Skittles Reunion

It occurred to me recently that when Skittles slipped in green apple to replace lime a few years ago, it wasn't just a temporary nightmare. In spite of all the uproar, it actually stuck. Suddenly a part of my childhood was really dead. Just like North Hills Mall and the Bubble Beeper, the real Skittles were no more. It's not like the green apple is a terrible flavor on its own, but lime just jives a lot better with the rest of the flavors. Sure, I was a strange child and carefully ate the flavors one at a time when I could. But in a dark movie theater? You just took a handful and marveled at how well everything worked together (and strangely tasted just like Tropical Sprite Remix). With the new green apple, it's like Van Halen after Sammy replaced Dave. Some folks will always like Van Hagar better, and that's their choice. It's just a poor choice.

The current loophole is that lime made a stealthy comeback last year in the new Orchards blend. It's absolutely possible to recreate a bag of the original Skittles mix by investing in two bags of candy. Nostalgia doesn't come cheap. Annoyingly, normal bags of Skittles are a bizarre 2.17oz, while the Orchards variety are 2oz exactly. This means (on average) you're going to come up short on lime flavor by about ten percent. Of course, King Size Skittles come in 4oz bags, which should mix flawlessly with two bags of Orchards. So now you need three bags of candy.

As a trial run, I took the incommensurate quantities provided by regular size bags (2oz Orchards, 2.17oz Original). Before a carefully orchestrated recombination, I did sample the new flavors. The lime is everything it used to be, cherry tastes somewhat like cough medicine, orange is more or less the same as in the "original" mix, and red apple is less tart than the green invader. The red and green apple flavors pair quite well, and I take strange pleasure in reuniting them, far away from all the original flavors. Peach is the worst Skittles flavor I've ever encountered. It's the buttered popcorn of Skittles, and fans of Father John Misty probably love it.

Swapping out the green apple for lime reunites Diamond Dave with the band (*) to play a greatest hits show without incident. It's like going back in time. I used to eat the flavors in order of increasing preference, and while the top spots would shuffle around a bit, grape was always the first to get out of the way. With green apple polluting the mix for the last few years, I'd forgotten how poorly I used to think grape fit with the original mix. Since I already started to change around the recommended combinations, I figured this was a great time to go a step further... what could I switch with grape? It then became clear that this operation would have to involve three different assortments of Skittles.

A local gas station stocked the King Size Share Size bags of both original variety and the Wild Berry mix. Wild Berry was one of the three alternative blends I remember from the 90s. The Tropical mix had some kind banana, which I found disgusting. Tart-N-Tangy Skittles were absolutely impossible to find in my old haunts, and they later evolved into the now-ubiquitous Sour Skittles that just burn your mouth. Wild Berry is perhaps the least-changed from its 1989 debut and has always the most tolerable of the remixes to me. Still, it's a bit of a dud on its own. Breaking down the walls and allowing flavors to move back and forth, I see some potential with the other cherry flavor and the raspberry. Darkside Skittles would also offer pomegranate, but I'm already blowing too much cash on Skittles right now to bother trying to track those down.

I got curious looks from Megan, our dog and several of the cats as I sat on the couch with four bags of Skittles and a number of bowls to facilitate the sorting. The best super mix I could obtain was orange, lemon (from Original), lime (from Orchards), strawberry, cherry and raspberry (from Wild Berry). Strawberry is in the original bag, but it has exactly the same color as the Wild Berry cherry, so I used the other lighter version for visual effect (who knew that would matter?). This mix contains a nice balance between citrus and berries, but I can't say I like it any better than the original Original option. Actually, I don't even like it as much as the classic mix. Skittles had the perfect combination and had to mess it up by involving Granny Smith. In the end, the days of the real original variety being affordable are truly over. It's just too much effort to create the past on a regular basis.

Epilogue: After reviewing my Skittles receipts from the last few days and noting the piles of undesirable flavors still sitting around the kitchen, I told Megan that, having binged so severely, I'm likely done buying Skittles for the next six months. She looked up from her laptop just long enough to say, "good, that was annoying."

(*) I'm aware it's not a perfect analogy. Michael Anthony did defect to the Hagar camp, and his duties were taken over by Eddie's son, Wolfgang. So imagine grape left with green apple and got replaced by raspberry or something. I already regret the running Van Halen reference.