Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (22 page)

Slime was slooshy, splorfy greenish goo that would make incredibly satisfying fart sounds if you popped it the right way. The cold, clammy gloop could be squished between your fingers or dangled over your little brother's face, stretching ever closer and closer to his pursed lips like some alien maple syrup–mucus hybrid. The smell—mossy, fecund, and oddly chemical—lingers in a generation's sense memory. Even if it was safely back in its plastic slime can, the odor Slime left behind on hands was not unlike what remained after you'd been petting a wet dog all afternoon.

W
HAT'S better, a toy or a snack? A toy that makes snacks. Introduced in 1979, the Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine wasn't the first food-preparation toy—the Easy-Bake oven dates to 1963—but it was, literally and figuratively, the coolest.

First, you mixed the sugar shock–inducing flavor syrup in a Snoopy-shaped squeeze bottle and shoved a regular ice cube into a hole in a big plastic doghouse. Then the fun part was pretty much over, and the sweatin' began. The TV commercials made shaving the ice cube look as easy as sharpening a pencil, but after about ten turns of the unwieldy plastic crank, most kids just gave up and whined until Mom agreed to do it.

Once the ice was finally transmogrified, things just kept on getting bleaker. The sno-cones looked large and luscious on the box, but in reality, they filled up teeny white paper cups so small they could serve Jell-O shots to Raggedy Ann. Kids in northern climes were known to just wait until winter, collect a big ol' bowl full of snow from outside, and squirt the Super Snoopy syrup on that instead. But none of the cruel reality interfered with the irrational lust kids held for this toy. Coveted by many, owned by few, it was a Sears Wish Book legend.

H
EY, Mom brought home an Archie comic! Cool! Except this one gets a little weird, even for a guy whose best friend wears a crown and swallows hamburgers without chewing. Unlike the other comics in your collection, this has a distinctly churchy bent.

Halfway through a gag about computer dating, Betty (it's always Betty . . .) pulls out a Bible and goes on to bash modern movies, TV, and books. Or in a Wild West–themed story, schoolmarm Betty (again) tells Archie with horror that books now teach evolution. In other stories, Archie and the gang visit different planets, travel back in time to World War I, and become dragon-fighting knights, all in search of Jesus.

Turns out, Mom bought you a Spire Christian Comic. While it's a masterpiece of subtlety compared to the far more fundamentalist Jack T. Chick tracts—those little comiclike pamphlets that rail against things like rock music and evolution—it's not exactly the Laff-a-Lympics of Reggie pranks and Veronica-Lodge-is-
so
-rich jokes you were expecting. Written and drawn by Archie artist Al Hartley, a born-again Christian, this series may have had its heart in the right place, but reading it unawares was like falling asleep during Saturday morning cartoons and waking up to find that Tom and Jerry were now running
The 700 Club
.

S
OME think of it as
American Idol
without Paula Abdul but with the Publishers Clearing House guy. But oh,
Star Search
was so much more than that. From 1983 to 1995, a tuxedoed Ed McMahon herded singers, dancers, comedians, and spokesmodels on stage like performing monkeys with shoulder pads, teased hair, and plastered-on smiles.

After they sang, danced, joked, or looked pretty, the two competitors in each category had to stand right next to each other on stage as they heard how many stars the judges awarded them. The loser's fake so-happy-for-you grimace proved that it wasn't just the spokesmodels who could use lessons in acting.

What was a spokesmodel, anyway? The weird little videos showing them in various outfits and awkward poses seemed like auditions for a gig in a JCPenney catalog. When Ed handed his mic over to the candidates, they inevitably stumbled over such challenging cuecard statements as “We'll be right back after this.”

Unlike
Idol
,
Star Search
spared the contestants the indignity of having to listen to the judges berate specific aspects of their performance in front of millions of people. On Ed's watch, no one was ever called “pitchy.” Four out of four stars.

T
HE prospect of 1978's
Star Wars Holiday Special
was enough to make our light sabers tingle with glee—a bonus chapter of the tale as we eagerly waited for the Empire to strike back. In practice, though, it was a disaster of intergalactic proportions. The plot, such as it was, focused on Chewbacca's family—his wife Malla, son Lumpy, and freakish (and, no doubt, flea-ridden and stinky) father Itchy—as they waited for Chewie to return home.

The original
Star Wars
gang made perfunctory appearances, including an overly made-up Mark Hamill and a stumbly Carrie Fisher. And it all spiraled even further into surreal territory when Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman showed up. The special was so embarrassing that it only aired once. Thank the Force someone was forward-thinking enough to record it so that future generations could revel in this pile of Wookiee poo.

At least it didn't start a trend of other ill-advised holiday specials based on '70s movies.Who would have tuned in to
The Jaws Memorial Day Picnic Special
or
Rocky's Arbor Day Punching Extravaganza
? Oh, right: We would have.

T
HE unluckiest, and sometimes dumbest, people in the world lived in story songs. Wildfire's owner couldn't build a stall strong enough even for a pony. Billy, the would-be hero, wouldn't keep his head low despite it being the
only
thing his fiancée asked for. And don't even get us started on the girl in “Teen Angel,” who apparently weighed “lose his class ring” against “possibly get squashed by a train” and chose the latter.

Unanswered questions abounded. What exactly was Billie Joe throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge, besides himself? Would the crew of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
really have made Whitefish Bay if they'd put fifteen more miles behind her? What was the guy in “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” in jail for anyway? Did those guys in the mine really eat “Timothy”?

Sure, not all story songs were about death. “The Piña Colada Song” was about cheating on your woman,
with
your woman (whoops). “Half-Breed” was about how racism made Cher sleep around. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” was about how poverty made Cher sleep around. “Harper Valley PTA” was about how even hypocrites slept around. But damn if story songs didn't deliver a cast of characters, plot, and a crashing climax all in the span of two or three minutes. Take that,
Young and the Restless
.

T
HE dregs of a fruit smoothie left to curdle on your car's dashboard in July. Fruit preserves soaked in cheap perfume. A melted gel air freshener. That's probably not what the chemists at American Greetings had in mind, but that's kind of what Strawberry Shortcake dolls smelled like. There was a hint of something that suggested fruit, but it was quickly overwhelmed by that plasticky, chemically aroma.

But buying Strawberry Shortcake dolls for the scent was like buying Chanel No. 5 for the texture. The smelly little family appealed most to girls hanging on the cusp between Fisher-Price and Barbie. And the dolls' names were so sugary they made your teeth ache: Strawberry's buddies included Blueberry Muffin, Lemon Meringue, and baby Apple Dumplin'. Most everyone had a cutely named pet, too, including Custard the cat and Pupcake the dog. No one was named Multi-Grain Breadbunny.

So many questions surround the Strawberry Shortcake world. Why was a greeting-card company making dolls? (Answer: Cash. Strawberry Shortcake reportedly generated more than $1 billion in retail sales between 1980 and 1985.) Were you supposed to sniff them
while
playing with them? (Answer: It was impossible not to.) And if Strawberry Shortcake grew up and mated with boyfriend Huckleberry Pie, whose scent would the baby have? (Answer: Ugh.)

W
ITH his little wrestler's underpants and uncanny resemblance to Malibu Ken on 'roids, Stretch Armstrong was the centerpiece of Kenner's line of contortionist action figures that encouraged kids to pursue careers as either massage therapists or medieval torturers. Pulled to within an inch of his life or tied up in knots, the resilient Stretch always squiggled his way back to his original shape.

Stretch Armstrong's one weakness was anything sharper than a marshmallow. A single fingernail jab or poke with a pencil, and the muscular-yet-mushy man's latex skin would tear faster than a scab off a knee. Out poured a viscous goo—that's corn syrup to you and me—in a glacier-paced eruption of nontoxic sludge. More than one kid opened the lid of his toy box to find a surprisingly gaunt Stretch drowning in a slow-moving sea of his own innards. The wounds could be temporarily staunched with a Band-Aid, but most kids realized pretty quickly that a bleeding Stretch Armstrong was a delicious Stretch Armstrong. And if you claim to never have tasted Stretch's sweet, syrupy middle, then you, sir, are a liar.

T
ODAY, some moms are willing to take even preteen girls to hair salons for highlights, but not in our day. Like Scarlett O'Hara pinching her cheeks to redden them because rouge was forbidden, teens who wanted to see if blondes really had more fun had to get creative. Lemon juice was the old standby, but a less sticky and time-consuming way to try to go blond was by using spray-on Sun-In.

And if a little was good, a lot was better. Girls marinated their locks in the stuff, then flopped onto a lawn chair and let the sun do its work. It was a very personal at-home science experiment, and it often failed miserably. The darker your hair was, the less effective the product. Orangey Sun-In streaks were as common as zits at some high schools, and the memory of its chemical smell lingers in the mind, and locker, of many a now-grown teenage girl.

G
IRLS of the 1970s and 1980s loved sad stories—just look to the popularity of
The Other Side of the Mountain
(skiing-caused paralysis) or
Ice Castles
(ice skating–induced blindness). But before those stories hit screens, there was the heartbreaking book
Sunshine
, about the short life of cancer-stricken teen mom Jacquelyn Helton (called Kate Hayden in the book). Author Norma Klein based her 1974 novel on tape-recorded diaries the real Helton kept as she struggled with the disease that started in her leg and took her life at age twenty.