Flashback to the 80's: Bonkers Candy

I remember back when I was a little kid, I had gone to visit my grandmother in Cleveland, Ohio. My cousin A.J. and I would hang out a lot while I was there. Unfortunately, there was a neighbor's dog a few houses down from my grandmother that terrorized me. It would chase me down the sidewalk, and it had a knack for being able to get out of its leash. I seem to remember that it even snapped the chain it was on (though the neighbor kid may have actually unhooked it from the chain).

Granted, the dog never actually caught me or bit me. Little 5-year-old Dylan wasn't THAT fast of a runner -- not enough to get away from a dog if it meant business. I'm not sure what kind of dog it was, but even a basset hound probably would have terrified me at the time.

I had no idea how to defeat this archenemy of a canine. Like the kids vs. the dog in "The Sandlot," it managed to outmaneuver me at every opportunity. Until the fateful day I saw that commercial.

Bonkers Candy -- Bonks You Out!

At last! A way for my brains to overcome this dog's brawn! I would carefully lay a trap for this dog. I would lay a piece of Bonkers Candy out where the dog would find it. It would eat the candy, and a giant piece of fruit would fall from the sky and crush the dog! Foolproof!

But which fruit flavor do I choose? Strawberry? Orange? Grape? Sure, all flavors seemed capable of crushing the elderly (and disturbingly leaving them laughing underneath). But which would be best for a medium sized dog? A.J. and I debated this point for a while. We ruled out Grape, since it had too many small spaces between the individual grapes from where a dog could crawl out relatively unscathed. Then it would see us, rationalize that we were the cause of the devious plot on its life, and chase after us before we could reset the trap with another fruit flavor. So my cousin and I each got a pack, one getting Strawberry and the other getting Orange.

Of course, we had to test the effectiveness of our death trap first before putting our plan into action. Since we didn't want to potentially damage my grandmother's ceiling, we went out into the driveway. That way, large falling produce would not cause a whole lot of collateral damage. We each took one Bonkers Candy and ate one. We kept looking upwards for oversized projectile strawberries and oranges. Nothing happened. My cousin and I swapped packs and tried each other's death-from-above flavor. Again, nothing. Just a softer version of a Starburst, really.

We finished the candy, each of us less naive about how commercials lie about the homicidal/suicidal nature of candy products. Eventually, my family left for Virginia. I left my cousin behind to fend for himself against the dog.