Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (13 page)

Oh, yeaaah!

L
IKE Quisp and Quake, Blair and Jo, or Wite-Out and Liquid Paper, Hershey's Krackel and Nestlé's Crunch candy bars were too similar not to be natural enemies. Both were long, flat bars of milk chocolate studded with crisped rice. Both had names that implied the sounds they made when eaten, if you were eating them in a cartoon. Like the Crips and the Bloods, they even chose opposing colors, with Krackel decking itself out in red and Crunch going for the blue.

Some people think that Pennsylvania-made Krackel is nothing but a poor imitation of Swiss-owned Crunch.Those people are wrong. The original Krackel had crunchier rice, a thinner bar, and a smoother mouth feel, making for an overall superior chocolate experience.

In the 1980s, there were few decadent delights that could compare to snacking simultaneously on a Krackel bar and a cherry Slur-pee from 7-Eleven. The Slurpee iced up your mouth, turning your tongue into a little frozen luge runway, and the little sled of chocolaterice nirvana whizzed right on down. Gold medal to the Americans.

I
N TV land, no one did cheap live-action better than
The Krofft Supershow
, a patchwork of short Saturday-morning segments featuring not-so-special effects and bargain-basement production values. Tying together this cheese buffet were segments starring rock group Kaptain Kool and the Kongs, the non-rockingest rock group who ever rocked. Need proof? The Osmonds wrote their songs.

“Electra Woman and Dyna Girl” used their feminine grrrl power, gigantic video watches, and skintight spandex to battle evildoers. “Dr. Shrinker” and assistant Billy Barty gave kids nightmares by chasing around three teens they'd shrunk to the size of eight-track tapes.“Wonderbug” was a blatant rip-off of cartoon “Speed Buggy,” featuring a low-rent Scooby gang who honked a magic horn to transform their dilapidated Schlepcar into a flying dune buggy.

The show was a launching pad for bigger and better acting gigs, perhaps because there weren't many worse ones. Kaptain Kool Michael Lembeck became a regular on
One Day at a Time
. Electra Woman Deidre Hall found fame on
Days of Our Lives
. And “Wonderbug's” John-Anthony Bailey went on to star in adult films. Talk about a magic horn.

W
ITH their “it slices, it dices!” rapid-fire carnival-barker narration, K-tel commercials sold music the way door-to-door salesmen once sold appliances. And no wonder, since the company was started by . . . a former door-to-door appliance salesman. Canadian entrepreneur Philip Kives figured out that high-energy TV commercials were a perfect way to pitch records, and sold hundreds of millions of “super hit” compilations with names like
Pure Power
,
Starflight
,
Disco Fire
, and
Street Beat
.

The yell-y, fast-talking narrator hawked hits from Peaches & Herb! Jigsaw! and Molly Hatchet! They were available at Sears! Kmart! and Woolworth's! Once we kids were exposed to the barrage of groovy animation, reverb, song clips, and photos of the bands, we were convinced every collection was a must-buy and begged our parents for a ride to the mall. (Did Stanley Kubrick get the idea for the freaky, fast-cut brainwashing scene in
A Clockwork Orange
from K-tel? Discuss.) It wasn't until we got the album home that the hypnotic spell wore off and we realized we didn't really care for most of the songs, particularly those by England Dan & John Ford Coley.

Too smart to fall for that in-your-face sales pressure? Check your record collection. We'll bet you the latest hit from the DeFranco Family you'll find a K-tel logo or ten.

T
HE 1976 Olympics captured kids' imaginations, and even those of us who knew we'd never be Nadia Comaneci or Bruce Jenner still harbored golden dreams. Animation powerhouse Hanna-Barbera played off our love for the Games with the cartoon
Laff-A-Lympics
, which ran from 1977 to 1979.

Three all-star teams of cartoon characters vied for supremacy: the Scooby Doobies, the Yogi Yahooeys, and the Really Rottens. Despite the fact that the Scooby Doobies had several super-powered heroes, a genie, and a talking car on their team, they didn't always take home the gold. Why the hell not? They should have been wolfing down the competition like it was a bowl of Scooby Snacks. Heck, the Yogi Yahooeys were composed solely of not-exactly-menacing animals, like mice and a duck, and that gigantic idiot Grape Ape. Even the Really Rottens, created to be the Washington Generals of the whole competition, won on occasion—and their team mostly consisted of monsters and hillbillies.

Laff-A-Lympics
was remarkably similar to the 1960s cartoon
Wacky Races
, which featured teams of third- and fourth-tier characters (Professor Pat Pending? Lazy Luke? The Slag Brothers?) driving planes, tanks, and automobiles.
Laff
took home the gold, though, not just for bigger cartoon stars but for its stellar host, overexcited pink mountain lion Snagglepuss. Heavens to Murgatroyd!

T
HE best childhood toys are the ones with a little element of danger, but this was ridiculous. Lawn darts were a 1970s fixture at backyard barbecues and birthday parties. Why didn't our parents just let us juggle chainsaws or tease rabid wolverines?

Lawn darts looked exactly like the little darts you throw at a tavern dartboard, only they were sized for the Incredible Hulk. Two players would stand at opposite ends of the yard and chuck the darts at plastic rings on the ground, doing a little victory dance when the point landed in the target with a satisfying
snikt
—narrowly missing the kid standing nearby.

There were apparently rules to lawn darts, but who knew what they were? As with horseshoes, we just liked to pick 'em up and fling'em as far as we could. If we'd just seen the Olympics, we might pretend we were on the United States javelin team. Fans of gladiator movies got to play Spartacus, and girls imagined themselves as Wonder Woman, hefting an enormous spear.

But our fun had an expiration date. In 1988, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lawn darts from being sold in the United States, for obvious reasons. Like BB guns, those clacker balls, and that hot melty goop we made monster molds out of, they soon passed into legend, a reminder of the days when fun extracted a painful price.

B
ONNE Bell Lip Smackers first showed up in 1973 and quickly pushed their way to mouth-moisturizing dominance. Some brilliant marketing mind had the inspired notion to sign deals with soda-pop and candy companies, resulting in such wacky flavors as 7-Up, Tootsie Roll, and Orange Crush. Forget the lip-soothing aspect, these were practically snacks.

Bonne Bell also successfully hawked them as jewelry. Large Lip Smackers came with a plastic hoop on one end and a plasticky rope so that they could be worn around the neck or swung at pesky little brothers.

Competing Lip Lickers by Village Bath seemed to be designed to appeal to the kind of girls who carried
Pride and Prejudice
with them everywhere and thought Gunne Sax dresses were too revealing.They just looked old-fashioned, with their cool little gold metal tins with sliding lids and elaborate designs of fruit and flowers lavished on the tops.You pushed down on the lid until it clicked, then slid it open to reach the gloss. Once you were there, it was almost impossible to resist digging down into the balm and creating a tunnel that went all the way to the bottom of the case.

Thankfully, neither Lip Smackers nor Lip Lickers actually colored your lips. Girls gunked them on so heavily that if they had imparted any color, they all would have looked like recent graduates of Clown College.

P
ENCILS have erasers, but when schoolkids moved up into the world of ink pens, making a mistake suddenly became as major as chiseling a wrong letter into a block of marble. Options were few: You could scribble out your error and leave an inky mess, or try one of those erasable pens that really just rubbed a hole in the paper. That's why Liquid Paper suddenly found its way into every kid's schoolbag: Perfection was just a brushstroke away.

Like calculators, Liquid Paper wasn't looked upon kindly by all teachers. Some banned it outright, both for the mess and because we could use it to hide our goofs. Being kids, we didn't just use it to judiciously dab over a typo; we slathered the stuff on like frosting, often impatiently writing on the new surface before it dried. Then we ended up with a mucky combo of gummy white liquid and muddled ink that stood out like bird poop on a newly washed car.

And although the stuff was called “correction fluid,” we soon discovered its less-than-correct uses. Some kids sniffed it. And any girl who tells you she never gave herself a math-class manicure with the stuff is lying. Come to think of it, because of the fumes, it's also possible she just forgot.

G
IRLS learned a sad lesson about creative license in 1974 when NBC premiered
Little House on the Prairie
. Every girl owned a set of Laura Ingalls Wilder's enormously popular books and eagerly anticipated the frontier family coming to life on-screen.

But then the credits rolled. Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson made an acceptable Laura and Mary, but true fans fell out of their sunbonnets when Michael Landon made an appearance. Landon had a perm, and his face was as clean-shaven as if this prairie Pa had daily access to an electric razor and a can of Barbasol. Every reader knew that Laura's pa had a beard to rival those of ZZ Top. It was as if Abe Lincoln suddenly showed up on the penny with an Afro.

But once kids got over that indignity,
Little House
took off like a team of runaway oxen. Wilder's enchanting characters—stubborn Laura, bossy Mary, and bully Nellie Oleson—shone through on-screen just as vividly as they had on the pages.Viewers even managed to learn a bit about the history of our nation and its frontier spirit. We felt a little guilty complaining about homework after seeing how hard the prairie families fought to establish a one-room schoolhouse, or whining about getting shots after watching Mary go blind from a teenage illness. But then like most shows,
Little House
went Hollywood, leaving Wilder's books behind for more dramatic and unrealistic plots. The nadir was that godawful episode where Sylvia (Who? Exactly!) got raped by a mime.

S
URE, most kids had no idea who half the passengers on a
Love Boat
episode were. Halston? Elke Sommer? Gloria Vanderbilt? The casting director might as well have just picked random names out of the Beverly Hills Golf Club phone directory. But this Saturday night staple was as warm and soothing as a hot cup of cocoa with marshmallows, especially for kids huddled inside on an icy January night watching the
Pacific Princess
steam into tropical waters.