What is it with doing away with orange-flavored things? When I posted the previous item about Hostess Orange Cupcakes disappearing from shelves, I was unaware that another orangey (and sugary-good) treat from my childhood has gone bye-bye: Orange Life Savers. According to this article, the Life Savers people changed their standard roll three years ago, dropping orange, lemon and lime in favor of raspberry, watermelon and blackberry.
Interesting. As a kid, I had an Uncle Nathan who never knew what to give me at Christmas or on my birthday so he usually gave me money plus a "Life Savers Gift Set." I guess these were sold at some store he frequented, probably the place he bought pipe tobacco. They were little books that you'd open and there'd be twelve rolls inside — one each of what then comprised the Life Savers line. Here — I'll show you a picture of one of them…
A nice little gift but I really wasn't a huge fan of most flavors. Actually, I wasn't big on hard candies or gum at all but the only ones that interested me at all were the orange and occasionally the peppermint, lemon or lime. Every birthday or Christmas, I thanked Uncle Nate for the Life Savers Gift Set, pulled out the roll that was all orange and maybe one or two others, then gave the rest away. In fact, I think I usually gave him the Butterscotch ones.
I'm pretty sure I read an article back then saying that the Orange Life Savers were the third best-selling variety, right behind the "Five Flavors" assortment and the Pep-o-Mint. Orange was one of the flavors in the assortment so I always thought my fave should have been regarded as the most popular.
I also read that the orange roll was introduced due to consumer demand. Apparently, the way Life Savers were then distributed, they were limited to twelve varieties at a time. I'm guessing this had something to do with the size of the racks of them you often found by the checkout counter in markets and drugstores. The article said — I'm remembering back close to a half-century here so cut me some slack — so many people had written in and said they wanted a whole roll of the orange that Life Savers complied, dropping its lowest-selling roll, which I recall as watermelon. If I'm remembering this correctly, it would seem like Watermelon Life Savers got the last laugh.
All of this raises one of those questions that I doubt anyone can answer. What happened to Orange Life Savers? Why were they so popular for such a long time and now, they've even been booted out of the basic Life Savers assortment. Did the recipe change? I doubt that. Does the current generation have less taste for orange? I doubt that, too. (Life Savers has a new flavor called Orange Mints and their Creme Savers line has an orange version.) What doomed the basic orange Life Saver? Did Billy Crystal sabotage its career?