by Ken Tuccio

I’ve made it well known previously on this site that I’m a big fan of anything that’s gummi.

As such, I felt an obligation to buy these when I saw them in Toys R Us ...

These are Muddy Bears, which are milk chocolate covered gummi bears.

When I saw this box two things immediately jumped out at me. The first was the apparent joy this bear had for being gunged …

The second was the disgusting sound of the combination of chocolate and gummi bears.

Don’t get me wrong, I love chocolate, and I’m a big fan of things in gummi form, but combining the two seems like the worst idea since The Blair Witch : Book of Shadows.

For some reason the idea of covering anything gummi in chocolate is enough to make me gag. It just doesn’t seem right. I’m not a talented enough writer to verbalize why I actually feel that way, but I just do. However, the back of the box does what it can to convince me otherwise …

They do this by using the statement, “Your cravings cannot live on chocolate alone!”, which is very true. My cravings cannot survive solely on chocolate, but that doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to mix chocolate in with everything else. I’m not going to start covering Fig Newtons in chocolate syrup, or blending cans of Yoo-Hoo with bottles of Vitamin Water. Those are just bad ideas, much like I feel a combination of gummi bears and chocolate is a bad idea.

Regardless, I’m a modern day adventurer, so I’m willing to give these a try.

The Muddy Bears, which I should note is a name that could easily double as the opening act for Disney's The Country Bears, look like small bear versions of Han Solo frozen in carbonite ...

They also give off a scent that is very noticably a combination of gummi and chocolate, it tells my stomach, “This is a bad idea”.

Bad idea or not, I tossed a few in my mouth to see what they were like, and I think “suck” is an adequate description.

I’ll be honest, I figured my expectations were so low that I was going to end up saying something along the lines of, “They weren’t that bad”, but no, they were that bad. These were beyond “that bad”; they’re terrible. These are the kind of candies we should feed suspected terrorists. Water Boarding will seem like a wave pool in comparison to these chocolate covered gummies.

Gummi and chocolate just don’t work well together. When combined they manage to mimic the taste of vomit almost perfectly, and that’s not the most appealing taste for a candy.

If you haven’t figured it out just yet, I wouldn’t recommend these to my enemy.

Okay, maybe I would recommend them to my enemy, but I wouldn’t recommend them to that dude who only annoys me sometimes. He shouldn’t have to eat these.

To sum it up, Muddy Bears are completely and utterly disgusting, and all remaining boxes of them should be burnt to ash.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bottle of Listerine with my name on it.