The Reason These Fruity Candies Were Discontinued

In the mid-1980s, Nabisco launched a chewy, tangy candy that can best be described as a cross between a Starburst and a Gusher (via Snack History). Each chewy vanilla square was filled with a different fruity filling like lemon-lime, grape, cherry, orange, or watermelon.

More so than the candy itself, Bonkers gained almost instant fame thanks to an ad campaign in which people eating bonkers candy were walloped with giant strawberries, oranges, and other fruit. Hence the slogan "Bonkers! Bonks you out!"

The mildly threatening campaign was a hit, so to speak. So was the follow-up ad in which a straight-faced Southern woman stares unblinkingly into the camera while her family members are pummeled by enormous fruit, as she says in a deadpan voice, "My son thought Bonkers was gum. He knows its candy now." (via YouTube).

The fruity candy gradually lost its ability to draw in customers when the commercials stopped running. Sales declined and Bonkers became harder to find. By the 1990s, Nabisco discontinued production. The discontinued candy was acquired by Leaf Brands, which promised fans that a reboot was coming in 2015. 2015 came and went without a single person getting bonked out by Bonkers. 

In 2018, Leaf announced that the iconic '80s candy was set to hit shelves by that summer with a new vegan recipe (via PR Newswire). 2018 came and went and fans still don't have any new Bonkers or updates on when the reboot will happen (via Nothing But Nostalgia).

Adults might think eating boogers is gross, but what do they know? The 1988 launch of Boogers, a gummy candy that came in a variety of flavors like lumpy lemon and goopy grape, ended up being incredibly successful for its manufacturer, New Jersey-based Confex, Inc. (via Time Magazine). Sales reached $2 million (a value of approximately $4.9 million in today's currency) in its first year on the market. At $0.40 per bag, that's five million bags of boogers sold.

According to The New York Times, the bag came with a mix of booger shades including green and red. But the candy achieved peak strangeness with its marketing campaign, which featured a 6-foot tall actor in a green, slimy booger costume known as the Boogerman (via South Florida Sun-Sentinel). The Boogerman traveled the country handing out bags of boogers to delighted children and disconcerted parents.

Then-President of Confex, John Sullivan, told The New York Times that kids liked the candy so much because it was "a way of shocking their parents and asserting their independence." While parents weren't quite as thrilled with the concept, their disapproval only helped sales. "The more the parents scream, the more the kids want the candy," Sullivan told Time Magazine.

We don't know exactly when Boogers were discontinued, but the trademark expired without being renewed in 1998, suggesting it fell out of production sometime in the mid-1990s (via Trademarkia). However, you may still be able to snag a bag of sour Boogers by Flix Candy.

This fruity and sour twist on the classic breath mint was a divisive candy during its time in the early 2000s. In keeping with the Altoid slogan of being "curiously strong," the sour coating was, admittedly, a little sourer than it probably needed to be. You couldn't really taste anything past the mouth-puckering sensation until the coating was gone. Then, it was just a sweet hard candy.

Still, devoted fans loved working through the almost unbearable sour coating to get to the fruity candy beneath. But haters thought it was way too sour and, more to the point, failed to serve as a breath freshener which is what original Altoids are supposed to be.

Unfortunately, the devoted fans were far outnumbered and sales of Altoid Sours lagged. A Mars company representative told Bustle that the product was discontinued in 2010 because the demand was too low to continue manufacturing it.

Later renamed Cosmic Candy, Space Dust is essentially what you would get if you ground up Pop Rocks into a powder. General Foods brought both versions of the revolutionary carbonated candy to the market around the same time in the mid-1970s (via Rumor in the Marketplace). It was a game changer that marveled kids and terrified parents.

The candy fell victim to rumors that it could explode stomachs, most notably that Little Mikey from then-popular LIFE cereal commercials had died from eating Pop Rocks and chasing it with soda. This rumor was surprisingly persistent, despite the fact that the actor who played Little Mikey was very much not dead (via Snopes).

While a nationwide advertising and letter-writing campaign helped calm fears that the candy was blowing up children's stomachs, Space Dust suffered a second scandal that would ultimately spell its doom. According to worried parents, the original name, Space Dust, sounded too much like Angel Dust, the street name for PCP (via Yahoo! Life). The fact that it was a small packet of powder didn't help, either. Some parents thought it would encourage their kids to turn to real drugs.

The switch to the new name "Cosmic Candy" was an attempt to separate the candy from these drug associations. But, between the rumors of exploding stomachs and illicit drugs, the powder version of Pop Rocks was unable to sustain sales and was eventually discontinued.

GatorGum was another '80s attempt to sell gum by using an already well-known brand, in this case, the popular sports drink Gatorade. While the concept was definitely better executed than the soda concentrate-filled 7Up gum, it still failed to win over enough fans.

Most consumers found it too sour or just generally unpleasant. Even fans of the product described the taste as "salty and sour" (via Fourth Grade Nothing). Since most people aren't really looking for those features in their chewing gum, the product only ever held appeal for a niche audience.

Still, the gum enjoyed about a 10-year run spanning most of the '80s before the licensing deal between the manufacturer and Gatorade expired (via U-Select-It). The sports drink brand refused to renew the license and the gum disappeared from shelves soon after. Select fans still miss the unique flavor but it seems unlikely to make a comeback.

Another mysterious disappearance, Raven's Revenge almost feels like an urban legend for those who remember it. The late '90s candy was a sweet and sour powder packaged in what looked like a test tube from a lab. A range of different flavors was sold with excitingly edgy names like "Anarchy" or "School Sucks," which told you nothing about the actual flavor but sounded irresistibly cool to kids across America.

To add to the intrigue surrounding Raven's Revenge, its manufacturer spent exactly $0 on advertising (via Los Angeles Times). With no marketing whatsoever, Raven's Revenge swept through the nation solely thanks to fans raving about the sweet treat. Elementary and middle school kids in the know got the candy from other kids through what developed into a strange black market run by children.

Why kids were treating Raven's Revenge like an illicit drug you had to exchange and consume secretly is unclear. Schools hadn't banned it. Parents were largely unaware or unconcerned by its existence. Kids at the time seem to have just collectively decided that Raven's Revenge was a great secret that needed to be kept hidden from grown-ups at all costs. As mysteriously as it emerged, Raven's Revenge eventually disappeared, leaving little trace that it ever existed at all.