee’s.
This was just one of several varieties of Episode I fruit snacks made by Farley’s, and easily the most interesting. Huge thanks to Jamie from The Roarbots for adding it to my collection!
These “Glitter Rolls” were basically just Fruit by the Foot ripoffs, made more distinct by the addition of silver sparkles. They were supposed to represent Jedi lightsabers, even if it was hard to correlate floppy fruit rolls with laser blades. Things looked more like alien tongues, which may explain why Farley’s chose Jar Jar Binks as the spokesman for lightsaber fruit snacks.
Thank you for reading about five strange movie-themed junk foods, which I will now return to a $5 storage bin and promptly forget about for another ten years.
