I’ll lead with the striking stuff:
(#1) Fruity 3D typography
(#2) Gay juicy fruit: Adam and Steve taste of the forbidden fruit
All this from a querulous Facebook posting about Fruity Cheerios.
(I haven’t found the source of the steamy #2, though there’s a suggestion it might be from Brazil.)
The explosion of Cheerioses. Yesterday on Facebook, Dan Elwell posted this photo he took at the Wegmans in Columbia MD:
(#3) The Fruity and the Chocolate
Dan asked:
So…how are “Fruity Cheerios” different from Fruit Loops, exactly? And are we better off for having them?
These might be rhetorical questions, implicating the answers “Not at all” and either “No” or “Hell, no!, respectively. But there is an answer to the first as an information question: Fruity Cheerios are very similar in appearance and taste to Froot Loops (some find their taste more substantial), but have less sugar, somewhat more fat, and more calcium, folic acid, phosphorus, and zinc.
Earlier on this blog:
from 3/12/16, “Sweet nothings: candy, cereal, advertising”: on Froot Loops
from 5/17/16, “Pebbles”: on Fruity Pebbles (the cereal)
To which we can add yet another multicolored sweet and fruity cereal:
(#4) Malt O Meal Fruity Stars from Post
Wish you could find a fun and tasty cereal that your whole family loves? Wishes can come true with Fruity Stars™ cereal. A galaxy of taste, color and yummy goodness just landed on your breakfast table.
The Fruity and the Chocolate Cheerios were news to Dan and me, but they’ve been around for a while (since 2006 and 2010, respectively); they’re part of a great eruption of Cheerioses that began around 2005, after 64 years of only occasional additions to the product line. From several sources, this mind-boggling list:
Pumpkin Spice Cheerios (2016), Honey Nut Cheerios (1979), Original Cheerios (1941), Multi Grain Cheerios (1992, 2009), Very Berry Cheerios (2017), Apple Cinnamon Cheerios (1988), Frosted Cheerios (1995), Honey Nut Cheerios Medley Crunch (“crispy flakes and crunchy clusters”) (n.d.), Oat Cluster Crunch Cheerios (2007), Yogurt Burst Cheerios (2005), Cinnamon Burst Cheerios (2011), Cheerios + Ancient Grains (2015), Cheerios Protein Cinnamon Almond (2014), Cheerios Protein Oats & Honey (2014), Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios (n.d.), Fruity Cheerios (2006), Chocolate Cheerios (2010), Multi Grain Cheerios Dark Chocolate Crunch (2013), Strawberry Cheerios (2017)
Honey Nut Cheerios has a suggestive edge, but any cereal name with Fruity, Fruit, or Froot in it takes us right into double-entendre territory, where we can play with the sexuality slur fruit ‘homo, pansy, queer, fag’ (examined in my earlier cereal postings).
Fruity Stars is right open for fun (Paul Lynde? Harvey Fierstein? Sean Hayes?), Froot Loops and Fruity Pebbles less easily so, and you might have thought that Fruity Cheerios wouldn’t fly, but the Cheerios people have provided a racy context, with their Fruity Cheerios slogan, “The goodness of Cheerios with the added fun of fruit packed into every O”. Oh dear, a fruit packed into an O.
Beyond fruit(y) cereal. Pancakes, candy, marijuana, and chewing gum.
A name that’s hard to beat: IHOP’s Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity® Pancakes:
(#5) Peach, cherry, strawberry
These signature pancakes are famous for a reason! Four of our thick buttermilk pancakes are topped with your choice of fun fruit topping and finished with our fluffy whipped topping. (link)
Then some candy:
(#6) This candy is good and fruity
Good & Fruity is a multicolored, multiflavor candy with a similar shape to Good & Plenty. Unlike Good & Plenty, Good & Fruity [originally] contained red licorice. It [is] produced by Hershey Foods. (Wikipedia link)
Note the good and ‘very, really’. From NOAD:
adv. good and — : informal used as an intensifier before an adjective or adverb: it’ll be good and dark by then.
Now, before passing on to the chewing gum, a product whose name is derived from the name of the chewing gum:
Juicy Fruit® is a trademarked brand of marijuana much like Bubble Gum® and Northern Lights®. (UD link)
Finally to the chewing gum, and a cycling back to the juicy fruit in #2, being consumed by two juicy fruits From Wikipedia:
Juicy Fruit is a brand of chewing gum made by the Wrigley Company, a U.S. company that since 2008 has been a subsidiary of the privately held Mars, Incorporated. It was introduced in 1893, and in the 21st century the brand name is recognized by 99 percent of Americans, with total sales in 2002 of 153 million units.
… Which fruit serves as the model for its flavor is kept vague in advertising, though in 2003, advertising agency BBDO characterized it as a combination of banana and pineapple, and some people say it resembles jackfruit. According to two books in the Imponderables series, peach is one crucial flavor among many others.
It is likely that the chemical used for flavoring is isoamyl acetate (sometimes known as banana oil), a carboxylic ester.
… Juicy Fruit gum consists mostly of sugar contained in a synthetic gum base. Other ingredients include corn syrup and dextrose as bulk agents and natural sweeteners, natural and artificial flavorings, glycerol and lecithin as softening agents, aspartame (NutraSweet) and acesulfame K as artificial sweeteners, Yellow Lake 5 as a coloring and BHT as a preservative.
Yum, yum. But there’s no getting around the carnal connotations of juicy. (GDoS has juice referring to bodily fluids, especially semen or vaginal fluid, and to ‘spirit, energy, vitality, usu. sexual’; juicy ‘sexually or otherwise stimulating … suggestive, racy, sexy’; and juicy fruit ‘male homosexual’, also rhyming slang for root ‘sexual intercourse’.)
A 1946 Juicy Fruit wrapper, touting the fascinations of its artificial flavoring:
(#7)
And from roughly the same period, during WWII, this ad:
(#8)
The ad was no doubt meant innocently, but … juicy, fruit, sailors and their reputation for sexiness, sailors’ muscles, and a sailor putting a stick of gum into his mouth (plus handy refreshment, appetite, and lasts) …
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