A Yellow Sea Sponge Has Never Tasted This Good!

I’ve always been fascinated by our desire, as human beings, to eat our favorite cartoon characters.

Don’t even pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. From Flinstones Vitamins, to Teddy Grahams and Animal Crackers, to nearly every fun-filled fruit snack imaginable—our brains are somehow programmed to want to devour them.

I suppose there’s a quietly poetic aspect to it: I love these imaginary characters so much, I want to ingest, digest, and incorporate them into my self and my being.

It also probably has something to do with our ability to participate in a working, nonviolent society. Each bite into an Animal Cracker’s head must release some small knot of murderous tension deep within the subconscious, and that’s probably what keeps us from pushing old ladies into buses.

But all that aside, there’s also something really goddamn freaky and sinister about it. And I can’t say I fully realized it until this weekend, when Bryan from TROOP! forced me to confront the horror head-on.

Here’s what he purchased:



That’s a SpongeBob SquarePants Bar, and as the website claims: You've got to try these fruit punch and cotton candy-flavored ice bars with gumball eyes!

Bryan did!





Let’s get a closer look of that, shall we?



GAH. WOW.


Okay. And now for the most terrible thing ever...



!!!!!!?!!

Never before have I been so absolutely sure that something is totally and completely WRONG. Now, I’m not blaming Bryan. It’s the horrible popsicle ice cream people's fault.

This product is horrifying. Horrifying, Horrifying, Horrifying. It’s like watching your favorite cartoon characters get all melted and mutated (G.I. Joe The Movie, anyone?). And as the children cry and cry, who are they told to blame for their suffering? Why, themselves of course. For was it not their own natural, ridiculous desire to eat their imaginary heroes that brought it about in the first place?

Shame, shame, shame on the makers of the SpongeBob SquarePants Bar. I can’t imagine how many children have already been permanently scarred by this. And I weep for them.