25 August 2010

Pac-Man Red Ghost and Blue Ghost Sours (Forbidden Planet) [By Spectre]



First released in 1980 and developed by Namco, Pac-Man quickly became one of the most popular video games of all time. Google even released an anniversary Pac-Man title page a few weeks back to commemorate its 30th year. To all those who are unfamiliar with gaming; Pac-Man is guided around a maze. Pac-Man is a big yellow round head with a big mouth for eating Pac-Dots. Pac-Man is chased around the maze by three ghosts; Blinky (red), Pinky (er... pink), Inky (blue) and Clyde (orange).

These sweets have been produced by Boston America Corp, famous for its Simpson's Duff Energy Drink. The company has a few Pac-Man related products including energy drinks and bandages. Being Red, Blinky is cherry flavoured and the sweets come in a red ghost shaped tin. Regular readers may remember my distaste for anything cherry flavoured after the Cherry Catastrophe beer post some moons ago. The tin is filled with small pink ghost shaped sweets. They remind me of Barratt's cherry flavoured refreshers, so they need a bit of a suck before you bite them if you don't want to break your teeth. Whilst there's nothing wrong with the taste of these sweets (asides my dislike of cherries) they couldn't really be classed as sour. Guzzling the whole tin may make you slightly hyperactive and try to keep them away from Coca Cola - unless you want an exploding fizzy drink.

Inky or the "ghost turned blue" is raspberry flavoured (though you'd think he'd be blueberry flavoured to go with the colour). Unlike cherries, I love raspberries. We have a raspberry bush in the garden that is just spewing out raspberries at the moment like there's no tomorrow. Unsurprisingly blue ghost shaped sweets fill the blue ghost tin. Although they have the same hard Refresher type texture of the Red Ghost "sours" (pah!), these sweets have a nice mild sour raspberry taste and are quite moreish once you tuck in.

Now I've finished the sweets I'm left with two rather cool looking empty tins that I'll have to find something to use them for. Boston America also make Pac-Man sweets in a yellow Pac-Man shaped tin, which are orange flavoured. We'll have to keep our eyes open for these, but I would have thought that this would have been an ideal opportunity for sour lemon sweets to match the Pac colour, rather than orange. Boston America could make Clyde the orange flavour. Pinky could be pink grapefruit, passionfruit or melon flavoured. Perhaps they could bring out a new ghost called Stinky (brown) and he could be chocolate flavoured? Though it's not in keeping with the sour theme of these sweets and I haven't heard of sour chocolate sweets. Besides, sour chocolate sweets sounds like a terribly bad idea, and if anything like that exists I'm sure Cinabar would have already tortured me with it...
By Spectre

4 comments:

NLi10 said...

I've got the Pac Man power pellets on my desk - I've had them for ages. They were from GameStation.

They are Ok and taste of. Well. They kind of taste a bit orangey.

They are probably out of date.

Dreich said...

Never realised Forbidden Planet had any food stuff in it. Hopefully it's the same comic shop as it is in Scotland/Ireland.

Anonymous said...

could the tins be used as cookie cutters maybe?

cinabar said...

Just realised these sweets are also available on amazon.

Dreich - it is the same Forbidden Planet, ours has a few 'cult' sweets such as these, Hello Kitty etc.

Anon - that's a great idea, especially for Halloween!