Loss of Tan
By: Karen Wennberg
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February 12, 2008
As I have been recently reminded of the wonderful childhood era called the 80s, it occured to me while eating a bag of M&Ms yesterday that something was missing. Something I recalled from days long past, just out of the edge of memory. And then it hit...
“What happened to the tan M&Ms?”
I started by asking my roommates, who being 20-somethings should be able to recall with some accuracy their pre-adolescent sugar intakes including brands/colors/shapes/quantities/how often their sibling stole from their Halloween stash and WHO licked my giant gobstopper because I KNOW it was purple and not red last time I looked! Why did I even care? I just wanted reassurance that it did at one point exist because my memory is cheese-holed enough as it is, and I don't want to be worrying about its depreciation even more as I approach the benchmark quarter-century. So after asking around I finally got a few nods, but mostly strange looks and ambivalence. And then I tried...
the internet.
The place where mysteries are solved and instant answers are offered to your every inquiry and fancy! And then some. Oh, and then some to infinity and into your deepest nightmares. If you look too hard, every subject becomes horrifying on the internet.
Take this woman for example:
“Do you know the biggest travesty of all? Where did my favorite color, the Light Brown M&M go? Why did it have to get pushed over by the ugly (no offense) blue? Every time I open a packet of M&Ms now the blue ones stick out like an eye sore. They do not belong! I want my light browns! Sniffle
One can only hope that Mars will decide to bring the light brown back. I’ve given up on the hopes they might change the name back to “Plain”. Such changes to one of my favorite candies has permanently left its mark on me.”
Okay, so there’s a couple crazies out there with just a little TOO much nostalgia. With 6 billion people you know they’re out there. But I can’t trust her emotional recollection. Onward...
Here’s this “Needy or Greedy" site where people may petition for funds to well, fund any idea that could possibly taint their minds and thus the internet:
“Tan was a cooler color and at this point, it carries major nostalgia points. Let's start a campaign for Classic M&M's. $1000 might pay for office supplies, maybe some print-ads, maybe a web site, aimed at pressuring the company into restoring them.”
Oh people of the internet, you amuse me!
“If you are a true TAN FAN when it comes to M&M's, then you must visit the official Friends of Tan page - it is truly awesome and I now feel like a complete person . This page is to tan M&M fan's what AA is for alcoholics. If you don't care about the eradication of tan, don't bother - we don't want to hear any pro-blue comments. You guys are messed up.”
No wonder it's so hard to write a proper paper these days with sources like these fouling up the web! I needed visuals. So I find a candy picture from an image search, and it appears to include light brown! Unfortunately it is from this site where you can order gumball machine candy in bulk, and according to their site design, they haven’t bought new supplies of candy since about, oh, 1995. (you can tell internet age by number of scrolls it takes to get to the bottom of a page, similar to counting the rings of a tree. Also for each 8-bit color used in text, subtract 2 years.)
But even new-fangled sites with more Bits and Flashes are hardly ever worth the server space if their purpose is to create marketing atrocities such as these:
I JUST WANT TO EAT THE CHOCOLATE BITS FOR GODS SAKE
please no more nightmares of personified candy
An M&M carrot?
AN M&M CARROT???
WHATJARGHR*U#@&%
After wasting many precious minutes, I eventually found the hard evidence needed to prove that tan M&Ms did indeed exist. Mars Inc. supplies that in 1995 the company created a public contest to update their look and offer the choice up to the general public to pick a single new candy color. By democratic process, done with perhaps more accuracy and enthusiasm than our own presidential election, blue was chosen over pink and purple. Tan was phased out!
And thus the era of tan came to a close in 1995, and soon thereafter and much to our relief, internet atrocities such as webrings, frames and embedded midis. Thank God for progress! Oh, but with new color additives and more Hertzes of internet does not always come quality. With great power comes great...stupidity.
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Comments
goodnight, sweet prince.
I remember voting for a new color. I may have even voted for blue. But at the time, I don't believe I was told that the new color would REPLACE a current color. That kind of information should not be withheld when making decisions of this magnitude.
why doesn't m&m just make bags o tan for these nutjobs?
i think i voted for blue. now i always eat the blue first, out of sole appreciation for blue. or because i have odd organizational skills and like to eat only one color at a time, and blue sometimes happens to be first.
I myself voted for blue too, out of hatred for girly colors during my tomboy phase.
You all contributed to the demise of the tan m&m. I hope you are happy now.
I would blame David Lee Roth and Van Halen... But I thnk that it was a "no brown M&M" clause in their contarct and not in fact Tan.
i never understood why M&Ms needed TWO kinds of brown. plus, their tan ones were the color of poop.
It just goes to show how they keep trying to rid the world of all the light skinned objects....I will scream and shout unitl the end..."HELL NO, WE WON'T GO!!!"
Even though, I am light skinned, being
American Indian/Black/Puerto Rican can make me a little bright...Hey, I'm proud to be light and still able to be in the sun as long as I want....LIGHT SKIN IS STILL IN, DAMN IT!! <---Just loves herself, can't you tell?!! ;)
What confuses me is that the first picture shows blue and tan M&Ms alongside each other, when they didn't exist simultaneously. Do you think this is an M&M conspiracy, that they are still making the tans and just hiding them from the public???
I heard that the tan M&M collapsed during a concert...and had to be taken to the hospital...and when they pumped his stomach they saw that it was filled with semen :~O Or wait...no, I think he ate a bunch of Pop rocks and drank some Diet Coke after...and his stomach exploded and he died. Yeah that was it.
Blue M&Ms are my favorite. They just taste better. I dunno why. I know how you feel though, Karen. A few months ago, my little sister was studying for a science test and I noticed she had written down ROY G BV as an anagram to memorize the names of the hues in the visible spectrum. I corrected her, explaining that it was ROY G BIV, and that she had forgotten about Indigo. She looked at me like I was crazy. We opened her science book and I was shocked to see that INDIGO had been excluded from the chapter. Where did it go? Also Pluto is no longer a planet? WTF? My world is crumbling.
Indigo was named and defined by Issac Newton when he divided up the optical spectrum:- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, Indigo, Violet. Someone should take a serious look at the book if it is skipping out on things by Newton.