Today my brother and I were eating lunch, and the only form of dessert we could come up with was an ancient box of Justice League fruit snacks. Over our make-shift desert, we started talking about how fruit snacks are always marketed in kid-friendly, predictable shapes (that often turn out looking like a blob of brightly colored what-the-hell-is-that).
Yeah, fruit snacks always feature the Rug Rats, or Spiderman, or…in some rare instances, they actually resemble the fruit the fruit snack is trying to taste like, largely without success. (Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy fruit snacks, they just don’t taste like anything that occurs in nature).
So my brother and I started coming up with alternate “themes” for fruit snacks.
First, The Random Household Object Fruit Snacks. An assortment of chewy delights in the shape of various household objects that have absolutely nothing to do with each other:
[ul][li]Lime Lamps [/li][li]Cherry Chairs [/li][li]Lemon Telephones[/li][li]Fruit Punch Refrigerators [/li][li]Strawberry Sinks[/ul][/li]
It’s the fruit snack for those of us who don’t want to commit to being fans of something, you know? Buying a box of Incredible Hulk snacks imply you like the Incredible Hulk, when you might just like the fruit snacks. Random Object Fruit Snacks are adult, sophistcated, and above all, non committal.
Next, we had Sex Fruit snacks. These were my brother’s idea. They feature:
[ul][li]Berry Bras[/li][li]Pineapple Penises [/li][li]Banana Breasts[/li][li]and my personal favorite, an indistinct clump that looks sort of like two people engaging in some activity that might or might not be vaguely sexual, in a fruit punch flavor. [/ul][/li]
Personally, I thought this idea was rather…well, not exactly cliché, but something like it. Until I realized the marketing possibilities. One example:
A guy and a girl are making out in a car at an Inspiration Point-esque setting. They’re a teenage couple, he’s wearing a letter jacket, she’s in a cheerleader uniform, say. And he starts pressuring her to “go all the way.” Instead of saying no, she replies with a remarkably cheerful “We can have sex!” and produces a box of Sex Fruit Snacks. “With Sex Fruit Snacks!” and she launches into a pitch about their fantastic flavors and fun shapes.
My mother came home as I was relating this idea, and pronounced both of us sick and insane, but we’re used to that.
Any other ideas?