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Snapchat Filter or ’90s Gushers Commercial?

I’d like you to think back to 1997. It was a simpler time. A better time. A time when a kid could be a kid, and you could call a neon-colored gummy candy composed of nothing but sugar a fruit snack, and get away with it.

It was also the year that birthed a series of bizarre ads for said fruit snacks that have haunted my dreams ever since. In them, any kid who ate Gushers immediately had their head turned into a giant piece of fruit. Suddenly your pals and classmates were walking, talking apples and oranges. Truly inspired stuff.

Over the past few weeks, these repressed memories came flooding back to me in the form of Snapchat filters which let users turn their faces into over-sized raspberries, strawberries, and pineapples. Here at Select All, we first made the Gushers comparison back in May, when Snapchat released a branded Taco Bell filter that let users render themselves as massive hard-shell tacos. (As did a number of Twitter users.) It’s a comparison Snapchat seems to have taken quite literally. (Snapchat did not immediately respond to request for comment.)

Snapchat has repeatedly come under fire as of late for creating filters that are racially offensive or bear a striking resemblance to art created by other people, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the giant-fruit-head filters are pretty innocuous. Not sure what the statute of limitations is for Gushers’ ownership of the giant-fruit-head space, though. Either way, Gushers should probably cut Snapchat a check for the best free product placement they’ve had since 2002. (Well, the best free product placement they’d had since 2002, until I wrote this post.)

Snapchat Filter or ’90s Gushers Commercial?