At the grocery store, I had a little impulse buy. I passed Fruit Gushers on my way down the aisle, and recent discussions of them put them back into my mind, and then I saw something on Imgur about somebody wrapping fruit gushers inside fruit roll-ups, described as the "ultimate stress relief."
So I bought some of both, to try.
What a raging disappointment.
First of all, everything's so much fucking smaller than it was back in the 80's/90's. The fruit roll-ups are easily 20-30% less in area than I remember, and the "roll" is severely lacking in QC - as often as not, it is not squarely on the plastic and thus sticks to itself and doesn't "unroll" without being shredded.
As for the fruit gushers, I never had them as a kid, but I did have other similar fruit snacks (I was a "Shark-Bites" eating maniac), and let me tell you, these pouches are about half the size of what I remembered them being. The contents contained within each packet I would barely describe as a "mouthful."
Furthermore, the "snacks" themselves are a bit disappointing as well. The fruit gushers exterior is made of the same sort of plasticized-fruit-weave/mesh "material" as the fruit roll-ups (I was expecting something a little more gummy/gelatin based from the look of the things in the commercials), and the amount of liquid in each one I'd call roughly a drop. Not even a milliliter. Heck, I think the entire volume of space occupied by a single fruit gusher is less than a cubic centimeter, all told. The juice is tasty enough I suppose, but I was expecting a lot more of it... as in, I expected it to, you know, GUSH when bitten. Instead, a tiny amount of fruit-fluid is secreted into your mouth.
Thoroughly underwhelmed by both the products individually, I attempted to re-create the imgur picture I had seen. Getting a fruit roll-up unrolled intact was a bit of a trial, as I mentioned earlier, and then there barely seemed to be enough fruit gushers in a single pouch to make the effort worth it. What I was left with was not any kind of fruit candy tamale, as I had come to expect, but instead it looked closer to some kind of neon plastic reefer.
At any rate, I bit into it to see if it was, indeed, good stress relief. My disappointment continued unabated. Indeed, it was nearly palpable. I remember fruit roll-ups having a bit more "tug" in them, so that biting off a piece took at least a little effort... but now it tears effortlessly, leaving no tactile satisfaction in the ripping off of a chunk of the ersatz fruit-bean pod. Chewing the bite was similarly unimpressive - as mentioned before, the casings of the fruit gushers have a taste and texture that more or less mimics the fruit roll-ups exactly, so it begs the question of why even bother combining the two... much of the same effect could have been had simply by leaving the fruit roll-up rolled up and forgoing the fruit gushers entirely. Oh, sure, that tiny little drip of juice soon followed, but really at that point it was all lost in the mushy fruit-and-saliva-with-plastic-aftertaste paste that my teeth listlessly nudged around my palate.
All said and done, I've now got an opened box of each item that I am not sure I even want to bother finishing, even though I'm pretty sure I could do so to both in seconds and still be hungry for an actual meal.
Feh.