Hot Week: Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Hot Gobstoppers!!

Welcome back to the second day of our Cinnamon Hot Week!  Today we’ll be shining a delicious light on a treat from the early 1990’s; Willy Wonka’s Everlasting HOT Gobstoppers!

Released all the way back in 1991, Everlasting Hot Gobstoppers were what you might expect, a cinnamon hot version of the Willy Wonka classic Gobstopper product.  At the time, a standard non-hot Everlasting Gobstopper box looked like this:

Sunmark – Willy Wonka – Everlasting Gobstopper – candy box – 1991

While I do have that spiffy 1991 Willy Wonka Gobstopper box in my collection, I don’t have a Hot Gobstopper example (but I’d love to find one).   Fortunately, my pal Brandon does have a Hot Gobstopper box and he shared a scan of it for today’s post – it’s pretty awesome:

Sunmark – Willy Wonka – Everlasting Hot Gobstopper – candy box – 1991 – courtesy Brandon Coker

So just like standard Gobstoppers candies, Hot Gobstoppers had multiple layers, though rather than a variety of fruit flavors each one was a variety of hot cinnamon.

Unfortunately, Everlasting Hot Gobstoppers didn’t catch on and were discontinued within a few years.   While that might be the end of the story for Hot Gobstoppers, it’s not all there is to tell.   Looking back, Willy Wonka’s Hot Gobstoppers have some interesting ancestral confectionery roots that I’d like to explore.

Most recent to its history would have to be Willy Wonka’s Daredevils from a decade earlier [I first wrote about Daredevils back in March 2012].   Also a hot cinnamon jawbreaker and also with multiple layers of hot flavor, Willy Wonka’s Daredevils mixed it up with white “cool down rings”:

Sunmark – Willy Wonka’s – Daredevils hot jawbreaker candy – box – 1982

If we stretch the confectionery-evolutionary lens back even further, you can find a product from the 1960’s which I would consider the grandfather of Everlasting Hot Gobstoppers; Breaker Confections “H” Bombs cinnamon jawbreakers:

Breakers’ Fine Candies – Breaker Confections – H Bombs hot jawbreakers candy box – 1960’s

The H-Bomb-to-Hot-Gobstopper lineage is clarified when you realize that Breaker Confections (the maker of “H” Bombs) would go on to be the original manufacturers of Everlasting Gobstoppers in the 1970’s.  Breaker Confections along with Gobstoppers would be brought under the Willy Wonka Brands umbrella by the early 1980’s with Daredevils and Hot Gobstoppers to follow.  So as you can see, it all fits together in one devilishly hot and deliciously layered history.

And that’s everything for today’s Hot Week entry and the story of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Hot Gobstoppers.  See you next time!

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This post was a part of CollectingCandy.com’s Cinnamon Hot Week!