Poll 100 full panels of 100 Family Feud survey respondents, and I sincerely doubt, with every last drop of mouthwater I have ready to dribble, that anyone would choose Jolly Rancher as the candy most deserving of a breakfast cereal.

I mean, first of all, Jolly Ranchers are popular for having several distinct, atomically potent candy flavors—each a strong personality that threatens to react with combustive volatility if kept too close to another. Second of all, they’re just not that great. Sure, I have a soft spot for the Blue Raspberry Jolly Ranchers I used to melt raw spots in my tender palate, but put these glossy little cylinders next to just about any chocolate candy and I’d feed every Jolly Rancher on Earth to a cabal of feral hogs if it meant getting a Three Musketeers Cereal with freeze-dried nougat.

But I get it: General Mills is clearly trying to get the most money possible out of their Hershey brand partnership. And even though competitor Kellogg’s is probably chuckling with knowing condescension at General Mills for picking up a brand that produced one of the worst Pop-Tarts crossovers, here I sit with a box of Jolly Rancher Cereal regardless.

Clearly trying to ride the tattered coattails of one Sour Patch Kids Cereal—who left in its Warhead-impacted wake a sense of sour delirium surrounding tarter cereals. But does Jolly Rancher Cereal deserve the same sort of hype-worthy hysteria? I’ve got mistletoe on hand, so it’s time to pucker up.

Jolly Rancher Cereal pieces look like Crunch Berries that got noggin-boinked by an ACME anvil. And I’m afraid that’s the nicest thing I can say about them.

If you had told me in January—my mouth still recovering from a Sour Patch Kaiju attack—that by the year’s end I’d come to reflect fondly on SPK cereal, and as a result of an infernal imitator, no less, I’d probably want you sour, sweet and gone from my life. Yet here I am, white-knuckling a bowl of red–green–blue–purple deceit while visions of gumdrop-vandalizing soured children danse macabre in my head.

I can’t delay the inevitable any more, so here goes: other reviewers who gave early thoughts on Jolly Rancher Cereal have compared it to Trix, essentially saying it was just a lazy reskin. But let me be the first to tell you that such statements are offensive to Trix, and any full-bodied cereal, at that. Because even disregarding how Jolly Rancher Cereal doesn’t taste good, you can hardly taste it in the first place!  

Just picture a ski-suited Ned Flanders with two rotund Ranchers for buncheeks, proclaiming how it “feels like I’m eatin’ NOTHIN’ AT ALL!”

Forgive my serial overemphasis (it’s Christmas, after all), but the only thing worse than a nasty cereal is one that doesn’t even try to be thoroughly flavor blasted. I find it hard to believe that any General Mills taste tester grimaced through a spoonful of Grimace-y purple Ranchlets and said “yep, kids will love these!” There’s no depth to the artificial fruit flavor presented. The only specifically discernible fruit, or at least one familiar to fans of Jolly Ranchers, would be green apple—everything else is just vaguely punchy, like some sort of pickled jungle juice.

And those dominant green apple notes aren’t too pleasant either, existing as living proof of why Granny Smith’s potent pecks hardly ever make it into the cereal aisle. It’s just too tart and candied—which would be an issue of sensory overload if it weren’t for how thinly the flavor’s basted on the otherwise bland and irritatingly starchy corn puffs.

Let’s just say that unless your own Great-Grandmummy Smithnwesson has a killer recipe for Apple Ambrosia Popcorn Roundies, you’re probably not going to enjoy the taste.

Yes, the addition of milk is able to knock the tartness down a peg and more evenly meld the coated flavor with its base’s, but much like in Sour Patch Kids Cereal, we soon face a dire swamp of radioactive waste called sour endmilk. Though the practice has been heard of in some desert sects and occult dairy farming brotherhoods, it isn’t common to eat your cereal with buttermilk. As with its apple exposé, Jolly Rancher Cereal again teaches us a lesson of what not to do: turn sweet, fatty and creamy goodness into the industrial runoff from Nickelodeon Slime production.

Overall, Jolly Rancher Cereal is a hollow homunculus of a gimmick cereal. Sour Patch Kids Cereal may have lacked re-munch value, but it was far more original and daring in its adaptation of sweet ‘n’ sour candy—heck, it even had a piece shape that could double as a Legends of the Hidden Temple prop. Unless you’re jonesing over your cup of Hot Jones for a green apple-flavored cereal—no matter how much of a grueling gruel it may be—I recommend passing on Jolly Rancher Cereal. If you’re going for a goofy cereal, perhaps as a prankish potluck contribution, you can do a lot better. And if you want genuinely intense fruit flavor, this season’s crop was bountiful.

Sorry for being so harsh, General Mills. I just gotta make sure to nip any ideas of a Now & Later Cereal in the bud, you know?

The Bowl: Jolly Rancher Cereal

The Breakdown: Uninspired and underflavored, the buzz behind this stuff isn’t worth the bee’s sting it’ll leave in your green-apple-core-on-the-cob scarred stomach.

The Bottom Line: 2 traumatizing Sour Patch Temple Guards out of 10