Jojo Jelly Beans

If you saw the movie Tropic Thunder, you might remember a scene with Jack Black doping himself up with white powdery drugs he keeps in a Jojo Jelly Bean box. Apparently, someone thought there would be a huge demand for Jojo Jelly Beans thanks to the riotous comedy stylings of Jack Black and so Dreamworks brought out actual Jojo Jelly Beans as a movie tie-in candy.

By the time I found Jojos in job lot store in Maine, I had completely forgotten about Tropic Thunder (movies with either Ben Stiller or Jack Black tend to do that to me anyway; it seems that with both of them in the same flick, the effect is magnified.)  What attracted me was the packaging featuring a nightmare clown vomiting jelly beans down his tongue and into the mouths of two dead-eyed children.  "Multi-Flavor Colorings!" also cracked me up.  Only after I got them home and really looked the package over did I realize that it was a tie-in, thanks to a Tropic Thunder logo, complete with the MPAA's R-rating.

Still...jelly beans!  Insane murder clown!  Win, right?  Right??

No.  Wrong.  These jelly beans totally suck.  Inside the package, there are green, pink, yellow, red, and orange jelly beans, and the flavors of each are nearly indistinguishable from one another. They have a strange floral quality (and not good floral, like orange-blossom honey or rose petal tea, but bad floral like your ancient maiden aunt's eau de toilette that she splashes on in lieu of a bath.)  And although they're soft and pliable inside, the coating is like sugarbrick.  I was going to give them a pass on the brickness, seeing as Tropic Thunder came out in 2008 and who knows how long these things might have been sitting around in a warehouse, but I notice that several places are still selling them online so I'm just going to be a douche and assume that they were shipped stale from day one.  Unless you simply can't live without the graphics on that box, you really are better off skipping this purchase if you find them.

Photo by Boston American

Jojo Jelly Beans are made in China and distributed by Boston America Corp., a company which specializes in making kind of mediocre products in extremely clever packaging which make you want the hell out of them.  Seriously, I could devote an entire blog post just to their stuff, from generic energy drinks with awesome videogame labeling, to kind of mediocre candy packaged in the most bitchin' tins ever, to theme-printed bandages.

Photo by Boston American

Many are the times I've come home with candy in tins the shape of Nintendo's Super Mario mushrooms made by Boston America - there is no denying the packaging is cool even when the product inside isn't, strictly speaking, the best stuff you can buy.