Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (21 page)

Still, what cooler fantasy for a kid than to instantly turn grown-up and super-powered by uttering a single word? When Billy Batson yelled “Shazam!” an animated bolt from the heavens transformed the teen into Captain Marvel, much cooler than Clark Kent dropping trou in a phone booth.

The setup was simple: Billy and his mentor (Name: Mentor) traveled the country (OK, just the San Fernando Valley), righting wrongs and sometimes teaming up with fellow hero Isis, a hot teacher who invoked her magic amulet and turned into a gorgeous Egyptian goddess. After uttering “Oh mighty Isis!” she took off her glasses and let her hair down, looking suspiciously like another Wonderful Woman.

Both heroes took a nonviolent tack and spent their respective half hours helping goofballs who got themselves into dangerous situations, then wrapped it all up with a tidy little moral. Fine, but we'd rather somebody got punched.

W
HY didn't our moms just sit us down at the breakfast table with the sugar bowl, a four-pack of food coloring, and a spoon? We probably would have ended up with the same ingredients in our bellies as we did consuming the sugary cereals of our youth.

We're not saying the 1970s and 1980s invented bad-for-you cereals, but that was when the breakfast industry went completely off the rails. Every character, movie, and game suddenly busted out with one. Rainbow Brite cereal had little edible rainbows. Mr. T cereal offered bowlfuls of a single letter—guess which one. Donkey Kong cereal featured barrels. Pac-Man cereal had marshmallow ghosts, marshmallow Pac-Man,
and
marshmallow Ms. Pac-Man with the little bow in her hair. For some reason, C-3POs were shaped like beer-can pull tabs, but the
Star Wars
in-box premiums more than made up for it.

Sometimes the cereal's expiration date outlived the fad it was named for.A prime example: Urkel-Os, strawberry-banana-flavored cereal named for the
Family Matters
geek with hiked-up pants and an even higher voice. We're betting people forgot who Urkel was before they even finished the box.

I
NVENTED in 1973, Shrinky Dinks brought into play the one appliance that Mom never really wanted you to mess with: the oven. In fact, the whole Shrinky Dink process seemed kind of like a joyous, don't-tell-the-parents experiment. Melting plastic on a hot cookie sheet without getting yelled at? Sign us up!

Shrinky Dinks never looked like they were going to work. You colored in the shape, be it a Smurf, Mr. T, or a rainbow-maned unicorn, threw it on a cookie sheet, and hoped for the best. Watching through the oven door, you were convinced you'd done it wrong and nothing would ever happen when suddenly it started to curl up like an old sheet of fax paper. It twisted, and then it fixed itself, and the end product was tiny, bright and colorful, and thick and strong. As with Homer Simpson and his Flaming Moe drink, fire made it good.

Few kids really knew what to do with Shrinky Dinks once they were shrunky dunk. One can only have so many zipper pulls, key chains, and napkin rings, after all. But no one ever thought about that when they were watching the plastic writhe in its little kitchen torture chamber. Sometimes the journey is indeed way more fun than the destination.

B
Y the time kids of the '70s and '80s were old enough to go to fairs and carnivals, the sideshows of earlier days were already a dying breed. The world had started to become sensitive to the idea that people shouldn't be exhibited under signs branding them “Mule-Faced Woman” or “The Living Torso,” and the attractions were grudgingly changing. More fire-eaters, fewer freaks.

But for kids, sneaking down the midway to the sideshow tents still felt like a forbidden thrill, and some traveling shows delivered. Fat ladies, midgets, and bearded ladies—these were still considered OK to exploit, as was the occasional Lobster Boy, with flipper-like hands and feet. The Headless Centerfold illusion arranged a sexy bikini-clad girl so that her head was hidden and weird medical tubing took its place. The Girl-to-Gorilla act crammed spectators into a dark tent where they watched a curvy silhouette behind a curtain slowly transform into a huge ape shape.You didn't have too much time to judge this one closely because the guy in the ape suit would pretend to break out, and everyone would run shrieking from the tent.

Yes, the show was pretty much over by the time we were allowed to buy a ticket, but kids let their freak flag fly in other ways, mostly by sneaking books out of the library to gawk at photos of the Elephant Man and various Siamese twins.

F
OR a while there, it seemed like every kid on TV hit the parent lottery and ended up being raised by mega-rich adults: Arnold and Willis moved in with Mr. Drummond,Webster bunked with the Papadapolises, and Ricky Stratton left military school to room with his multimillionaire dad.

The premise of
Silver Spoons
, which ran from 1982 to 1987, was tailor-made for kids who dreamed about trading in their regular lives for an unlimited Toys “R” Us expense account and a chance to play with diamond-encrusted Ataris and use hundred-dollar bills for scratch paper. Blond moppet Ricky Stratton acted like comicdom's Richie Rich, and heck, actor Ricky Schroder even looked like him. His castle-like mansion was packed to the very expensive rafters with arcade games, a rideable train, and even—in one episode—Mr.T.T

Ricky had hangers-on—a preteen
Entourage
, of sorts. Alfonso Ribeiro breakdanced a lot, and Jason Bateman's Derek was Eddie Haskell to Ricky's Beav. (Derek was so jerky, Ricky once told him he understood why all of his gerbils committed suicide.) Like most shows in the '80s,
Spoons
featured plenty of Very Special Episodes, covering everything from child abuse to drinking to kidnapping. All perfect stage-setting for Schroder's eventual stint as a cop on
NYPD Blue
.

F
OR a short period of time in America, a stubby, bossy dictator named Simon held the nation in his sway, always harshly cutting them off and telling them they were wrong.
American Idol
judge Simon Cowell? Well, yes. But back in 1978, there was Simon, the mouthy electronic game.

Simon looked so simple. You just had to repeat a sequence in your head and slam your palm down on the right colors. Blue, blue, green! Blue, blue, green, yellow! Blue, blue, green, yellow, gr—
buzzz
!
“Auuugh! Red, I meant red!”

Simon was uncheatable and unforgiving.You got better, he got faster. You mastered one sequence, he spat out a longer one. You shoved him under the couch and sulked, he laughed silently and waited you out.

Simon was a gateway drug. Kids never knew that they had voluntarily donned the yoke of future servitude to the machines. Soon, those same brains would race to learn the latest Pac-Man screen or memorize the sequence required to rip out their opponent's spinal cord in Mortal Kombat. In retrospect, Simon's genial tones ring with the simplicity of church bells.

B
ACK in the days before safety was invented, the most sought-after seat in Mom's faux-wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon wasn't shotgun in the front. It wasn't in the back, either, crammed in with your sticky siblings. It was the “way back”—vehicular Valhalla. While the rest of the family faced front, the luckiest kids scored the best seats in the house, the collapsible ones with a view out the rear window. Seat belts? Who needed 'em? When Dad took a hairpin turn, you'd roll around like a pop can.

But dang, what a ride. It was our own little space, like a tiny office or a Pullman bunk on a train. And the best part was that it put you as far away from your parents as the engineers in Detroit could possibly figure out.You were on your own little vacation, and if you wanted to stick your tongue out or make faces at cars behind you, who would know? Even though you were eight years old, you were still ahead of the poor slob driving behind you—who no doubt had his own kid facing out the back, making faces at yet another frustrated driver.

S
TEVE Austin was a lucky man. And not because those military doctors saved his life when his experimental aircraft tumbled into a fiery ball of grainy stock footage. No, he was fortunate enough to have his accident back in the 1970s: Had he been injured today, his six-million-dollar repair budget would have gotten him a Band-Aid for his torn-off arm and a get-well card.

Yes, Colonel Austin fared pretty well, what with all the bionic whatnots and whoozits six million Carter-era bucks bought. His action figure was even cooler, with a huge eye for kids to look through, a button on the back that ratcheted up his arm, and his best feature: the peel-back rubber skin on his forearm that revealed removable circuits beneath. Kids across the country spent hours making the
dootdoot-doot
bionic sound effect and forcing the Austin doll to put his sporty red jumpsuit and tennis shoes to good use and jog in slow motion around the ottoman.

His entourage? Less impressive. The Oscar Goldman figure, a fairly accurate rendition of Steve's balding boss at the OSI, came with a polyester sport coat, a briefcase that exploded if you opened it wrong, and a manila folder.What kid wouldn't want a thirteen-inch government bureaucrat as part of his toy collection? Snore as Goldman talks on the phone! Sigh as he pressures an underling into working late! Shrug as he cuts line items from his budget! Truly, the world's first inaction figure.

M
ATTEL couldn't have hit on a product that was a better fit for its key demographic if there had been a gaggle of nine-year-old boys running its R&D department. Boogers in a garbage can? Slime was the mucusy holy grail of rude, crude playthings.