CHOCO OF THE PAST

 

Tora! Tiger! Attack!



   

The toys we were crazy about

 

Now it costs RM1.30





The chocolate balls with the round biscuits in them





 











Kinos Food Industries still produce them



We raced to assemble them.  The chocolates later.

  

The manipulative toys we have to assemble

 A packet of the chocolate balls.

 

One of the toys in the Tora box




 

We sacrificed our pocket money for these





  

Scream 'TORA' For Choco Balls Biscuits

Remember the words 'Tora! Tora!'?  They were imprinted on the blue box where chocolate balls were stuffed.  Only on rare occasions would I be able to pop these luxurious chocolate items into my mouth.  Back then when I was a school kid and with forty cents as pocket money daily and each Tora box costing fifty cents, how could I afford them very often? 

Most kids would love to have them and would save their pocket money to buy the chocolate balls. It did not help with the advertisements running during our cartoon shows showing the Tora box and the little toys that would be included in the packaging. Mat Sentul's  voice would be saying, "Tora datang lagi dengan cokelat berbola." (Tora coming back with the chocolate balls).

The persuasive power of advertisements magnetised us and I tried all ploys and pleas to squeeze a box or two from my parents. There would always be a change of toys offered for us to part with our money. And Mat Sentul was superb at that!  Also 'Tora' which is a Japanese word means attack. So Mat Sentul was actually screaming, "Tora is attacking the children! Time to buy the toys inside the box!' The boxes were ripped apart, the chocolates were put aside first and we would race to assemble the small pieces of the toys in order to try them out.

Times have changed now. With the invasion of Hershey, Cadbury, Ferero Rocher and Hirajuku, these chocolate balls I grew up with have faded from the scene in Singapore. On hind sight, I wonder did I buy Tora because of the chocolate balls or the little manipulative toys that came along with the packaging? Your guess is as good as mine.

BTW my son bought the Tora chocolate balls at RM1.30 each from Tigermart, Johor Bharu.



 

What does Tora mean?

It means tiger; however, in this case it meant to or charge and attack. Taking it apart in context to the era of a war film  titled 'Tora', it means Torpedo attack.  The title is made up of the code-words that were used by the Japanese to indicate that complete surprise was achieved (tora is Japanese for "tiger", but in this case, "To" is the initial syllable of the Japanese word totsugeki, meaning "charge" or "attack", and "ra" is initial syllable of raigeki, meaning "torpedo attack").

 

Such Tora advertisements hypnotised us