Whoziwatsis?

Cast your minds back to the sad-sack seventies, my friends; it wasn't all ABBA and Happy Days. We had fuel shortages, stagflation, Communism on the march, fearmongering of every sort in the media (disaster would soon strike from ice age / aliens / nuclear war / complete economic collapse / overpopulation / starvation / running out of oil / labor strikes / nuclear plant meltdown / crime / government corruption), and polyester as far as the eye could see.  

Into this grim landscape appeared something that would provide a turning point. Picture: It's 1978. We're a year away from Carter's Malaise Speech, but things look awful. The Great Blizzard of 1978 strikes the U.S. The Soviets are pushing "Russification" on all their republics. Aldo Moro is assassinated. Paul John Paul I dies after 33 days in the Chair of Peter. The Afghan war begins and is still going on to this day. Ashton Kutcher and Hannah Gadsby have been born and Charles Boyer and Louis Prima have died. But then a light shines in the darkness....

Yes, Hershey introduces the Whatchamacallit, a candy bar made with peanut butter crisps and chocolate (later to include caramel and whatnot inside to create the bar sold today, according to NEPA Scene). The Whatchamacallit was touted with the slogan, “It’s almost as much fun to say as it is to eat!”

Am I saying that the Whatchamacallit is what turned the misery of the seventies into the dynamism of the eighties? Well. not exactly, but it didn't hurt.

Let's bring the timeline up to date. Here we are in 2022. Everything looks like crap. The government is compromised and can't be trusted. The Chinese threaten war. The Russians are bumbling around with heavy ordnance and still have those nukes. Global warming has pretty much pushed the other world-ending disasters off the front pages, except that we all saw how a (likely Chinese engineered) virus spread quickly and probably accidentally -- maybe the next one will be a lot more fatal. Inflation is out of control; we have a labor shortage and high unemployment at the same time; the younger generation is hopeless and the older ones just want to hang on to what they have until the Grim Reaper comes. The music is terrible. The movies are worse. Incompetence by people convinced of their own value is the order of the day, and it shows. 

And now, into this bleached and burned landscape, Hershey brings us....

The Whozeewhatzit is a new candy bar, and it's great. It has a layer of peanut butter under the chocolate coating, not enough to dominate the flavor, and a thick brick of Krackel-type chocolate crisp below. The flavor balance and the texture are right on target. I say this one is a winner. 

Will it be enough to turn the tide? Who can say? We can't be cocky. Hershey introduced the Thingamajig bar in 2009, another bleak era, and discontinued it in 2012. Sometimes the problems are not done getting worse, and that was surely the case in the tremulous oughts and early teens. 

But like its ancestor, the Whatchamacallit, the Whozeewhatzit could be a harbinger of a prosperous age to come. And if the age doesn't arrive, at least we can eat good candy while we shiver in the dark.