It was a watershed moment when I bought my first Marathon, and when I misguidedly gave up chocolate for Lent one year, Marathons proved the hardest to ignore. It's the peanuts that make the difference. Marathon had been our bar, but then it wasn't. The hostile impersonal forces of global commercialism snatched a fixed point in our childhood away from us, and gave us instead, Snickers. Marathon sounded appropriate - big and impressive, with a classical feel to it.
Snickers is apparently the name of a horse belonging to the developer of the bar .
The bar and the packaging didn't change, and we were also offered funsize and later king size versions, but it still isn't the same. I buy Snickers occasionally, but it's not my chocolate any more. In a way, the change broadened our horizons, showing us that there was a world out there with a different way of looking at things. However, it was also an introduction to the creeping globalisation of commercial culture. Around the same time, the Wimpy bar in Crendon Street in High Wycombe became a Burger King.