These are showing up here and there in Dollar Trees, long after the Transformer movies are blessedly fading memories: Special-edition Transformer M&Ms. They're strawberry flavored, with a peanut butter center, surrounded by a layer of chocolate, coated with the trademark M-labeled candy shell. Perhaps surprisingly, they taste pretty good, if somewhat different from what we've come to expect of M&Ms.
Y'know, if I hadn't seen these in the dollar store, I would never have even known they existed. When the Transformers movie was in theaters last summer, I don't remember any advertisements for special M&Ms. And I certainly don't remember seeing them in any of the usual retail candy outlets around here. It makes me wonder if the candies had as brief a flash in the pan as the movie did. And it makes me wonder why big companies like Mars really find it worth the time and cash it takes to retool a manufacturing line to make a tie-in product for something with such a short sales window. Just sort of makes me shake my head.
This, by the way, is a cross section of the Transformers M&M. It's kind of rough-edged because Lynnafred and I didn't even attempt to surgically split one with a scalpel or anything - she just bit one in half. Anyway, the peanut butter center is clearly visible, as is the chocolate surround and the candy shell. Careful nibbling revealed that the strawberry flavoring is found in the candy shell, probably in that first "primer" coat - the white layer between the chocolate and the colored shell. I hope you all appreciate the delicate and painstaking methodology we used to discover this flavoring secret.