Happy 40th Birthday, Skor!
By Michael Jones | May 8, 2021
How’s the old saying go, Forty is the old age of youth? If so, it’s time to wish a happy 40th birthday to the oldest youthful candy bar and – dare we say – the best piece of candy to come out of the 1980s.
Milk chocolate, brittle toffee, an oh-so-satisfying crunch, sticky bites that linger in your teeth for hours, and… a name that literally means shoes in Swedish?
That’s right, we’re talking about Skor bars, the Hershey concocted candy bar meant to compete with the classic Heath Bar. Skor has hit the big 4-0.
If Heath was your Coca-Cola, Skor was your Pepsi. If Heath was your Golden Girls, Skor was your Empty Nest. If Heath was Tiffany, Skor was your Debbie Gibson. And one bite of a Skor bar could literally turn you into a blonde Swedish bombshell (or so the commercial goes).
Apparently eating Skor bars can turn you into ABBA.
But for true candy connoisseurs, Skor deserves recognition all its own. Skor launched in 1981, and here are the key differences between Skor and Heath: Skor is thinner, as if someone took a Heath Bar and put it in a panini press; Skor’s toffee is stickier and richer which, yes, means you’ll be digging glorious toffee out of your teeth; and Skor, at least according to the Sierra Club, doesn’t include palm oil, which we’ll say automatically makes it a winner.
But this is a nostalgia site and that’s where the real joy of Skor Bars lie. And yes, the name is one giant candy clusterf*ck. Whether it was done on purpose or whether some poor copywriter was unceremoniously fired after naming it, “skor” is the swedish word for shoes. “Skör” however, with the umlaut over the “o” is the Swedish word for brittle. That’s probably what Hershey execs were going for, but hey, we like shoes and we like buttery toffee. Throw chocolate into the mix and you could name it the Swedish word for trash and we’d eat it. (The Swedish word for trash, by the way, is skräp and that could definitely work as a candy bar, albeit one probably with raisins.)
And those Skor commercials from the 1980s are just a buffet of yum. Like this Silk Stalkings-esque clip where a man named John walks into his dimly-lit bachelor pad, hits the play button on his answering machine, and listens to a cavalcade of shit pour in through the messages. First his Jaguar is in the shop and isn’t fixed. Second his boat is busted and needs a new part. Third his friend Derek cancels on their squash game. Fourth – and this is the real kicker – his girlfriend Angela cancels their dinner date and says she’s going to play squash with Derek.
Does a broken-down Jaguar, a busted boat, and a friend cheating on his girlfriend get John depressed? Absolutely not, and it’s because he has a glass bowl full of Skor bars in his bar cabinet. And then the tagline really hits home: “Skor – indulgence you can trust.” That’s right, fuck Jaguars, boats, and Derek and Angela. Skor will never let you down.
Or how about this 1984 commercial that is perfect for those of us who’ve gained some pandemic weight.
“No matter how much you exercise, everyone deserves an exercise in indulgence,” says the actress, plucked straight out of the 1980s Crystal Light universe in her aerobics garb. And then she chows down on a Skor bar, while giving a Zagat-level review of why the candy bar is so delicious. You can almost feel the toffee sticking to her teeth straight from the screen.
And of course, what 80s ad campaign wouldn’t be complete without a commercial that takes place in an office. Some poor chap is stressed out from shuffling papers around their desk, and needs just a moment of indulgence to survive the capitalist corporate grind and pretend like he cares about whatever his company is doing and that it’s not just crushing his soul bit by bit serve as afternoon pick me up. What do they do? Reach for a Skor bar, and get ushered away to a world of indulgence full of bizarre stereotypes that would definitely not make it on the air today massages, symphony music and ballet dancers who perform private concerts just for you.
Yeah, okay, maybe they could have kept that ad.
Look, the 1980s were a dearth of new candy. Oh sure, we had Bar None in 1987, Ferrero Rocher chocolate hazelnut bomb balls in 1982, Airheads in 1985, and Nerds in 1983.
But when it comes to candy bars, when it comes to indulgence, when it comes to the type of candy that the pockets of your molars will remember for decades to come – well, nothing holds a candle to Skor.
Happy 40th birthday, Skor. You’re very hard to find in stores (it’s true, read the Amazon reviews), so don’t get any ideas of retiring. After this COVID year, we all need some indulgence we can trust.
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.