Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (5 page)

Y
OU'RE sitting around the card table, a
Laverne & Shirley
rerun playing mindlessly in the background.The Crazy Eights bid is to you, and this could be for the whole pile of Necco wafers. How does a cool kid ramp up the drama? You reach for the red-and-white pack of candy cigarettes at your elbow, tap it dramatically, slide out a sugary cylinder, and take a deep, opponent-intimidating, fake lung-polluting drag. Smooooth. Now, seriously, could you have this much fun with a Snickers?

Just as with real smokes, it wasn't the flavor that was addictive. Candy cigs tasted kind of like sweet chalk, but their gimmick was undeniable. Just as kids faced with a toy steering wheel couldn't resist violently jerking it from side-to-side while making “Vroom! Vroom!” noises, no kids with any sticklike food could resist slipping it between their lips and taking soul-satisfying puffs. Candy cigs were more a toy than a candy, and what were toys for if not for preparing for kids for adulthood, with all its vices and virtues? Smoke 'em if ya got 'em.

T
ODAY we can choose from thousands of songs with a click of a mouse, but when we were kids, we let Casey make the call. With his raspy, melodic tones and distinctively measured—and family-friendly—delivery,
American Top 40
host Casey Kasem spoke volumes.

It was appointment radio.We'd clear our preteen schedules, settle in by the stereo with a bag of Bugles, and get our weekly fix of songs, like “I Love Rock N' Roll,” “Pass the Dutchie,” and “Come On Eileen.” But Casey didn't just spin records—he spun yarns. It was as if we were all sitting around a big, cozy fire and listening to Casey tell the stories behind the songs—with guest appearances by Men Without Hats and Quarterflash.

Even pre-relationship grade-schoolers got the poignancy of his heart-tugging “long-distance dedications,” usually about a lost love. They all started like they could be a letter to
Penthouse
(“Dear Casey, A few summers ago I moved from Atlanta, Georgia, my lifelong home, to a small town in rural Wisconsin . . .”) and ended with something like, “Casey, will you please play ‘99 Red Balloons'?” He'd close every show with his trademark reminder to “keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars,” and dammit if we didn't try to do just that.

M
OST girls never got into baseball card collecting, but in 1977 and 1978, sports-card maker Topps hit one out of the park. The company issued
Charlie's Angels
photo cards, with each pack including a piece of powdery gum and a coveted sticker. The cards neatly outlined America's fascination with T&A TV. Bikinis! Two-fisted gun grips! Hair as feathery as a down pillow! Faster than you could say “three little girls who went to the police academy,” a generation of new collectors was born.

Angels
cards were swapped, stored, sorted, and hoarded according to each girl's personal Angelic hierarchy. Farrah Fawcett's Jill and Jaclyn Smith's Kelly were favorites, but cards showing Cheryl Ladd's Kris in a red-sequined circus outfit were pretty hot, too. (Poor Kate Jackson's Sabrina, eternally the Smart Angel, was trading-card Kryptonite.) Even cooler than the cards, though, were the stickers. More than one kid was handed a butter knife and a severe tongue-lashing and ordered to perform Angelectomies on their bedroom doors.

To try to encourage kids to collect 'em all,Topps printed a group photo of the Angels on the back of the whole set, urging girls to flip the cards over and assemble an enormous puzzle. Actually doing this was about as likely as getting that damn Mousetrap game to actually trap anything, but there was still incentive to keep chucking your allowance after a new pack. By the time replacement angels Tiffany (who?) and Julie (don't know ya!) earned their wings, the TV card fad itself had gone to heaven.

I
T was the movie that launched a million nightmares. No, we're not talking about Mariah Carey's
Glitter
. Though it starts out all lollipops and gumdrops, 1968's
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
takes a sharp right turn into balls-to-the-wall horror—not necessarily the best combination for a nightmare-prone six-year-old who happened to stumble upon this freak show on TV one Saturday afternoon.

The basic plot sounds harmless: Eccentric inventor Dick Van Dyke fixes up an old jalopy, which turns out to be a magic flying car.What fun! Then the Child Catcher (yes, that's his name) arrives, with his greasy, stringy hair; huge nose;Wicked-Witch-of-the-West voice; and horrific singular focus (“There are children here somewhere; I can smell them”). Why, hello, thirty years of therapy! The Child Catcher is Willy Wonka by way of Hannibal Lecter, using candy to lure kids into his cage.

Why did our parents think this was a children's movie? Stephen King's
Christine
was also about a car with a mind of its own, and nobody plops their kids in front of the TV unattended when that's on. Unleashing the Child Catcher into our developing imaginations? What a Chitty thing to do to a kid.

I
T doesn't seem that the package designers for Nestlé's Choco'Lite were trying all that hard. The brown wrapper, with the candy bar's name in fat yellow cartoony lettering, was about as attractive as a 1970s earth-toned kitchen. But all was forgiven when the bar was unwrapped. The chubby chocolate sections, stamped with an arty fan pattern, featured a unique touch. Inside, the bar was dotted with tiny air bubbles, as if someone magically sucked all the crisped rice out of a Nestlé's Crunch bar, leaving only the chocolate behind.

Those bubbles not only gave Choco'Lite its airy, creamy texture but made eaters stop in their tracks and actually look at what they were eating. It was like peering at the excavated side of an archaeological dig.

Choco'Lite was both dense and fluffy, a contradiction in candy. But it never caught on (did would-be buyers think “Lite” meant it was a diet snack?), and Choco'Lite burned out for good.

Y
OU'RE an undersea explorer, hunting for the Lost City of Atlantis, and a stream of bubbles catches your eye. If you decide to analyze the bubbles, turn to page 9. If you decide to take depth readings instead, turn to page 14.What do you do? WHAT. DO. YOU. DO?! You join millions of people around the world in fondly remembering the
Choose Your Own Adventure
books, that's what you do.

Most books were a pretty passive experience, but this addictive series, introduced in 1980, put kids squarely in the driver's seat. We were the heroes; we got to decide our fates. We'd get to a literary fork in the road and have to decide which way to go. It was an early lesson in how decisions have consequences—even if sometimes those decisions meant we'd get poisoned by a tree frog, gored by a buffalo, or eaten by a dragon.

Sure, in the books you could always backtrack and make a different choice. Not always the case in real life, where one crummy decision often meant twenty years at a dead-end job or a lifetime trapped in a marriage with a guy who never picks his socks up off the floor. Sometimes we would have rather faced the dragon.

T
HEY filled up entire pages in Archie and Dennis the Menace comic books. Get a seven-foot Frankenstein's monster for $1! (It was a poster.) One hundred toy soldiers for $1! (They were flat plastic.) Torment your brother with onion gum, 20 cents! (It tasted awful but not a lot like onions.) Learn to throw your voice with a 25-cent booklet! (We ended up throwing the booklet across the room instead.) Try X-ray Specs, a hilarious optical illusion, just a buck! (They made things look kinda fuzzy but never did let you see through that cute girl's sweater.)

Some comic book ads wanted you to sell something—usually greeting cards or
Grit
—in hopes of raking in extra cash. Others just hawked products you had never heard of but suddenly had to have—Sea-Monkeys and Charles Atlas's strength-training program were classics. The ads made at least as strong an impression on a kid's mind as the stories of Archie and Veronica did.

Sure, most kids were smart enough to know that you weren't going to turn into a muscleman by buying Atlas's thirty-two-page pamphlet, that brine shrimp probably didn't wear crowns and play basketball, and that Mom was so going to ground you if you slipped that fake-blood-producing soap into her sink. But they were so tempting, and if you had a little allowance money and access to a thirteen-cent stamp, well, who didn't send away for one or two? The anticipation of waiting for the mailman alone was worth the buck.