The Easter season is almost upon us, and you know what that means: The shelves will be stocked with lots and lots of brightly-colored candy. Cadbury Creme Eggs. Marshmallow Peeps and Bunnies. Malted-milk Robin's Eggs. Chocolate bunnies, hollow and solid, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, peanut-butter filled, endless varieties.
This next article is about a now semi-defunct brand that had a big impact on me around the early-to-mid 2000s.
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| Courtesy Pinterest PROLOGUE |
As far as I know, Wonka never really had any notable Millennium celebrations; it's more that a brand which had existed two decades before went into overdrive at the time I normally cover anyway.
PART ONE: A BRIEF HISTORY
In 1971, Quaker Oats wanted to get into the candy business. There were already Hershey's bars, and Mars' M&Ms, and Nestle's Crunch and Baby Ruth bars, and the market seemed pretty crammed. Someone at Quaker had the bright idea of financing a movie to advertise a candy bar, and the obvious vehicle was Roald Dahl's children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The candy bar in question was, of course, the Wonka Bar, so the name Charlie and... had to become Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to better advertise the candy. I remember this quote from the 30th Anniversary DVD's featurettes (paraphrasing here): "They had a disposable movie and a candy bar that would last forever. But something was wrong with the formula, and the bars melted on the shelves. So they got a disposable candy bar and a movie that would last forever!"
Quaker abandoned the trademark, selling it a few years later to Chicago-based Breaker Confections, which manufactured now-familiar sweets like Shock Tarts, Tart-n-Tiny's, Dina-Sour [sic] Eggs (later to become Runts Easter Eggs), and such. In 1980, Breaker became The Willy Wonka Candy Factory, which Nestle purchased in 1988. An excellent website called Collecting Candy has a lot of Wonka wrappers, ads, and other ephemera spanning from the brand's earliest days in the mid-70s to the present day. Strangely, the brand started out heavily chocolate-based with Wonka Bars and Scrumdiddlyumptious Bars, but gradually abandoned this in favor of tangy and fruit-flavored confections--presumably these were far more cost-effective.
PART TWO: THE GOLDEN TICKET IS MINE
And then, in 1996 or 1997, I became acquainted with Wonka. Nerds, Bottle Caps, Everlasting Gobstoppers (in real life, nowhere near everlasting, but the name stuck), Tart-n-Tiny's, Shock Tarts, Runts...The brand name had an effect that no other did: You could sort of imagine the candy actually coming from Willy Wonka's factory. For example, Runts grew on trees in the Chocolate Room, and the Gobstoppers came from the Inventing Room. Of course, that's not really how it works, but the idea was too good not to believe in. (At one point, I'd worked out an idea based on those "Fruit Gushers" snacks, based on the evil "Vermicious K'Nids" from the book. Here's a mockup of what that might have looked like.)
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| I use artistic license here--the design lends itself more to a 90s sensibility than the more unified early 2000s look. |
1999-2001 saw the lead-up to the 30th anniversary of the movie, and Nestle really ramped up the brand-awareness with new products such as "Fruitastically Chewriffic" Oompas, Nerds Rope, Lik-m-Aid Fun Dip (a case of reviving an existing though long-dormant brand), and, of course, the Wonka Bar. There was a Golden Ticket sweepstakes, but every bar had a Golden Ticket (a golden wrapper, but still), and the grand prize was, I believe, scholarship money. Yay. (NOTE, 3/4/19: I just remembered that there was indeed an Easter egg similar to Cadbury's in the mid-2000s, and you could pretend that, if not a golden goose like in the movie, then maybe a golden hen had laid it!)
There were "Invention Room" toys, battery-powered contraptions that could dispense Nerds or Tart-n-Tiny's and mix Pixy-Stix flavors. There were "Beanie Babies" in the shape of the Oompa-Loompa characters. And then there was Wonka.com, a grand and glorious website that made you feel as if you were going level by level through the factory itself. On each level there were games: Nerds Rope Follow-the-Leader; Gobstopper Gobbler; Laffy-Taffy-tris; Wonka Air Hockey; Chocolate Pipe Madness, and dozens of others. I found all of these games online a couple of days ago, but I won't post the link here. However, if you went to YouTube, searched for "Willy Wonka games" and did a bit of digging around in the comments, there's really nothing I could do to stop you.
(Side note: There was a Wonka.co.uk as well, which had different games and a little more of a narrative surrounding it. There was a gremlin in the factory or something, and you had to find it by playing different games, like the famous "shell game." I only visited it about once or twice in late 2000, and it was less fun than the US version.)
There were "Invention Room" toys, battery-powered contraptions that could dispense Nerds or Tart-n-Tiny's and mix Pixy-Stix flavors. There were "Beanie Babies" in the shape of the Oompa-Loompa characters. And then there was Wonka.com, a grand and glorious website that made you feel as if you were going level by level through the factory itself. On each level there were games: Nerds Rope Follow-the-Leader; Gobstopper Gobbler; Laffy-Taffy-tris; Wonka Air Hockey; Chocolate Pipe Madness, and dozens of others. I found all of these games online a couple of days ago, but I won't post the link here. However, if you went to YouTube, searched for "Willy Wonka games" and did a bit of digging around in the comments, there's really nothing I could do to stop you.
(Side note: There was a Wonka.co.uk as well, which had different games and a little more of a narrative surrounding it. There was a gremlin in the factory or something, and you had to find it by playing different games, like the famous "shell game." I only visited it about once or twice in late 2000, and it was less fun than the US version.)
CHAPTER THREE: AN ALL-TIME HIGH...AND THEN A FALL
The brand expanded further into the 2000s with the XPloder Bar, Donutz, Nerds and Shock Tart Gumballs, Puckerooms (sour mushroom-shaped gummies), and Wonka Randoms, an attempt to bring a British candy to the States, and with the new treats, there were new games on the official site. The brand eventually diversified into frozen treats and higher-end chocolate bars and candies called "Wonka Exceptionals," a way to get in on Ghirardelli's upscale market. Now there was a chocolate bar so delicious and so smooth, you'd swear it had been mixed by waterfall!
Sadly, the good times were not to last: In 2015, Nestle abandoned the brand and re-dubbed the candies under the "Nestle Candy Shop." I haven't bought any Nestle-made sweets in a long time for a few reasons, chief among them the loss of the Wonka brand. Then again, it's understandable why the brand had to go: Nestle had to pay royalties not only to the Roald Dahl estate for the name but also to Warner Bros., because their designs had taken inspiration from the 1971 movie from the brand's inception. The Candy Shop sticks mainly to Gobstoppers, Runts, Nerds, Spree, Bottle Caps, and SweeTarts. Most of the seasonal variations--Spooky Nerds, Gobstopper Hearts, Runts Easter eggs--have fallen by the wayside as well.
Yes, the candy is still functionally the same, and yes, it's just a brand name slapped onto some junk food, but it made a boring, humdrum world a little more magical and colorful because of the association. That world is just a little poorer without it.
...And the less said about that infernal "Tom and Jerry in Willy Wonka," the better. Dear, oh, dear.
Sadly, the good times were not to last: In 2015, Nestle abandoned the brand and re-dubbed the candies under the "Nestle Candy Shop." I haven't bought any Nestle-made sweets in a long time for a few reasons, chief among them the loss of the Wonka brand. Then again, it's understandable why the brand had to go: Nestle had to pay royalties not only to the Roald Dahl estate for the name but also to Warner Bros., because their designs had taken inspiration from the 1971 movie from the brand's inception. The Candy Shop sticks mainly to Gobstoppers, Runts, Nerds, Spree, Bottle Caps, and SweeTarts. Most of the seasonal variations--Spooky Nerds, Gobstopper Hearts, Runts Easter eggs--have fallen by the wayside as well.
Yes, the candy is still functionally the same, and yes, it's just a brand name slapped onto some junk food, but it made a boring, humdrum world a little more magical and colorful because of the association. That world is just a little poorer without it.
...And the less said about that infernal "Tom and Jerry in Willy Wonka," the better. Dear, oh, dear.
