Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (2 page)

Those things didn't just dramatically vanish one day in a flurry of farewells and confetti. Childhoods don't end that way. Sure, there are marking points, like graduations and moving days, but they don't tell the whole story. The little things slip away every day, and most of them go without warning.

Some vanished totally, like Freakies cereal. Some stayed around but faded from the spotlight, like Sea-Monkeys or Shrinky Dinks. Others were replaced by better technology, like school filmstrips giving way to DVD players, or piles of vinyl records changing to eight-tracks, then to cassettes, then to CDs, and now to MP3s. Still others stuck around and earned places in the hearts of the next generation—have you seen how many varieties of Lip Smackers kids today can buy?

 

 

A
LOT of people our age hate the label “Generation X,” preferring to call themselves children of the 1970s and 1980s. Those are goofy decades to embrace, with their avocado refrigerators and wood-paneled rec rooms, their leg warmers and shoulder pads. But if you loved your childhood home even though it wasn't the most glamorous place on the block, you likely have fond memories of the years in which you grew up—no matter how goofy, no matter how clumsy. In a way, these two are decades only a native could take to heart.

It's not really the things that we loved; it's our memories of those things and how they fit into our lives. The orange-and-red shag carpeting in your bedroom isn't as important as the hours you spent trying to make your Lincoln Logs stand up on it. Malibu Barbie isn't necessarily the world's best doll, but if when you think of her you picture your cousin and remember how hard you laughed when her baby brother bit Barbie in the boob, then to you she is the best doll, now and for eternity.

“Life moves pretty fast,” said our fellow 1980s child Ferris Bueller. “If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” That's what we're trying to do in this book—stop and look around, close our eyes, and redecorate the rooms of our childhood. We want to remember the sounds we heard, the foods we ate, the toys that passed into our hands for a day or for a decade.We couldn't possibly write about everything, and if one of your favorites isn't here, rest assured we probably loved it, too; we just ran out of room and time. Not everything here was invented in the 1970s or 1980s, but everything listed was important to us in that time period and, perhaps, to you.

In addition to sharing specific childhood memories, we've assigned each item an X-tinction rating. They're pretty self-explanatory, but we include them as a way to bring our reminiscences up-to-date. Many things live on, others are gone for good, and some have had a makeover and been reintroduced in some way. Where we can, we note if a certain item has been completely replaced by something else.

So flip up the collar of that polo shirt and dig in.We're off on a guided tour through a childhood of lost memories, back to the days when MTV played music videos and Quisp and Quake duked it out for cereal supremacy. Memories are made of this.

A
S preachy as Sunday school and as subtle as Gallagher,
After School Specials
tackled the juicy social issues, from divorce to date rape, that public schools in the '70s and '80s couldn't talk about. Watching these shows was like peeking at those books the people you babysat for kept hidden high on a bedroom shelf. But because they were dubbed “educational,” you could watch completely guilt-free.

A Martian could figure out the plots from the titles alone:“Schoolboy Father.” “Andrea's Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy.” “Please Don't Hit Me, Mom.” “The Boy Who Drank Too Much.” Who wouldn't rush home after algebra to tune in to these tawdry tales?

Hilariously, the scripts could have been written by a nun who didn't get out much. Every social issue was treated with the same amount of gravitas, be it shoplifting or Satanism. But the casts were like an all-star team of teen favorites. Rob Lowe and Dana Plato made a baby! Kristy McNichol couldn't get along with her stepdad!
After School Specials
were like the mall for kid actors: Eventually, you saw everyone there.

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VERYBODY knew one lucky kid who had an air hockey table in his rec room. These were often the same spoiled Richie Riches whose parents also bought them a pinball machine and full-sized popcorn cart. But who cared? For a day, they were our best friends, as long as they let us join in the Jetson-like wonder of this truly space-age sport.

Introduced in 1972, the oxygen-powered game put lower-tech basement activities like pool and Ping-Pong to shame. With the flip of a switch, the compressor would noisily shudder into action, firing air through tiny holes in the table and giving kids the power to levitate a tiny puck.

And then, blower-fueled ecstasy. The action was fast paced and airplane-bathroom loud. The mallet, which looked like a little sombrero, let kids whack the plastic puck with the intensity of a pint-sized Wayne Gretzky. The puck would click and clack as it banked off the sides until one killing blow would send it flying into the air—and into our opponent's orthodontia.

Dangerous? Sure. But a lifetime of chipped teeth was worth it for the few minutes we were walking—and playing hockey—on air.

T
HE whole concept of Schaper's Ants in the Pants game was baffling. Were the red, yellow, green, and blue plastic bugs really supposed to be ants? We're not entomologists, but they looked a lot more like grasshoppers. And why were we trying to flick the ants into a pair of pants in the first place? For that matter, why were the pants and suspenders standing by themselves? And perhaps most importantly, whatever happened to the owner of the pants?

Schaper, which also made Cootie and Don't Break the Ice, never really answered those pressing questions, and kids didn't really care. All we wanted to do was fling bugs. In 1997, new owner Hasbro added a cardboard Dalmatian to the plastic pants-and-suspenders combo, which acted as a backboard. His pose is mocking, as if he's daring kids to just try and infest his britches with insects. Game on, dog. Don't let the ants hit you in the junk.

As much fun as it was,Ants in the Pants was really just a glorified version of tiddlywinks. Or, as beer-loving college students like to call it, Quarters.

I
F you could go back to the 1980s and show an Atari 2600–addicted kid a modern screenshot of Grand Theft Auto, it'd be like escorting Amelia Earhart onto the space shuttle.

Today, it's easy to snort at Atari's pixilated Pitfall Harry, swinging from a mighty jagged line. Pac-Man appeared to have been hastily copied from the legendary arcade version by a kid with no depth perception. But remember, until the 2600 came out, the pinnacle of home gaming was Pong, a black-and-white game in which small vertical lines beat up on a tiny square. The 2600 felt like the future.

The great games have passed into legend: Space Invaders. Asteroids. Frogger. But it's the bizarre ones that are forever burned into our brainpans. In Chase the Chuckwagon, you guided a dog to his product-placed Purina kibble. In Plaque Attack, you protected teeth by shooting toothpaste at invading food. In Journey Escape, you guided members of the band Journey past groupies and crooked promoters to get them to their . . . spaceship?

Atari didn't go down easy. The 2600 was fourteen when it was officially retired in 1992. Back in the 1980s, its TV jingle demanded to know: “Have you played Atari today?” No, not today, but sometimes we think we would give up our HDTVs, our iPhones, even our hybrid cars for just one more hour sprawled on the living-room floor, helping that damned frog cross the road.

O
NE day, Americans couldn't tell Australia from Austria, and the next, we were all wearing clip-on koalas.

Olivia Newton-John may have started the trend playing Aussie babe Sandy in
Grease
, but it was Men at Work's 1981 hit “Down Under” that sealed the deal, smashing into our brains like a boomerang. Many folks never gained any more knowledge of this vast continent than what's contained in its lyrics, which were as bewildering as “Waltzing Matilda.” A fried-out combie? Head full of zombie? Where men chunder? A Vegemite sandwich sounded good—that is, until we got our hands on the nasty spread and realized that eating it was kind of like licking a bouillon cube.

But for a while, adding the words “Down Under” or an Australian accent to almost anything upped its cool quotient to near Fonzie level. Disney mice
The Rescuers
had a
Down Under
sequel and so, oddly enough, did the girls from
Facts of Life
. Man, where was Crocodile Dundee and his enormous knife when you needed him? Thankfully, a dingo ate this trend somewhere around 1992.

I
N the movies, kids were often portrayed as insufferable saintly little twits. Not so in
The Bad News Bears
. These foulmouthed brats much more closely resembled your own playground foes. Mouthy Tanner called his own teammates every slur in the book. Engelberg chomped chocolate while he was playing catcher. Ogilvie was a benchwarming nerd and Timmy Lupus an unabashed “booger-eating spaz.”Add in lone girl Amanda, rebellious jock Kelly Leak, and alcoholic pool-cleaning coach Buttermaker (Walter Matthau, in the role he was born to play), and you had yourself a team.

The swearing, the slurs, and, best of all, a drunk Buttermaker driving the kids around, seat belt–free, ensured that this 1976 movie would never fully meet with parents' approval, making kids love it all the more. Who wouldn't want to be cigarette-smokin', Harleyridin' Kelly Leak?

And the fact that the Bears lose it all in the end struck a true chord with your average bench-riding viewer. When Tanner tells the victorious Yankees to take their apology and their trophy and shove it, he's speaking for every fat, mouthy, booger-eatin' spaz in the audience. Play ball!

T
HE Banana Splits Adventure Hour
deserves a spot in Gen X heaven just for giving puppetmaster brothers Sid and Marty Krofft their start. Cartoon kings Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hired the brothers to create costumes and sets for their psychedelic freak-out of a show about a gorilla, a beagle, an elephant, and a lion who hung out in a
Laugh-In
-styled clubhouse and sang horrifyingly bad bubblegum pop.

When not riding around in the kid-coveted “banana buggies,” the Splits introduced cartoons, including
The Arabian Knights
and
The Three Musketeers
(sadly, not about the candy bar). Live-action serial
Danger Island
may have been optimistically named—the villain wore a not-so-threatening pink-polka-dotted bandana, and the only “danger” involved a cream-pie fight.