3
All true; some opinion-based
1. If you bite into them quickly enough, they shatter nicely and you can chew them like most other crunchy candies. But if you wait even a second too long, you get a lot of sticky bits that are then even more difficult to suck on than the original, solid single piece would have been.2. In humid climates, you want to either eat your Jolly Ranchers quickly, or store them in a ziplock bag or something. They get all gross and sticky within a few days. No one likes that texture. It's hard to peel the plastic off, and then the outer layer of the candy is, like… gluey.
3. Jolly Ranchers used to be more of a rectangular shape. They seem to have moved to a more irregular, rounded shape in recent years. Easier quality control? Or did people just get tired of having the sharp angles ground into the roofs of their mouths?
4. They also used to be available in a square shape, similar to the shape of a Starburst. You could buy them in columnar packs, also similar to Starbursts. I haven't seen these in a while, but I'm not sure if it's because they don't make them, or my stores don't stock them, or if I just haven't looked carefully enough. These days I only encounter Jolly Rancher candies in bagged form, in the pegboard section of the candy aisle.
5. Who exactly is this rancher, and why is he or she jolly? I remember when I was a kid, Jolly Rancher candies actually had a pseudo-Western brand on the label, a stylized J and R inside a circle.
6. The name of the candy is actually just "Jolly Rancher," although almost everyone pluralizes it to "Ranchers." Grammatically, it's the same way that most people say "M&Ms," meaning that you never think of one single Jolly Rancher, you think of them by the handful.
7. There are a lot of flavor variants, but I still think the original flavors are the best. I also consider their Green Apple flavor to be iconic, the ideal against which all other Green Apple flavored candies must be measured up against. (I am less fond of the Cherry flavor.)
8. Intrepid drinkers can make their own Jolly Rancher-flavored vodka by virtue of dropping Jolly Rancher candies into a bottle of vodka and letting it sit overnight. This takes about a dozen candies per 8 ounces of vodka, and sounds absolutely revolting to me, but hey, different strokes fer different folks.
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