Sunday, October 17, 2010

M&M Colors

Harumph. In my day we didn't have all these fancy, designer colors for our M&M's. There was one typre of M&M's, with one distribution of colors, and we made do with that. We made do with what we had, you young punks, and we liked it. Most of the candies were brown, too, just like the chocolate underneth. And the red ones were special, dammit, almost rare. This taught you something about life, that it wasn't going to all be gaiety, song-and-dance, and here we go round the mulberry bush. Life is boring, and plain, and you'd better appreciate it when something colorful comes into your life, mister.

The actual percentages, in the Good Old Days.

30% Brown
20% Yellow
20% Red
10% Green
10% Orange
10% Tan

Hmm. I could have sworn there were 50% browns. And okay, it was the orange ones that were special, but the principle still holds.

Frankly, I don't remember the tan ones, even when prompted. I think it's a hoax.

The covered peanuts seemed a reasonable experiment at the time, but now we see that in retrospect, it only opened the door to all sorts of nonsense. Blue ones. I still narrow my eyes a bit when I see those. Buying all yellow M&M's if you want, or all green ones. Why in my day, if you wanted all of one color, you and your friends had to tediously pick them out one at a time, sharing each other's germs. The way life should be. And now, prefiguring the Abomination of Desolation, you can get pastels. Purples. Speckled, monogrammed, almond M&M's. Almonds, mind you - a fancy foreign nut, not a respectable American nut.

Even the plain, regular bag of M&M's has been subject to deteriorating standards. Look at them. I mean just look at them!



Brown M&M's, the color that taught you about life and are good for your character, aren't even in the top four of the distribution. Modern hegemonic blues are the most common - those johnny-come-latelies, those haughty interlopers. It's an outrage.

24% Blue
20% Green
16% Orange
14% Yellow
13% Red
13% Brown

4 comments:

Michael said...

Don't forget that we lost the red ones for a number of years due to the good ole' red dye #5 scare!

Erin said...

I do remember the tans ones. I think they went out fairly early in my childhood.

AVI, if I can dig up a picture of you in my albums, you can bet what you'll be getting for your next birthday!

http://www.mymms.com/default.aspx

Assistant Village Idiot said...

And Michael, it was good for us to do without for those years.

Ben Wyman said...

I distinctly remember the tan ones. They were replaced by the blue ones after the great Blue vs. Purple vs. Pink vote that M&M had. As I recall, I welcomed blue but felt sad to lose tan.

In retrospect, those tan ones were terribly ugly.