6 Best And 8 Worst Old-School Halloween Treats

There may be intriguing new candy creations cropping up every year to sweeten up your Halloween, but it's the old-school classics that haunt the trick-or-treat memories of generations of costumed kiddos. Sure, everyone was happy to get a full-sized Snickers or a grocery store pack of Bubble Yum while candy corn always left us bitter. But the trickiest treats of all were the ones that turned the most candified holiday of the year on its pointed ear, and transformed every treat bag into a minefield of hits and misses. So many up-and-down retro options made getting the best or worst Halloween candy a real roll of the dice.

Vintage treats didn't always take youngsters into consideration. Some candies presented as front door offerings were downright boring, like peanut butter kisses and Nik-L-Nips will attest. Did we eat them when there was nothing left in the bag but wrappers and disappointment? Of course, we did. But we didn't enjoy them, wishing all the while we'd been a little slower eating the better bites. While some of these sugary goodies were destined for the garbage bin, others made an indelible impression and informed our childhoods as unforgettable pleasures of the Halloweens past.

How can a company that excels at making Valentine's Day conversation hearts fail so miserably at a Halloween candy? Granted, Spangler's Necco Wafers weren't exclusively a Halloween nibble. But when your fingers brushed a roll at the bottom of your bag, for a moment you might have mistaken it for a roll of quarters instead of chalky dust-covered candy. You'd pull it from the other treats, realizing you hadn't hit the money motherlode but rather the jackpot of despair. Even the weird vellum wrapper made every roll look like a relic. Based on the archaic snap of each wafer, they probably were. And the weird flavors, including a mint that tasted like straight-up Pepto Bismol, only added to the collective wish that these sorrowful chips would age out of the trick or treat system.

Maybe the reason this candy feels so old-school is because it's so old, period. They appeared on the scene in 1847, almost 200 years ago, and they seem to have changed very little since. Though Necco Wafers made a suspicious disappearance for a few years, they eventually returned. That doesn't mean you have to eat them.

What a weird texture these candies have. Caramel creams are composed of a caramel swirl that surrounds a creamy disc, a combination that should have been far more delicious based on that description. Yet somehow, so much Halloween potential went to waste when the finished product was discovered to be chewable misery. The caramel is oddly waxy, the cream is strangely powdery, and the whole thing breaks into its separate components after the first bite. Eating caramel creams is not a happy phenomenon in the world of treats, though handing them out yourself is probably a pretty royal trick to pull on people you don't particularly care for.

For anyone who didn't learn their lesson with the lowercase version of caramel creams, Cow Tales candy is an uppercase bar version created by the same company, Goetze's Candy. You can also find an unsettling combination in flavors like Brownie and Apple, which may help matters. But we can't imagine how that's possible.

This last resort treat is the stuff of nightmares — a grandma candy that always seems to have rolled out of the candy factory a hundred years ago, no matter when you unwrap it. Sometimes mistaken for Mary Janes, a similar candy launched by the Charles N. Miller company in 1914, peanut butter kisses are the Halloween equivalent of a fruitcake, a collection of pieces that's been regifted into treat bags again and again for decades. 

The only time trick-or-treaters ever relish tasting this much-maligned mush that sometimes comes with a daub of real peanut butter in the middle is when they've run out of all other options. Even then, it's a dice roll as to whether or not the unlucky soul who made it past the wax paper would finish the whole bite or chew it like gum before spitting it out. The Halloween world has never been fond of these nuggets of nastiness. They were banned in High Point, North Carolina at one point by the Emperor of Acceptable Candy. Fake rulerhood notwithstanding, maybe it was a great idea to get rid of a candy whose time has obviously come.

In 1949, Ce De Candy, Inc. began making Smarties, a cylinder of straight-up sugar pills that some kids believed gave them genius-level intelligence. Not to be confused with chocolate-based Smarties from the U.K., American Smarties gave reality to the antiquated concept of a smart pill. Some kids believed they could pop a few whenever they needed a brain boost. There was no truth behind the mythology, other than the little sugar boost that may have added a bit of energy to our thought processes. But having a tangy, crunchable column that snapped open with a twist of the scalloped ends made kids feel like they'd tapped into something more special than the usual bits and bonbons in the bag. Finding 15 candies in each roll made it seem like you had more treats than you could shake a stick at, too. Ah, to figure out how to be so easily delighted as a grown-up.

Considering that there are only five ingredients in Smarties, these charming caplets are possibly one of the most prudent confection choices you can make. Sure, they're still candy. But all that sugar consumption had to turn into wisdom at some point.

A solid cube of chocolate marketed as a candy bar? Yes, please! Chunky compressed a full-sized treat into a concentrated block, and turned ordinary ingredients into something that felt more like a gold bar than foodstuff when rummaging around in the candy catcher. This was a literal chunk of chocolate that we could really sink our teeth into. No more making do with flat Hershey Original bars — no siree! We had a substantial sweet that could stand up to our appetite for candy, lasting well into the first day of November if we played our cards right. We could even break it into fourths to share with friends if we felt generous enough. Chunky was a bit of all right all around.

The heartbreak of finding out a candy made since the 1930s is out of production is enough to make us linger in the wistful yesteryears when we had no idea such a thing could happen. But if you listen closely on Halloween, you might hear a Chunky rustle into your bag thanks to continued listings of stock on Amazon.

Otherwise known as the Filling Remover, Bazooka was a true hit-or-miss in the Halloween treat world back in the day. If you were lucky enough to get a few fresh pieces, you could overload your jaw with bubble gum goodness while laughing at the dad joke comic strip that came in every wrapper. If you were less fortunate, you'd find a rock-hard brick that you believed would be worth chewing if you just let it soften up a little first. The sad truth was that it never softened up again, no matter how long you held it in your cheek waiting for the miracle moment. It was as soft as it would ever be, a texture that rivaled concrete. And it didn't even taste all that great.

Russian immigrant Morris Shorin is the man who originated Bazooka bubble gum, all the way back in post-World War II America, though the well-known Bazooka Joe comics didn't make an appearance in the wrapper until 1953. There's no denying the staying power of this bubble gum behemoth. Denying it's potential as a tooth-cracker that's not worth taking a chance on is another story.

The vision of candy buttons spooled on infinite rolls in old-time candy shoppes where the clerks wore bow ties and barbershop quartet hats is like a scene from a childhood dream. Too bad the horrifying reality of these pellets is that receiving candy buttons at Halloween was one of the 20th Century's cruelest tricks. Was there a way to get the candy away from the backing without leaving a bit of paper? Most likely. Did any trick-or-treaters ever learn the magic method so they could enjoy their loot without having a spit wad stuck in their throats? Probably not.

Though these never-ending reels of confection have been around since the 1930s as a product of the Cumberland Valley Company, their time was up long ago. The bottom line is that candy shouldn't take work to enjoy. That's the whole point of trick-or-treating, to get an easy cache of sugary treasure that comes to you easily and goes down smoothly. Having to wrangle with little strips of wrapper to enjoy what was little more than a mound of sugar shouldn't be part of the package.