I've been a fan of Nerds candy ever since they first hit our shores in the late 1980s.  As much as I love Nerds, I loathe all of their unusual variants.  It seems like every few years, the Wonka Candy Company finds a way to turn out another weird Nerds product.  From Nerds Cereal in the 1980s to today's topic, Giant Chewy Nerds candy.  

Maybe it's because the poor Nerds have been so thoroughly anthropomorphized into cartoon characters, or maybe it's because they are the only Wonka candy anyone really recognizes (second to Runts, I suppose).  The actual original Nerds are tiny nodules of candy.  A hard candy shell over a compacted, powdery filling.  They are small and crunchy and tangy and delicious.  

Giant Chewy Nerds are pretty much the opposite of that.

The first thing you notice about Giant Chewy Nerds is the crazy-ass colors.  Orange for some reason was over-represented in my packet.  And it's a weird orange - flat and pale, like an unadventurous shade of house paint.  All of the colors are in a strange shade, skewed just slightly off from what you would expect.  They are not appealing.  They do not look tasty.

I recently puzzled over the bumps on the coating of Boston Baked Beans, before deciding that they must be nodules of sugar or small fragments of peanut.  Giant Chewy Nerds have little nodules as well.  Perhaps these are meant to evoke the lumpiness of the original Nerds candy.  All they do is make the candies look formidable, like something you probably shouldn't be putting in your mouth.

On the up side, the little hand grenade-like bumps do help keep the candies from rolling around on my desk.  I always appreciate that.

The outer layer of Giant Chewy Nerds is a candy coating which tastes and crunches just like original Nerds.  It's just enough to make you nostalgic for the real candy.  Inside is a blecchy jelly bean.  I do not like it when they put jelly beans inside things.  There seems to be no reason for it.  Why would you do such a thing?  I would like Nerds-flavored jelly beans, without the weird crunchy coating.  I dislike biting through a crunchy outside and finding a gummy interior.  I can't explain why.  It just gives me the horrors.

The flavors are, as previously mentioned, exactly that of the Nerds they represent.  Tangy, fruity, wholly unrealistic, and delicious.  It's a shame the flavor is tied to such a shudder-inducing form factor.  A lot of people seem to really like these, but I just can't get past my gut-level reaction at thetexture.

In the name of experimentation I tried tossing several Giant Chewy Nerds into my mouth at once.  The resulting texture was even worse than eating one solo.  With several Giant Chewy Nerds, the outer coating forms a sort of textural paste that plays crunchingly against the gummy interior.  They linger in the mouth far too long, requiring too much chewing before they dissolve.  And they made me really thirsty.  

DO NOT WANT.