Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (15 page)

But although the word “Kissing” was right in the name, there couldn't have been a lot of smooching going on with this stuff. It was sticky enough to trap flies and made your lips look like you'd just downed a bucket of greasy fried chicken. Mostly, girls too young or too gawky to date rolled it on, licked it off, and rolled it on again. This was why no one bought the Mighty Mint flavor—really, if that's the taste you were looking for, you could just go brush your teeth.

I
T was hard not to worship at the altar of fast-food innovation in a decade like the '80s, when corporate America was putting patent scientists to work solving eating problems we didn't even know we had. One troubling crisis was briefly averted by McDonald's with the 1987 introduction of the McDLT.

Who could forget the sandwich's slogan—“Keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool”? In other words, the meat patty was kept apart from the cool elements (lettuce and tomato, aka the “L” and “T”). In
other
other words, you had to assemble your burger yourself.

The McDonald's employee of your choice would serve it up to you in a specially patented and enormously wasteful container with two separate sides, keeping the cool kids on one side of the gym and not letting them mingle with the hot chicks until your car had cruised out of the drive-thru and your friend was taking the corner much too fast, possibly resulting in L and T meeting Floor and Mat.

However, no one seemed to care that both the hot and the cold side sat under the same heat lamp, pretty much rendering the whole two-sides thing a landfill-clogging wash.

I
F there's one thing TV taught us, it was that our universe is far from the only one. In some places, crabby green furballs live in trash cans and holler at giant yellow birds; in others, kids adopt friendly sea monsters who come from dysfunctional families. And then there's McDonaldland, where hamburgers are mayors and french fries grow from bushes.

McDonaldland came to life in the chain's commercials starting in 1971, and man, was it a bizarre place. Officer Big Mac was an obviously hapless cop, since his jurisdiction was freely roamed by the shaggy, fry-stealing Fry Guys and the notorious Hamburglar. Really, how hard is it to catch a guy who dresses in black-and-white convict stripes and is always yelling “ROBBLE ROBBLE ROBBLE”? Mayor McCheese wasn't much better, what with his pince-nez spectacles, child-sized top hat, and a Miss America–style sash announcing “MAYOR.”What, in case he forgot?

Ronald McDonald was supposedly the star, but everyone's favorite character was the lumbering purple blob that was Grimace. Was he supposed to be a blueberry shake? An endomorphic eggplant? Cookie Monster after a dye job and an eating binge? It seems odd to say this about a place where creatures had hamburgers for heads, but he was by far the weirdest in a weird land.

H
OLY enduring memories! With their imagination-sparking capes and cowls, Mego Corporation's World's Greatest Superheroes captured a super-powered feeling of glee better than any bunch of toys had before or since. And they were only eight inches high.

The detail was impeccable, from Batman's removable cowl to the Lizard's flexible tail. The female heroes (dubbed “Super Gals”) featured outrageously huge hair, although manly men Conan and Thor also sported bouffants that put the Ronettes to shame. The figures had little plastic boots and gloves to lose, and real fabric clothes that you could take off to check out their supermanhood. Obviously, the reason the Incredible Hulk continues to smash everything in sight is that he's still torqued off about the lack of genitalia beneath his torn purple pants.

Play sets and vehicles, like the Batcave (with working Bat Signal!) or the Hulk Van (subtly labeled “Hulk Van”), added an extra level of accessorized fun. But it was just as fulfilling to see what happened when Iron Man met up with the lawn mower, Aquaman fought the crashing surf of a real-life lake, or Robin, the Boy Wonder, was dragged for miles behind a banana-seated bike.What happened? Mom made an emergency trip to JCPenney to pick up another Mego, that's what happened.

P
LANET of the Apes!
Holly Hobbie!
Starsky and Hutch!
When it came to lunch boxes, what was on the outside made what was on the inside taste better. The metal box opened with a satisfying flip of the clip, and you'd slowly lift the lid to unveil your eats for the day, shaking your head sadly at the kid sitting next to you with the wrinkly brown paper bag.

Lunch-box beverages? Less thrilling. Why bring a thermos full of milk from home when you could buy a carton of ice-cold dairy goodness for a nickel? There were always kids whose parents made them, though. They had to sip room-temperature liquid from the little plastic cup, and their thermoses always smelled like sour cream.

Our theory is that the most popular kids had the most popular lunch-box designs. The kids with Batman or Wonder Woman? Homecoming king and queen. The ones with
The Fall Guy
or Pele? Not so much. And if you were stuck with a nonlicensed design, like plaid, well, then, you were probably eating by yourself anyway.

Y
OU
could
lick the aluminum top of a tuna can, but why would you want to? Metal pudding tops, however? Ah, that was a different story. From the late '60s through the mid-'80s, it was practically mandatory to risk bodily injury by running your tongue over the creamy deliciousness that stubbornly clung to the underside of the lid.

Snack Pack, the top dog of no-need-to-refrigerate, portable puddingy goodness, manufactured its last metal cover in 1984, and the addictive opening process is only a gooey memory. Step 1: Insert finger into ring. Step 2: Hold can and pull, listening for the übersatisfying
schlooooosh
of the metal peeling away from its seal. Step 3: Lick the back of the lid. Step 4: Realize that you sliced your tongue on the sharp metal edge, and freak out. Step 5: Keep licking anyway, letting the combination of sweet pudding, cold metal, and warm type O negative trickle across your taste buds.

It was a dangerous dance, but nobody seemed to mind. Kids were heartier stock back then. And so were their pudding containers.

I
N 1986, once we all had microwaves, along came the reason those appliances were invented—MicroMagic brand foods. At last, a latchkey kid could prepare his own junk food without ever leaving the house, perfect training for eventual grease-spattered employment: “D'ya want fries with that?”

And indeed, the fries were MicroMagic's most fondly remembered offering. These crinkle-cut beauties came in bright-red individual serving boxes, ready to be nuked right in their little cardboard homes. If the finished product tasted a little like the paper they cooked in, hey, small price to pay. The fries were followed quickly by MicroMagic burgers and then, in a head-shaking development, MicroMagic milk shakes.

Wrap your brain around that one. Milk shakes, whose sole purpose in life is to be frosty and icy, somehow achieved that goal by taking a hot dip in an oven. They started out frozen solid, and the microwave melted them just enough to make them stirrable and slurpable. Sure, it felt like Backwards Land, but making a chocolately shake without having to mess up Mom's blender? That's a Backwards Land worth visiting.

A
SK any kid running around with a bedsheet tied to his neck or a colander on her head: Almost anything can double as a costume. That was definitely the case with Moon Boots, the foamy footwear that stomped their way to popularity in the '70s. They were clunky and puffy at the same time. How is that even possible? Who cares? When you slipped on the boot—a combo of lightweight foam insert, waterproof nylon shell, and massive rubber sole—you were instantly transformed into an astronaut, hopping in pretend slow motion on a backyard moonscape. They'd double as the bottom half of a superhero or KISS costume, and they were also useful for kicking your little brother squarely in the groin.

Grade-school hallways in cold-weather states were filled with dozens of the colorful boots, lined up like slightly effeminate soldiers. Most of us wore department store knockoffs of the Italian originals and paid the price:The foam inserts would turn into mushy sponges if the nylon leaked. Kmart, we have a problem.

M
OUSE Trap was supposedly the nation's bestselling game for 1963 and 1964. When '70s-era kids rediscovered it gathering dust in the rec-room closet, most copies of the game had lost their marbles. Also, their plastic divers, bathtubs, bowling balls, swinging boots, and the cages that fell on the probably-also-lost mice. Mouse Trap may have been a board game in the 1960s, but by the time we unearthed it in the 1970s, it was pretty much a puzzle lacking most of its pieces.

Even if you had all the parts, and even if you put them together according to the picture on the box, it was fifty-fifty as to whether the trap would spring correctly. Seriously? If you win in chess, it's not like your queen can get stuck on a square and refuse to checkmate the opposing king. If you win in Monopoly, it's not like the other player's money just refuses to find its way into your account. Kids in 1963 must have been easily entertained.

M
WA-HA-HAAAAA! Mis-ter Yuk is mean, Mis-ter Yuk . . . is . . . GREEEEEN.” If you saw the 1970s public-service announcement, that eerie refrain likely still haunts you to this day. While psychedelic smoke coiled in the background, the lime-green-and-black Mr. Yuk made his appearance. Then things really got weird: electrical cords, matches, and bleach bottles apparently all became possessed by the demon from
The Exorcist
, writhing around with murderous intent while a voice taunted, “Home is full of lots of things that children shouldn't touch. Home is full of bad things that can hurt you very much.”