Even though I'm not a big fan of sour candy (I just don't have much tolerance for it), I really like Lemonheads.  It's more about the texture than the taste for me.  There is nothing like the texture of a Lemonhead!  Except I guess the texture of a Grapehead or Cherryhead.

This confused me, reading about all the other members of the Head family.  When I was a kid, growing up in Alaska in the 1980s there was a lot of stuff we just didn't get.  Everything had to be shipped up by barge from Seattle, and the distributors made some weird choices. 

Lacking the internet, basically if something didn't have a television ad campaign and wasn't being sold in Alaska, then I never heard of it.

A lot of odd things fell into this black hole on the Venn diagram of the intersection between those two sets.  Including, apparently, Lemonhead's cousins.  Everyone else already knows everything about Grapheads (formerly Alexander the Grape) and Cherryheads (formerly the unbearably racist candy Cherry Chan).  And Orangeheads (not sure if those are formerly anything or not).

So you can imagine my confusion on being confronted by a box of "Chewy Lemonhead & Friends."  First of all, the idea of a chewy Lemonhead completely defeats the purpose of the existence of Lemonheads.  Changing the texture of a Lemonhead is like creating a leftist PC feminist Rush Limbaugh, or a vegetarian shark.  I don't know what a chewy Lemonhead is, but it's not a Lemonhead.

Second, not knowing about the history of all the other Ferrara Pan sour candies, I was perplexed by his "friends."  

So basically they took their classic line of candies, changed the texture, and dumped them all into one big box.  Okay; I can work with that.

As with the Mike and Ike Berry Blast candies I recently reviewed, these candies were BEAUTIFUL.  Sure candy should be all about taste and texture, but appearance counts, too.  The rich color and gloss combined to look almost pearlescent.  

Except for the purple grape ones, which I thought were ugly.  And I didn't like their taste.  Definitely the losers of this assortment.

I like to nibble the outer coating off a Lemonhead, but this experience was not to be had with the chewy variety.  The flavor is still there, uncannily intact, but the texture is completely different.  It's like a Lemonhead-flavored jelly bean, basically.  Like a special round variant of Mike and Ike candies.  

The green apple and orange flavors were nothing to write home about, really.  But I did quite like the cherry ones.  They had a good Kool Aid-ish cherry flavor, with a nice sour kick.  And the cherry ones didn't taste quite as salty to me as the other flavors did.  

I have to say that the more I stared at the package, the weirder the characters seemed to me.  Something about the way that none of them seem to know what to do with their hands.  As if they had only recently been incarnated into these vaguely humanoid fruit bodies, and were still trying to figure out what kid of poses to strike.  Or maybe they're just tripping over their inexplicably large white cartoon shoes.  And let's not discuss the fact that they are naked but for shoes and a bow tie.  Brr, now I'm creeped out.