Indiana Jones and the Surprisingly Satisfying Candy Bar Adventure

Posted by Kevin Kelly (kevinkelly@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 23, 2008

Thankfully Paramount hasn’t been supersaturating the advertising marketing with Indiana Jones items… well, besides cornering the market on billboards. But, if you’ve been to a 7-11 anytime recently, then you’ve probably seen Indiana Jones the Indiana Jones Snickers Bars and M&Ms littering the counters.

I haven’t yet seen the inexorable march of new Indiana Jones toys hitting the shelves, and thankfully there isn’t a television advertisement on every 60 seconds. Although I’ve been watching a lot of cable lately, so maybe I’m just missing it. However, this is the first time I remember seeing such a hardcore glut of what I’m going to call candy-vertising.

Normally a company will just slap an image on a wrapper and call it an advertisement. You know, like sticking R2D2 on a Milky War bar and then wiping your hands and saying you’re done with the advertising. Well, Mars/M&Ms has gone a step further by creating an entire candy bar just for Indiana Jones. It’s like a regular Snickers bar, except they’ve added “exotic spices” (which I still can’t figure out what they actually are… maybe cayenne pepper and something else), and a hint of coconut.

Not to be outdone, M&Ms have also introduced a new Mint Crunch flavor, and the individual M&Ms are emblazoned with riffs on the M logo, with one wearing an Indiana Jones fedora and such, and well… they taste minty and crunchy. They also have regular and peanut M&Ms with these same new logos stamped on them, but this Mint Crunch flavor was concocted for Indiana Jones, who might have a sweet tooth that we didn’t know about.

Admittedly, I’m a fan for gimmicky candies. When Reeses came out with all the billion new Peanut Butter Cups flavors over the past several years, I went a bit nuts buying them all. Still, this Adventure Bar is pretty damn tasty. It didn’t make me have any adventures, but it’s darn good. I could pass on the M&Ms, but bring on the coconut & spices or whatever the hell, and I’m sold. I can only hope I can smuggle a few of these into the movie a month from now.

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