This must be one of the most successful marketing campaigns in all of candy-dom.  Even I heard about it, and I don't have a television, for pity's sake!  I must have seen the ad on Hulu or maybe the AdultSwim.com website in between episodes of Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law or something.

These are the same basic concept as Sour Skittles: you take a perfectly innocent little Skittle, and you drench it in some kind of strange, occult sort of powder.  Except that in case of drenching them in sour, the mad scientists at Skittles have drenched it in… Pop Rocks powder.  Or the like.

Just as with Sour Skittles, the underlying Skittle is a regular flavor which you can find elsewhere in the line.  In this case, the flavors are Berry Punch, Melon Berry, Raspberry, Strawberry, and Wild Cherry.  That's right: it's the Wild Berry collection, straight up.

Except that… is it just my imagination, or do these Skittles have less flavor?  It must be my imagination, right?  Why would they re-tool their machinery and processing line just to create Skittles "just like those over there, but with less flavor"?  It beggars belief.  Nevertheless, it seems to me that once you lick off the powder (if you dare, or if you are of an inquisitive mind), the Skittle underneath is lacking in some of its typical oomph.

The flavor of the underlying Skittle may be compromised by whatever they have to do to the candy shell to get the powder to stick.  (In so far as it sticks at all - which in my experience most of it doesn't.)  Or it could just be that the flavor is simply overwhelmed by the fizzy powder.

But you don't care.  You want to know about the fizzle.  It's… I guess it's fizzly.  I only ate one at a time; the effect may be stronger if you knock back a bunch of them at once.  It's substantially less fizz than Pop Rocks proper.  It's more like just barely licking the edge of an Alka Seltzer.  Or holding a mouthful of soda.  

The ads make it sound like WHOA STAND BACK THESE THINGS ARE REMARKABLE.  But believe me, Fizzl'd Fruit Skittles are a lot less "impactful" than a static electricity shock to the tongue would be.  In fact, I'm not even sure I would notice the fizzle if I hadn't been told about it ahead of time.

In exchange for delivering a mildly interesting sensation, the powder tastes… really, just awful.  You could have labeled these Salty Skittles and I would have believed it.  And it's not a nice salty, like pretzels - it's a gross salty, like stale sweat.  The aftertaste is unpleasantly chemical and salty, as well.

Lo and behold, when I compared the nutritional data with that for regular Skittles, and it was virtually identical.  The only explanation I can think of is that they took out some of the sodium from the Skittles candy, in an attempt to balance out the terrible saltiness of the fizz powder.    

Fizzl'd Fruits Skittles has finally managed to dislodge Smoothie Skittles from the spot at the bottom of my Skittles preferences.  They're gross, and bad, and I really would not recommend them to anyone.