Some memories are awesome.  Your trip to Hawaii, your first dill pickle, or the birth of your friends’ kid.  Some,  like travel roofies, or the 2002 World Series, are not.  Still others don’t even make it to the good or bad category-they just disappear in a puff of bong smoke, never to be thought of again.

Take these, for example, :B*B*Bats.  If you had asked me last year  if I enjoyed them as a kid, I would have said no.  However, after seeing them in the new local candy store yesterday (Powells, Novato CA.  Pretty impressive, way more stuff than they used to have) it was like shock waves went through my memory hole-suddenly they looked familiar, and I KNEW I had loved them as a kid.  Powerful thing, candy is.

Back home at the bat cave later that night, I put them to the test.  Cause it’s one thing to be fun and tasty in 1977, but an entire different thing to stand the test of time, and still be good today in 2003.  First up was banana.  Ordinarily, I don’t go for banana candy, I’m not sure why.  But the first lick took me back to the mean streets of LA I perused as a kid (Bel Air), at Halloween time.

It’s a delight.

Hard, tough taffy with “that” classic banana flavor, this thing didn’t disappoint.  Extremely chewy without being very sticky on your teeth, it really sent me down memory lane, in a good way.  That banana taste is so iconic for me, so tied to classic candy flavors, that it really did bring me back.  After eating about 6 and staring at the dead wrappers, it was very clear to me that I ate these a lot as kid, but I don’t remember how.  Did I buy them?  They strike me as things that would have been cheaper than other candy, even in the 70’s.  Or was it just a compounding of Haloween candy memories I was feeling?  Not sure.  But then I moved on to peanut butter.

Friends…this was just outstanding.  Again, it had that classic PB taste I remember, which isn’t that different from today’s, but probably way more artificial.  They even advertise their proud artificiality on the wrapper, which of course being snide, I appreciate.  Either way, it’s a rich, salty, peanuty romp.  Chewy and tough like the banana, this one narrowly beat out banana as my favorite.  I like smaller sized candies that take a while to eat – it makes one feel like the calories are working slower.

Finally, I tried strawberry (for some reason I forgot to buy the chocolate kind).  Fresher (clearly), this was WAY softer, way less chewier, and way not as good as the other two. It just isn’t special tasting to me at all, but then again, I have my strong opinions about candies that represent red fruits-they rarely do. This flavor I didn’t hate, but let’s put it this way: I bought 3 of each flavor.  What I have left is 2 strawberry, one banana, and no peanut butter.  I tried another strawberry just to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something, and the second one really rubbed me the wrong way.  It had this weird oily flaovr that masked the berry almost completely.  No peeps, skip this flavor.  Not good.

Anyhow, I like these.  A lot.  I’m glad my local candy hole has barrels of these (literally), but as always, if you want a deal, you gotta hit the internet place.  Click the purchase link below (snazzy, right?) if you’d like to relive your youth in the form of chewy old bats for a song.

I really, really enjoyed these. Get some!