Idiot Box Savant: Snack update!

By Andrew Kiraly

Well, the TV season has peaked, and here we are once again, flopping around in the tide pool of a weirdly postcoital funk. Yeah, you know the season's officially over when Hallmark airs a "Little House on the Prairie" marathon on Sunday. Otherwise, the Savant caught a few oldish cowboy flicks on American Movie Classics, harkening back to the pre-gore days when getting shot did little more than make you somersault into the dirt and fall asleep. Bang! Yeow! Zzzz!

And thus our consolation prize in our brief TV winter: snacks! Browsing the junk food aisles of my quaint neighborhood big box soul vortex continues to reveal a society in decline, obsessed with making snacks xtreme by either adding the letter Z to the name or slapping on a pic of Tony Hawk, whose already thin frame seems to be getting more wiry and wizened as the Dark Druids of Commerce slowly pimp the life force right out of him. (From the dungeon below, a spent, skeletal Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan shout hoarsely: "No, Tony! Don't give in!") Indeed, reject idols and false prophets promising munchtastic bliss. May Snack Update guide us like a U.N. flavor inspector dispatched to the Arabian hinterlands of your tongue!

Ritz Cheddars: It's no secret that Cheez-It and Ritz have been locked in mortal combat for millennia, their intertwined destinies written in the blood of warriors, etc. The latest skirmish sees both snacks staking out new ground, with Ritz gettin' extra aggro by coming out with its own baked cheddar cheese snack--the junk foodland equivalent of taking an explosive dump in your rival's front yard, then writing your name in it. Once your Jaws of Life open the industrial foil packaging, these oddly shaped chips--kinda look like rejects from the Not Worse Just Different People Baking Science Night School--pack a mouth-attack that's more salty than cheddary, which is perhaps explained by the cryptic warning on the front: "Made With the Flavor of Real Kraft Cheese"--as opposed to "Made With Real Kraft Cheese."

Cheez-It Twisterz: But Cheez-It has a few tricks up its sleeve covering its personified cheese product arm! In this case, it's Twisterz, which look like pretzel sticks crossbred with swollen old-lady ankles. The Savant tried the portentously named "Hot Wings and Cheesy Blue," and between that freak moniker getting me all kinda mopey about all the Tom Robbins books I never finished and how readily the orange flavor sand came off in my hands, making me wipe everywhere in a whorl of emotional pique, I was not getting good anticipatory snack vibes. Then I pulled over in the freeway's emergency lane, promised myself through the tears to read more and jammed my hand in the bag. Actually, Twisterz are pretty good, with a reasonably realistic blue cheese flavor and a slight hot wing tap dance flourish in the end.

Golden Oreos: In Oreos as in the life of the Savant's many ex-girlfriends, once you go black you never go back, but I figured in the interest of fairness I'd better give these supposedly bad-ass yellow fuckers a whirl. They're inoffensively sweet and vanilla-esque, but lack that whole deep yin-yang dynamic you get from o.g. Oreos. Milk factor: good. By my watch, they sog up nicely after a mere three seconds and slide right down your naughty little snackhole so you can save your crushing molar power for the pillows at John Ashcroft's Terror Hideaway Internment Camp.

Sour Fruit Gushers: From my mouth to yours, I offer one very post-ironic WOW! Yeah, we live in an age when package hype is so overblown, sometimes I expect to open a bag of some promising new snack all flashbanged with all kinda promo hype and instead get laughed down by a bunch of termite dust. But Betty Crocker's Sour Fruit Gushers Triple Berry Shock are, well, pretty sour, fruity, gushy and shocking. They're like your usual fake fruit niblets, but filled with a concentrated, wholly unnatural liqui-blast that unleashes a veritable Abu Ghraib of flavor on your tongue.

Bacon Snaps Microwave Pork Rinds: Gawd, I hate to use up my monthly allotment of post-ironic WOW!s in one column, but fukkit: WOW! Now, I'm not so jazzed on the taste of Bacon Snaps--in the end, they're more or less like your average fried pork fat, but I gotta praise the Rudolph's labcoat crew for making this thing work. I defer now to the box hyperbolic promo: "POPS like POPCORN into a crunchy bacony snack YOU'LL LOVE!" That's just pure...[wiping away tear as TelePrompTer stalls]...poetry, ya know? You put this flat bag in your microwave for two minutes and a few mysterious crackles and ghoulish snickers later, you've got a bag of unsettlingly warm pig crisps for you and, after you've had about three and start rasping for water 'cause they're pretty damn salty, your dog. Rind-a-riffic!