Ambiguity has never looked so exciting.
The Whatchamacallit (for which I can think of no practical abbreviation) is a candy bar without any real identity.
Hence the name, or, really, lack of one. It was introduced in 1978 with little to no fanfare, spent 9 years sitting on store shelves not being eaten by anyone, and was then redesigned in 1987 to include a thin strip of caramel.
The bar's name is by far its biggest selling point. Not that it tastes bad, because it doesn't or that it's stylish packaging isn't appealing, because it might be. It's just that the name "Whatchamacallit" adds an attractive allure to an otherwise plain candy.
So where did the name come from? A genius marketing intern at the Hershey company? Maybe a complicated psychological survey that determined the best name to boost sales? Perhaps a humorous story about a CEO who couldn't remember what the new candy bar was called at a company meeting?
Not nearly that interesting. Apparently the phrase "Whatchamacallit" was used in some (presumably awful) comedy in 1978 and Hershey's took the name. That's it.They just took the phrase and named a candy bar with it. That's like releasing a chocolate bar in 1991 and naming it "Dididothat."
The Whatchamacallit that might have been.
But it worked. Ridiculously, the Whatchamacallit is still around and, we have to assume, still being eaten by somebody. For instance, I ate one this one time in 2009.
Still, the bar's popularity has never been equal to that if its more successful brothers and sisters, and unlike many of them, the whatchamacallit doesn't have much of an overseas market. As far as I could tell the only other country it's sold in is Canada, and there under the assumed name "Special Crisp." That name is decidedly less stupid. Yet somehow the bar is less popular in Canada than the US. So maybe we're stupid. Or maybe the name is not stupid but actually clever and interesting... or we're idiots. This classic commercial makes an assinine case for Hershey believing the latter.
Anyway, the bar is made up of a crunchy peanut wafer, chewy caramel and chocolatey flavored candy coating...
See that? I didn't say "milk chocolate coating," I said, "Chocolatey flavored candy coating." Big difference. You see since late 2008 the good people at Hersheys have removed cocoa butter from most of their candies and replaced it with plain old vegetable oil. Yum!
Well it turns out that US law only allows something to be called chocolate if it actually contains cocoa ingredients. So now most Hersheys "chocolate" is called "chocolate flavored candy," which is secret marketing code for "crap."
So, where was I? Ah, right. The bar is made up of a crispy peanut wafer, chewy caramel and then dipped in crap. The wafer does have a nice Kit Katty crunch to it, although the flavor is distinctly nuttier than a Kit Kat. The best way to describe the wafer is to say that it tastes like a a Reeses Crispy Crunchy bar, except with less peanuts and more cardboard. Meanwhile, The caramel is one micron thick and slightly chewy. It has a nice buttery sweet flavor, but your left wanting much more. Finally, adhering to Hershey's "make it sweet or die" policy, the crap coating is cloying but "chocolaty."
The end result is a candy bar that is as unmoving to eat as a cold piece of American cheese in between two pieces of white bread.
Or, more relevantly, the Whatchamacallit tastes like a cheap rip off of a Twix bar. It can be summed up in one syllable: "Eh." That and a helpless shrug that says "Well, I bought it so I guess I'll eat it."
It's not that the candy bar is bad it's just that you don't give a damn about it. Eat it, don't eat it, throw it in the river, who cares? The only people who get "in the mood" for a Whatchamacallit are people who grew up with it. Otherwise you buy it because of its name and wonder what funny story led to its creation. But little do you know that the back story is more uninteresting than the bar itself and the that the whole experience is likely to be a terrible let down.
Whatchamacallit is like an unwanted baby.
TL\DR - Its parent never planned for it, didn't see it coming and don't really care about it. They gave it some awful, meaningless name, like Adolf Favre Foucault Manson, only because the nurse asked for one, and then "accidentally" left it in the hospital and had to come back to pick it up. Now it lives in the candy bar equivalent of under the stairs and watches its siblings make something of themselves while mommy and daddy loosen it's jaw chains to feed it porridge once a week.
