Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (17 page)

O'Boisies also daringly broke the unwritten consumer flavor-naming code—the “original” flavor, instead of being plain, had a distinct garlic taste, perfect for those days when you were fresh outta dip. And these treats almost single-handedly taught a generation a new word for “noisy,” thanks to their commercials featuring the Keebler elves loudly chomping while a jingle bragged “O'Boisies are O'Boisterous!”

W
HEN Lisa Birnbach's
Official Preppy Handbook
hit bookstore shelves in 1980, American schools were instantly awash in pastel. Preppy pushed aside hippie, and kids everywhere donned the uniform of the day. It was simple, once you cracked the code. Collar up on your Izod shirt? Check. Sperry Top-Siders on? Gotcha. Argyle underwear? Yes, please.

The look, based on fashion from New England prep schools, poured over middle America like a pretentious tidal wave. It took a lot of the guesswork out of getting dressed, sure, but mostly it helped kids in fly-over country find something in common with their hipper East Coast counterparts. No, there weren't many Muffys or Chips in the Midwest, but wearing a shirt with a little crocodile on it made even Stacys and Scotts feel a little bit snooty.

The book, although satirical, became a bible of sorts for Waspy wannabes, tackling thorny issues ranging from the politics of monogramming to explaining why “summer” is a verb. It didn't take long for preppy-wear like polo shirts and khakis to make it into the mainstream, and stay there. Flip open any J.Crew catalog. Odds are you're wearing the pants on page 27.

I
F someday soon we face a shortage of doctors, blame Milton Bradley's Operation, which taught a generation that one slip of the hand in a body cavity meant a super-annoying
buzzzz
. Oh, and also bloody death.

Operation laid open poor ol' Cavity Sam, and junior Dr. Frankensteins grabbed the tweezers and set to organ-thieving torture. Sam's injuries had apparently been sketched out by someone who'd never seen an anatomy textbook—“writer's cramp” was depicted by a tiny pencil, and “bread basket,” by a piece of toast. The grandpa-era medical terms were cute, but they might as well have been Cockney.Water on the knee? Charley horse? Smartly, in 2003, Milton Bradley allowed fans to vote for a new weird ailment for Sam, and the winner was the brilliant “brain freeze,” depicted by an ice-cream cone in the head.

The game actually came with rules, cards, and even fake money, but that was beyond the point. It was all about avoiding the
buzzzz
, as if it were a multimillion-dollar malpractice lawsuit. There was always one kid, however, who reveled in the eardrum-scratching sound and intentionally pressed the tweezers against the metal sides until he was clobbered over the head with a nearby Connect Four stand.

Y
ES, there are approximately eight thousand Doritos flavors, and four thousand of them have used the word “taco” in some way. There was Zesty Taco. There was Tacos at Midnight, which apparently self-destruct if they're eaten at any other time of day. But none of those strange chemical combinations exactly re-created the most-longed-for Doritos flavor of all time, 1967's original Taco flavor.

While Nacho Cheese became known as the chip's basic flavor, Taco actually came first. It was a spicy, fresh-tasting chip that was reminiscent of the spices used to season taco meat. It bravely ventured forth onto store shelves in an era when both tortilla chips and tacos were still as exotic as escargot and curry, and then suddenly, it vanished.

And then, in January 2011—an apparent miracle. Bags bearing the retro design of the long-missed Taco chip started showing up in grocery stores, and Frito-Lay announced that the original seasoning blend had returned, if only for a limited time. Fans love the old-fashioned bag, but those we pulled are split on whether the taste matches their memories.

M
ARIE was a little bit country, Donny was a little bit rock and roll, and the entire Osmond family was all teeth, family values, and flared pants. And for a kid in the '70s, they were also a tough act to follow. In their TV specials, their variety shows, and even their short-lived 1972 cartoon, the clean-cut Utah siblings would good-naturedly josh each other, a foreign concept to those of us brought up on a steady diet of noogies, wedgies, and whatever it's called when your brother takes his middle knuckle and grinds it into your chest.

That was never more apparent than in the Osmonds' holiday specials, when eleventy million members of the Osmond clan would gather to ride horses in the snow, trade corny jokes, and sing, all the while looking Stepfordly ecstatic to be together. Kids watching at home missed much of the Osmond family fun; most were otherwise engaged—pulling hair, punching throats, and grating each other's face into the carpet.

Our distraught moms didn't understand why we couldn't emulate the Osmonds, who never resorted to such violent shenanigans. From older siblings Alan, Wayne, Merrill, and Jay to younger heartthrobs Donny and Marie, and even down to runty Jimmy, they were a family to envy, with their Mormon values and blindingly white smiles. Sure, a good portion of them were interchangeable (Quick, which one was Merrill?), but that just reinforced the notion that the Osmond whole was greater than the sum of its pearly-white parts.

R
ING, ring.
Who's there? A booth full of awesome. The phone booth was your own little glass-and-steel getaway where you could make a call in private—or just pretend to be Clark Kent. For three minutes, anyway, until the mean old operator demanded more change.

Most high schools had at least one, and on big-city streets, the booths were lined up like a boxy metal Stonehenge.The phone books were on chains, as if that deterred thieves. Whatever—whenever you needed a piece of information, someone had already ripped out that page. But you were going to do it, too, so somehow that made it OK.

We'd drop in the dime (and eventually, in the '80s, a quarter) and listen for the satisfying clink.We'd always—always—stick our finger into the coin-return door, just in case. And sometimes we'd even get lucky. Thanks for the free change, Ma Bell slot machine.We were so entranced with the convenience of it all, we didn't think about how many people had punched the buttons before us with their grubby fingers or, worse, slobbered on the handset. If you listened closely, you could almost hear the germs.

H
AVING a pen pal opened up the world. You found one from places like a comic-book mailbag, the pen-pal exchange on
Big Blue Marble
, or the Trixie Belden fan club, and sent off a letter. We picked our pen pals based on purely scientific criteria—a cool first name, a common love for Rick Springfield, or a residence in a fascinating place. (Kids in Hawaii must have been overwhelmed with mainlanders wanting to correspond.) An active writer could have two, three, or even a half dozen pen-pal relationships going at once. Waiting for the mailman suddenly became fun.

Our letters laid out our twelve-year-old hearts. We exchanged school pictures, wailed about classes, and confided about our crushes. We showed off our neato Care Bear stationery and covered the envelope with scratch 'n' sniff popcorn stickers, dotted our i's with giant hearts, and sketched elaborate swirls under our signature. We traded regional slang (Boston pen pals were “wicked cool”) and shared mix tapes of local bands. We were never likely to meet this person so far away, so we could display a confidence in writing that we actually didn't have in our own school halls.

Eventually, of course, the letters slowed to a trickle and stopped. But before they did, we'd gotten to know someone outside our town, someone who got grounded or dumped and who fought with his or her siblings just like we did. And we learned that kids in Hawaii or Ireland or Iowa were really a lot like us.

W
HO didn't like Dorothy Hamill with her sassy wedge haircut? Who doesn't like soda with a sassy wedge of lemon? Logically, Pepsi Light, Pepsi's first lemon-spiked cola, should have been a hit. But the oh-so-'80s soda vanished faster than Molly Ringwald on the first season of
The Facts of Life
, despite a catchy theme song that claimed “The time is right! For Pepsi Light! Lemony! Pepsi Light! We put a little lemony taste in and took out half the calories!”

Apparently, though, the time just wasn't right. Pepsi Light was introduced in 1975, but its light burned out around 1986. Maybe we Americans wanted to keep squeezing lemon wedges into our cola ourselves. Maybe, in a decade when zero- and one-calorie diet sodas were becoming as common as legwarmers, only taking out half the calories wasn't enough (Pepsi eventually reintroduced the drink with only one calorie). Or maybe it was because the drink itself tasted like you'd polished the ice cubes with Lemon Pledge. One of those, we're pretty sure.