Let Them Eat Legos
Product recall in five, four, three...
In the process of going to college and moving to Portland, I had to give up a lot of my old toys. Some things were easier to get rid of than others – getting rid of my squirt guns wasn’t too hard, losing the Army men was tougher, and giving away the Beanie Babies just about killed me (not because of any sentimental value, but just because I’d bought the damn things as an investment when I was in 4th grade, expecting that they would one day finance my retirement). However, I never doubted that these toys were unnecessary - I had no illusion that there would ever be a time in my adult life where I’d suddenly need them.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Capps, but it appears that you have cancer.”
“No, it’s cool – I’ve got some Hot Wheels.”
However, if there was one thing in my closet that I felt I absolutely couldn’t part with, it was my giant purple tub full of Legos. I feel like my life will in one way or another be hollower, because now that my Legos are gone I am unable to jump up whenever I want to and build a pirate ship crewed by dinosaurs. I loved my Legos, and so did you. It was like the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt think Legos are totally rad. It was a real shame that my family had to go and move when we did, because I had a pretty impressive Lego collection going at that point. Imagine, if you will, a solid decade of Legomania*, either bought with carefully saved allowance or received on birthdays and at Christmas. In that purple tub, cowboys intermingled with spacemen, little plastic guns mixed with miniature pizzas, not to mention loose plastic doodads and God knows how many strands of my hair. Ten years of my life and literally hundreds of dollars were represented in that box of possibilities.
*Do you remember those old commercials, with the song? “I’ve got a case of [pause] Legomania!” There was a time when I really seized on Legomania as a viable excuse for just about anything – “I can’t go to school today, Mom; I’ve got Legomania. I have to keep playing with my Legos!” My parents, evidently not understanding the severity of the Legomania virus, never accepted this excuse. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve kicked my Legomania in favor of Egomania, a common occurrence in people who grew up creating and destroying their own miniature civilizations on a daily basis.
I have never met a person who, when I mentioned one of my millions of great experiences with Legos, said, “Oh, hell no, I hated Legos. My favorite toys were my piece of string and my Bible!” Legos are, simply put, one of the absolute greatest creations of all time. They were like the DNA of fun – you start out with a bucket filled with random multicolored bricks, little smiling men, and the occasional palm tree, and then from this jumbled mass create something wholly original, like a spaceship driven by dinosaurs, or a rocket propelled covered wagon driven by dinosaurs, or a giant fortress outfitted with booby traps and dinosaurs. Legos may as well be called the “God Starter Kit”, because it’s basically a box full of opportunities to create new, exciting worlds, and then fill them with dinosaurs.
Well as it turns out, the unstoppable march of human progress has seized upon the inherent genius of Legos and combined them with the inherent genius of candy. Behold, ladies and gentlemen, Lego Fun Snacks – fruit snacks that are shaped like Lego blocks. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is this awesome, or is this a class-action suit waiting to happen? Allow me to render my opinion.
When I first heard that they were making food that was shaped like Lego bricks, I was thrilled. On paper, Lego bricks that are made out of delicious candy are arguably the greatest step forward in toy history – not only are they functional as structural materials, but they’re edible too! For thousands of years, mankind has strived to create buildings that double as foodstuffs. We were brought up with the story of Hansel and Gretel, we built miniature gingerbread houses we longed to live in, and Ray Nagin once referred to New Orleans as “The Chocolate City”. Buildings made out of candy have been prophesized for centuries, and Lego Fun Snacks are making it that much easier for us to live out our dreams. As I mentioned before, I would often play God by creating Lego societies and then destroying them when I deemed them sinful (or when it was time for bed). It was one thing to instill fear in your Lego citizens by knocking over a building or two, but imagine how powerful and awesome it would feel to eat an entire city! If it were possible, I would drop out of school to spend my days building breathtaking creations, and then eating them.
The bad news is that these Lego Fun Snacks aren’t really Legos, because despite looking exactly like Legos in every way, you can’t interlock and stack them like the real thing. When you realize that it’s impossible to actually make anything out of your Lego candy, you’ve got to wonder why they even bothered in the first place. How could a project like this even get out of the design phase when there’s such blatant wasted potential?
“My proposal is that we make fruit snacks shaped like Legos!”
“Brilliant idea, Simmons! I can finally build my Lego dream house, and then eat it!”
“Actually, sir, we’re unable to build edible interlocking bricks with current gummy fruit technology.”
“So you’re saying we’re just going to be marketing candy that sort of looks like Legos? Where’s the fun in that?”
“No, it’s cool – I’ve got some Hot Wheels.”
Now that any hint of coolness is gone, we must turn to the flat out stupid irresponsibility of Lego Fun Snacks, much of which has already been handled in this article. The simple fact is that little kids will treat just about everything as food until experience proves otherwise. What’s really ironic is that this coupling between Lego and Kellog’s is probably intended to sell more Lego building blocks by getting kids interested in Lego fruit snacks, which is fine until you remember that only one of these two identical items is edible, and the other is just a chunk of hard plastic with a bunch of pointy bits. So what’s going to happen? A lot of kids are going to start eating their Legos, obviously – more kids than are already eating Legos, because now they’ll have a legitimate reason to believe that their toys are delicious. If it was possible to actually build with Lego fun snacks, I’d say that a few three-year-olds having to get their stomachs pumped was a fair price to pay for progress. But instead, we’re just endangering the lives of a whole bunch of little kids so that we can have the exact same kind of fruit snack in a different shape, and frankly that’s not an exciting enough prospect to sacrifice children for.
I don’t really see what’s so amusing about food being shaped like something anyway – if it’s not functional, it’s just one more thing to put in your mouth and smash up with your teeth. Just because a food is shaped like something you love doesn’t really make it all that much better; this is why I will never eat Tina Fey shaped candy. The cold hard truth is that shapes do not have flavors; however if they did, I’m betting circle would be freaking delicious.
Truman Capps would like to point out that Good & Plenty candies could cause similar problems, as they reenforce the notion that all pills taste like delicious licorice, and you should eat as many of them as possible.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Capps, but it appears that you have cancer.”
“No, it’s cool – I’ve got some Hot Wheels.”
However, if there was one thing in my closet that I felt I absolutely couldn’t part with, it was my giant purple tub full of Legos. I feel like my life will in one way or another be hollower, because now that my Legos are gone I am unable to jump up whenever I want to and build a pirate ship crewed by dinosaurs. I loved my Legos, and so did you. It was like the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt think Legos are totally rad. It was a real shame that my family had to go and move when we did, because I had a pretty impressive Lego collection going at that point. Imagine, if you will, a solid decade of Legomania*, either bought with carefully saved allowance or received on birthdays and at Christmas. In that purple tub, cowboys intermingled with spacemen, little plastic guns mixed with miniature pizzas, not to mention loose plastic doodads and God knows how many strands of my hair. Ten years of my life and literally hundreds of dollars were represented in that box of possibilities.
*Do you remember those old commercials, with the song? “I’ve got a case of [pause] Legomania!” There was a time when I really seized on Legomania as a viable excuse for just about anything – “I can’t go to school today, Mom; I’ve got Legomania. I have to keep playing with my Legos!” My parents, evidently not understanding the severity of the Legomania virus, never accepted this excuse. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve kicked my Legomania in favor of Egomania, a common occurrence in people who grew up creating and destroying their own miniature civilizations on a daily basis.
I have never met a person who, when I mentioned one of my millions of great experiences with Legos, said, “Oh, hell no, I hated Legos. My favorite toys were my piece of string and my Bible!” Legos are, simply put, one of the absolute greatest creations of all time. They were like the DNA of fun – you start out with a bucket filled with random multicolored bricks, little smiling men, and the occasional palm tree, and then from this jumbled mass create something wholly original, like a spaceship driven by dinosaurs, or a rocket propelled covered wagon driven by dinosaurs, or a giant fortress outfitted with booby traps and dinosaurs. Legos may as well be called the “God Starter Kit”, because it’s basically a box full of opportunities to create new, exciting worlds, and then fill them with dinosaurs.
Well as it turns out, the unstoppable march of human progress has seized upon the inherent genius of Legos and combined them with the inherent genius of candy. Behold, ladies and gentlemen, Lego Fun Snacks – fruit snacks that are shaped like Lego blocks. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is this awesome, or is this a class-action suit waiting to happen? Allow me to render my opinion.
When I first heard that they were making food that was shaped like Lego bricks, I was thrilled. On paper, Lego bricks that are made out of delicious candy are arguably the greatest step forward in toy history – not only are they functional as structural materials, but they’re edible too! For thousands of years, mankind has strived to create buildings that double as foodstuffs. We were brought up with the story of Hansel and Gretel, we built miniature gingerbread houses we longed to live in, and Ray Nagin once referred to New Orleans as “The Chocolate City”. Buildings made out of candy have been prophesized for centuries, and Lego Fun Snacks are making it that much easier for us to live out our dreams. As I mentioned before, I would often play God by creating Lego societies and then destroying them when I deemed them sinful (or when it was time for bed). It was one thing to instill fear in your Lego citizens by knocking over a building or two, but imagine how powerful and awesome it would feel to eat an entire city! If it were possible, I would drop out of school to spend my days building breathtaking creations, and then eating them.
The bad news is that these Lego Fun Snacks aren’t really Legos, because despite looking exactly like Legos in every way, you can’t interlock and stack them like the real thing. When you realize that it’s impossible to actually make anything out of your Lego candy, you’ve got to wonder why they even bothered in the first place. How could a project like this even get out of the design phase when there’s such blatant wasted potential?
“My proposal is that we make fruit snacks shaped like Legos!”
“Brilliant idea, Simmons! I can finally build my Lego dream house, and then eat it!”
“Actually, sir, we’re unable to build edible interlocking bricks with current gummy fruit technology.”
“So you’re saying we’re just going to be marketing candy that sort of looks like Legos? Where’s the fun in that?”
“No, it’s cool – I’ve got some Hot Wheels.”
Now that any hint of coolness is gone, we must turn to the flat out stupid irresponsibility of Lego Fun Snacks, much of which has already been handled in this article. The simple fact is that little kids will treat just about everything as food until experience proves otherwise. What’s really ironic is that this coupling between Lego and Kellog’s is probably intended to sell more Lego building blocks by getting kids interested in Lego fruit snacks, which is fine until you remember that only one of these two identical items is edible, and the other is just a chunk of hard plastic with a bunch of pointy bits. So what’s going to happen? A lot of kids are going to start eating their Legos, obviously – more kids than are already eating Legos, because now they’ll have a legitimate reason to believe that their toys are delicious. If it was possible to actually build with Lego fun snacks, I’d say that a few three-year-olds having to get their stomachs pumped was a fair price to pay for progress. But instead, we’re just endangering the lives of a whole bunch of little kids so that we can have the exact same kind of fruit snack in a different shape, and frankly that’s not an exciting enough prospect to sacrifice children for.
I don’t really see what’s so amusing about food being shaped like something anyway – if it’s not functional, it’s just one more thing to put in your mouth and smash up with your teeth. Just because a food is shaped like something you love doesn’t really make it all that much better; this is why I will never eat Tina Fey shaped candy. The cold hard truth is that shapes do not have flavors; however if they did, I’m betting circle would be freaking delicious.
Truman Capps would like to point out that Good & Plenty candies could cause similar problems, as they reenforce the notion that all pills taste like delicious licorice, and you should eat as many of them as possible.