Yowie Chocolate Christmas Figures!
Little chocolate confections with toys inside of them have always been a slight fascination of mine. Not as much as Lego, Plug n Play games, bootleg NES/Genesis gaming, or Toys to Life franchises, but it's there. I just love the idea of getting a little candy with a little inedible toy surprise inside, in the same way that people love getting subscription boxes and blind bags. You have some chocolate to snack on, a cheap toy to play around with as you munch, what's not to love?
...Well, for me, the price. As much as these things fascinate me, I'm just not tempted to spend $4-5 on some subpar chocolate with a sub-dollar store toy inside, especially when I can get a big bar of quality chocolate or bag of candy for that much. And that's the main reason why I don't make finding these things as much of a hobby as my other collections. Luckily, I was able to find the things I'm featuring today for only 65 cents each in a Christmas clearance sale at my local WinCo. I grabbed the last two, and it's unlikely I'll ever find a deal like this again...
Being an American, it's much more uncommon for me to find toy-hiding chocolate confections than it is for most of the rest of the world. Since the mid-90s, the FDA has prohibited the sale of any food that contains an inedible element to it, as it presents a "major choking hazard." ...I would argue that if you're not capable of telling the difference between chocolate and the toy inside, you probably shouldn't be eating candy to begin with, but, hey, I'm not an overpaid, overparanoid federal cartel...
But, in recent years, manufacturers have found loopholes large enough to get their products sold in American stores, so nowadays, I can walk into a nearby Walmart and find a few of these toy-containing chocolates lined up by the checkout lanes. Not to mention that I can still get smuggled Kinder Eggs at the swap meet down the street, despite their still being banned in this country, but I'm not about to incriminate myself by featuring them here...
And that brings me back to the brand I have today: Yowie. As you can probably tell by the name, Yowie is an Australian brand founded in 1997 and manufactured by Cadbury. The shapes are based on variations of the mythical Yowie, a humanoid creature that protects the Australian wildlife from encroaching humans. The toys inside Yowie figures are usually little animal figurines, which reside in the "Yowie Kingdom" where they can roam free of the destructive influence of humanity. Think Captain Planet mixed with My Pet Monster.
Seeing as what I bought are Christmas variants of the Yowie line, I'm going to assume that the toys inside are also going to have a Christmas flavor to them. ...If I'm lucky. The two I picked up are "Crag", a crocodile-Yowie hybrid, and "Rumble", the red kangaroo-Yowie combination.
And while it's hard to make out due to the foil plaement, Crag has reindeer antlers while Rumble is wearing a Santa outfit. Cute.
Just to appease those FDA guys, the wrappers contain TWO warnings not to give these to anyone under three. ...Or any kid whose parent stocks their toy chest with plastic bags, then goes to watch TV in the other room... So the warning should actually read "Keep away from kids with yuppie parents..."
Confusingly, the wrapper also states "2 Pieces." ...Are they counting the chocolate and the toy, or do both halves of the chocolate qualify as "2 Pieces?"
When we finally take the wrapper off, we find... That one of them didn't quite survive the carbon-freezing process... The designs also don't quite match what was on the foil, depicting just a blandish happy-looking monster outline in the chocolate. Which I'm pretty sure both candies share, but it's hard to tell...
On the one that's mostly intact, we can see that they've gotten around regulations by clearly having a seam between the chocolate and plastic casing inside, so it doesn't come as a complete surprise that the toy-filled chocolate confection actually has a toy inside! ...Alright, enough passive-aggressiveness. It's the holidays! ...According to this chocolate, anyway.
Speaking of which, the chocolate's... Passable? I tried both the smoother chocolate and the stuff that looks like it's been sitting around a while, and both tasted like what you'd get out of a dollar store chocolate advent calendar. It's not what I'd call even average quality, and one of the reason why I prefer to spend the full price of one of these things on a Symphony bar instead. ...Still, as long as it doesn't reignite my food poisoning, it's fine, I guess.
And with the chocolate gone, we're left with these vaguely Yowie-shaped yellow-and-red plastic capsules and the goodies inside.
Which, as I predicted, are two animal statuettes. For what they are, they're not too bad. They're solid rubbery plastic with a little bit of detailing where it's needed. They're made of relatively quality materials, similar to what you'd find in most other hobby toy animal statuettes in a zoo gift shop or similar. I personally prefer a little bit more functionality and poseability to my collectibles, but if you're into these things, they're ok.
Though I think they went a little overboard on the red paint for the Chimpanzee. ...Unless they WANTED it to look like it was doing a Masque of the Red Death cosplay...
Being an environmentally-focused line, the toys come with two strips of paper, giving a few factoids about the animal and its endangered level, so young "Yowieans" can take a stand to protect these species from extinction.
Which you can find out more about at the official website of Yowie World. If you're into that, more power to you! ...I'm just a little disappointed that these don't also come with an endangered list for the toys, so I can know if what I got is worth a small fortune to collectors...
Also, the Yowies around the logo look much better than their foil equivalents. I look forward to their Qubo show, if ever that happens.
And those are the Yowie chocolate surprise figures. Since this is probably a one-time thing, I don't see the sense in giving them a full breakdown or overall score, but they're pretty... "OK" across the board. The chocolate was below average, but it wasn't horrible and it didn't taste expired and crumbly. The statuettes are pretty high quality for the most part, and pretty much what I expected to get for the price I paid. ...Though I wouldn't be as forgiving if I paid full price for these... I'm also a little disappointed that, despite being packaged as such, they had nothing to do with Christmas. You could have wrapped these in any foil and they'd fit just as well... Overall, as chocolate surprise toys, they're decent. I probably won't go for them again, but if you're into animal toys with an environmental theme, and you find them on sale, you'll probably be satisfied. Me, I've had my fun, so you can eagerly await these toys in their capsules showing up in a Savers around the Salt Lake area.
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