Maybe it's because the bars could turn dangerous? Lacey offers a fascinating anecdote: "When it was given out at the home opener of the Yankees game, the fans started throwing them out onto the field because Reggie was batting really well," she recalled. A slightly-tweaked Reggie! bar with peanut butter instead of caramel made a brief comeback in the 90s, but it was gone for good just a short time later. It was originally intended as a novelty candy and made its debut at the Yankees home opener in 1976, but proved so popular that it stuck around before getting benched in 1982. Named for baseball great and onetime New York Yankees right fielder Reggie Jackson, the Reggie! bar was a round, milk chocolate-covered bar with a peanuts and a caramel center. So which discontinued candy bars continue to pull at the heartstrings of sugar fiends the national over? We posed the question to Benjamin as well as to Beth Kimmerle, author of Candy: The Sweet History and curator of The Candy Wrapper Museum and Darlene Lacey, author of Classic Candy: America's Favorite Sweets, 1950-80 and owner of research-based historical candy store True Treat Historic Candy in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Susan Benjamin, author of the recently released history of American candy Sweet as Sin, estimates that there were as many as 100,000 companies producing candy bars during that decade. Big-time outfits swallowed up smaller ones, often choosing to cease production of sweets that in some cases had been around since the 1920s, apparently a time of great candy bar prosperity. A_ccording to conversations with several candy historians_-a very real and fantastic profession-true, deep-seated obsession is reserved for a slightly older class of candies, many of them casualties of the American candy industry's shift from small regional producers to large national conglomerates in the 1980s. They're not always the candies a millennial might immediately think of, like the discontinued Butterfinger BB's (gone forever) and Dunkaroos (only available in Canada) of the 1990s. There are noted, glorious exceptions-chocolates and sweets from yesteryear that continue to command outsized interest. Before long, you can find only stale specimens listed for obscene prices on eBay, and some time after that, no one really thinks of them at all, except to say, "Hey, remember that candy from way back when?"
When a factory shuts down production of some past-its-prime candy, those sorry sweets disappear from supermarket shelves and depart from mainstream consciousness.
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