Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (24 page)

As cool as the two-tone hair sounded, Tiff had more issues than a
Seventeen
magazine subscription. Kids could intentionally spin her head just halfway and make her look as if she'd been horribly injured in an industrial mangler accident. Even when her hair was carefully swiveled to show the preferred shade, the other color was still obvious, making her look like a skunk, a punker, or the worst hair colorist on the planet. But kids didn't care because, hey, two dolls in one.

Q
UICK—how many movies did Don Knotts and Tim Conway appear in together? Eighty? A hundred? Nope, just six. If it felt like the pair showed up in nearly every '70s-era kids' comedy, it was for good reason. Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy were our parents' and grandparents' comedy teams; Knotts and Conway were all ours. We knew them well from TV, and somehow they became even more than the sum of their parts when they teamed up on the big screen. Conway was a dim-witted goof; Knotts barely contained his frustration at his buddy's shenanigans, letting it squeak out in double-takes, pursed lips, and dismissive sniffs. Together, comedy gold.

And what better way to while away an afternoon than watching those two knuckleheads engage in cinematic slapstick? After a pair of
Apple Dumpling Gangs
and a few lesser flicks, they hit their stride in
The Private Eyes
, the Sherlock Holmes spoof that set the pair loose in a spooky castle filled with hidden passages and opportunities to goof around. Just try not to pee yourself during the scene when Knotts fights back the barf while Conway lists off gross things like “warm milk with lard in it.”

Our grandparents can keep their black-and-white memories of Hope and Crosby and Burns and Allen. We had Barney Fife and Dorf.

T
V was pretty lecturey in the 1970s and 1980s. Somewhere along the line, someone panicked that kids weren't eating proper snacks and decided the way to solve that was to offer nutritional advice from a yellow blob of fat with spindly legs and a ginormous hat. Thus, the birth of Timer, a disturbing but memorable PSA star whose segments were apparently dashed off by a bored but starving copywriter who had to make deadline before he could hit the drive-thru for a Big Mac.

Timer's most memorable video has him “hankering for a hunka cheese,” but any kid who needed to be shown how to place cheese between two crackers was really too dumb to be allowed to watch TV. In another, Timer takes a tour of the stomach and then apparently just gives up, encouraging kids to eat random leftovers out of the fridge. “Sunshine on a Stick” oversells the result by half, as it's just orange juice frozen in ice-cube trays.Timer also shows up in a segment demonstrating toothbrushing, which is odd when you consider that his teeth are as yellow as the rest of him.

C
OWBOYS, goblins, lost civilizations! Time Life Books read like encyclopedias with all the boring stuff cut out.Their extra-long TV commercials were mini-movies, letting us imagine joining the James Gang or plundering with the Vikings. We'd plead with our parents to call the 800 number and set the once-every-other-month delivery machine into motion. “Please, Mom? You get to examine it free for ten days!”

In one ad, Vincent Price pitched the
Enchanted World
series as books that “let you fly along with those unlucky spirits condemned to haunt the world of the living.” Commercials for the
Old West
series told kids about gunslinger John Wesley Hardin, who was “so mean, he once shot a man just for snoring.”

But what really set the books apart was less the content and more the elaborate bindings. The
Enchanted World
series was bound in fabric; the
Old West
version had “the look and feel of hand-tooled saddle leather.” Our Scholastic Book Club paperbacks looked sad by comparison.

We wish the line had endured, just to see what Time Life would have tried next. Would a series on food have been bound in real cheese slices? But alas, the books eventually ended up in garage sales all over the country when people finally realized that they were indeed good-looking on the outside but less than useful in daily life. Apparently, you can't judge a book by its cover after all.

F
ORGET cookies and caroling—one of the best parts of Christmas was snuggling up on the couch with a department-store catalog. You'd skip past the endless pages of boring clothes and home furnishings, narrowing right in on the toys. It was so much better than a trip to the mall—no hot coats and slushy boots, no crowds, no Dad dragging you off to look at snow tires instead of Snoopy Sno-Cone Machines.

And we never even saw half these catalog treasures in our local stores. Superman-themed Big Wheels? Sing Along with Shaun Cassidy record players? Toy kitchens that were bigger than Mom's,
Starsky and Hutch
walkie-talkies, a four-story
Star Wars
space station that rivaled Barbie's Dream House for luxury?

Some sections gave you a peek at your own imagined future, when Mom might actually splurge on a pinball machine or trust you to play with Creepy Crawler goop.And still other pages puzzled. Was there that much call for Donny and Marie marionettes, and who were the kids buying all these chemistry sets and microscopes?

Here's the thing about toy catalogs:They taught you about life. You knew you weren't going to get everything you wanted, but surely some of your dreams would come true. For the rest of it, sometimes just knowing it was out there was enough.

C
ALLINʹ out around the world, we were ready for a brand-new beat. The portable, battery-powered marvels that were transistor radios allowed us to dance in the streets to our very own soundtracks. Finally, we could listen to Night Ranger wherever and whenever we damn well pleased—including, if we hid the tiny earpiece behind our feathered hairdos, in class.

The radio designs were pop-art pizzazz—there were giant dice, Coke bottles, Folger's cans, even ladybugs with dials for eyes. Kids dragged around the colorful ball-shaped Panapet by its chain, a futuristic dog that barked staticky Barry Manilow songs. The Toot-A-Loop was shaped like a pregnant bagel. Part high-tech party starter, part fashion accessory, it could be worn around the wrist or twisted into a mod “S” shape. Try doing that with a record player.

On clear nights, we thumbed the ribbed little dial and surfed the airwaves, tuning in broadcasts from exotic cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. It was a window into another world—a snowed-in kid in St. Paul could drift to sleep listening to a Dallas DJ drawl on about how hot it was. We'd feel like high-tech eavesdroppers, listening to voices from towns we'd never been to talk about traffic on highways we'd never ever drive on. What's the frequency, Kenneth? Pure broadcasting bliss.

T
HE world of school supplies was pretty stagnant until 1978, when Mead introduced the Trapper Keeper and really upped the coolness ante. The folders, or Trappers, came with wraparound flaps that held your papers in even if the class bully knocked them to the floor. And they were punched with three holes so that the Trappers could all hang out together in your Trapper Keeper, a binder with snappy sliding plastic rings and a rip-r-iffic Velcro closure. Even if all you were organizing were drawings of your dream bedroom, complete with secret passageway, escalator, and soft-serve ice-cream machine, you felt positively tycoonlike with your Trapper Keeper stuffed under your arm.

The first Trapper Keepers we remember were in simple solid colors—turquoise was a favorite—but soon the designs were flying fast and furious. A Saint Bernard carrying a bucket of flowers. A baby harp seal cuteing it up on an ice floe. Kittens. Swans. Hot sports cars. Paint splatters. Scenes that seemed to represent either a futuristic city or the inner workings of a pinball machine. Kids too old to wear their sentiments on a metal lunch box transferred them to the Trapper Keeper instead. It didn't mean your homework was any better, but it certainly was organized.

W
ONDERING how the seven SS
Minnow
passengers found their way to Gilligan's Island? Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale! Confused as to how Greg and Marcia were related? Here's the story . . . of a lovely lady!

Some theme songs required that you know a tiny bit about the plot, so you could figure out why Chico shouldn't get discouraged, or just how Wonder Woman got into her satin tights, fighting for our rights. Others were so subtle that they actually charted—
Kotter
's bouncy “Welcome Back” could have been about any dreamer returning home, and
Greatest American Hero
's peppy “Believe It or Not” resonated with anyone who couldn't believe their luck. (“It should've been somebody elllllllllse!”) And some shows appeared to have written a theme song, then said “Aw, to hell with it” and had an actor speak the words instead. (“Now they work for me. My name is Charlie.”)

Good theme songs essentially served as catchy jingles promoting their shows—ads that viewers carried around in their heads.Ask any kid hopscotching to “Schlemiel! Schlimazel!” on the playground, or trying to decipher what Archie and Edith were singing around the piano. (It was “Gee our old LaSalle ran great.”) Themes were the musical wrapping for a sitcom present—not really necessary but surprisingly missed once they started to disappear.They could take a nothing show and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

H
IGH school in the '80s was dangerous.You could sand off your skin in shop class, burn your buns in home ec, and risk severe finger injury in typing. Computers were still a futuristic dream, and working with newfangled electric typewriters was like learning to fly the space shuttle.

You'd flip on the IBM Selectric or Smith-Corona, and it'd leap to life with a loud
ka-chink
and sustained hum.You'd press a key, and the typewriter would respond with a gunshotlike crack. Press too hard, and the “W” would WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW its way across the page before you even knew what was happening. Accidentally rest your hand on the Return key, and the paper would shoot up like a bright white piece of toast.

No amount of repetitive exercise (“AAA space, SSS space, DDD space”) was going to help us master this crazy piece of equipment. It was as if they'd set us in front of an industrial drill press and told us to build a car chassis. So we cautiously hunted and pecked as the teacher suspiciously cased the room, taking points off our score—or, worse, knocking our knuckles with a ruler—when she caught us looking at the keys.

Little did any of us know that all of those lessons would end up crumpled in the trash bin of history. Soon enough, thanks to Black-Berrys, we'd all be typing with our thumbs.