Hope is Making Believe

When I read about the candy wholesaler in Florida recalling thousands of bags of candy with toys evoking the attack on the Twin Towers, I shuddered. Think of the parents whose children ended up with the toys. They weren’t pleased.

I know that the wholesaler apologized, saying it had no idea what it was distributing, and nobody is really all that mad at Lisy Corporation. After all, why should a distributor check to see what’s in 14,000 bags it sends out to stores to sell to children? Nobody is too upset with the importer either. How was L&M Import to know that a “plastic swingset” was constructed of the two towers with a plane in between?

And how were the people who manufactured it to know that what was a popular item in Asia wouldn’t exactly fly in U.S. markets? Maybe, in fact, the shipment was a mistake. Perhaps somebody spaced out, and that’s why the toy ended up far away from home in a market bound to react with horror.

A few days after the story broke, I found myself buying a bottle of water. After giving the clerk money for the water, I noticed a box of candy and had a flashback to the time when spicy jawbreakers were kind of fun to put in my mouth. So I picked one up. I read the label. Although I shuddered, I decided to buy the candy anyway.

“May I get this Atomic Fireball too?” I asked the clerk. It was a rhetorical question. All she needed was my dime, and the candy was mine. I put it in my bag and took it with me. I carried it around on errands and thought about what was in my bag. Would Atomic Fireballs go over big in, say, Hiroshima, I wondered? Were they all that popular elsewhere?

Later, I took the candy out to read the fine print, which allowed me to do some research. The manufacturer, Ferrara Pan, introduced this item in 1954. According to the candy manufacturer’s website, 15 million fireballs are consumed around the world each week. That’s a lot of hot and spicy fireballs. They come in all sizes, too, from the individual serving I bought to a box that has an even bigger illustration of an atomic bomb detonating on the front.

The toy that accidentally ended up in Florida had a purple plane perched between two orange or purple towers, with the nose of the plane pushing against one of the towers. For days, people expressed opinions about this peculiar toy in the news and on Internet discussion boards. A few wondered what the big deal was. Other voiced outrage. Many raised their eyebrows at the popularity of such a toy in other parts of the world. How creepy could a toy get?

Given the timing, this toy has struck a nerve. It’s hard not to imagine thousands of children pretending to take down the Twin Towers. However, we know that not every child that plays with a fashion-conscious Barbie grows up with her values. Many children assign toys their own stories. One can only hope that some children out there, given different perspectives, are using the infamous swingset to make-believe a different ending to the tragedy.

I think it’s weird to eat candy evoking a bomb, but I’m the sort of person who thinks twice before biting the head off a gummy bear. If I were a child, I’d extinguish my fireball. Then I’d dismantle the plane from the Twin Tower toy and let all the people out so they could go home.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 9 September 2004, p. A6. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2004.