Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (7 page)

Textures demanded their due, too. Kids hated shag carpeting because Lincoln Logs wouldn't stand up on it, and it ate doll shoes. Fuzzy flocked wallpaper stained easily and made no sense—were we supposed to pet it? Popcorn ceilings, faux-wood paneling, random mirrored walls—if some decorator could think of it, our parents bought into it.

Maybe it was an extension of the free love of the 1960s. Why commit to one style when you could embrace them all? A Spanish mural here, some foil wallpaper there, a little bead curtain hanging here. It was like a conquistador went to a bordello to meet Shaft.

H
OW do you know the elephant's been in the refrigerator? The footprints in the butter, of course. Where do cows go Saturday nights? To the mooo-vies.

Corny? As Kansas in August. The knee-slappers on Dixie Riddle Cups may have been lame, but they're the reason we all know that when you tell a mirror a joke, it cracks up—and the best way to talk to a monster is . . . long-distance.

Sometimes Riddle Cups would show up in kitchens, where kids would have to fill up about a dozen of the thimble-sized buggers to wet their whistles. Mostly, though, they were staples in bathrooms across the country. We were supposed to use one of the tiny cups each time we brushed, but we'd often yank them all from the dispenser, quickly digest the comedy, then stack them back inside, blissfully anticipating the really awesome riddle that would pop up later.

At the peak of the cups' popularity, in the '70s, Dixie expanded the line to include Dixie Riddle Plates and Bowls. Mmm—dinner and a show.

W
HAT kid didn't love novelty and comedy songs? When a radio station would sneak “Purple People Eater” or “The Streak” onto the air, it was like discovering Mom had slipped a Snickers into your lunch box. How fabulous, then, to stumble across
The Dr. Demento Show
, a full two-hour Sunday night radio romp, where goofy led into ridiculous led into somewhat risqué followed by just plain silly.

The gentle-voiced Deeeeeee-mento (real name: Barret Hansen) was the lunatic running the musical asylum, honking horns and holding court with a pile of wacky sound effects.There was probably a rubber chicken in there somewhere. But there was method to his madness—he organized songs by themes, featured witty guests, and wound up each show with the most-requested tunes.

The crazy songs he played wriggled their way into our memories. Who could struggle through a miserable week at summer camp without muttering “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”? And how daring did it feel to almost swear by singing “I stepped in a big pile of... shhhhh... aving cream”? Dr. Demento was a teacher, too, introducing us to legends like Tom Lehrer and Stan Freberg and, most notably, to a young fan of his with giant glasses and curly hair who became “Weird Al” Yankovic, undisputed king of modern parody tunes.

S
HOW of hands, please: Whose parents smuggled them into a drive-in movie by hiding them in the backseat of the car to avoid paying a measly $1.25 for a child ticket? Everybody's? That's what we thought.

Drive-in movies were more than just another entertainment option—they were an endurance test. If your parents opted for a triple feature, they'd show up before dusk, jockey for a good parking spot, then drive home bleary-eyed six hours later. In between, it was a mélange of popcorn, bug spray, cigarettes, and beer. Dad would roll down the window halfway and affix the clunky corded speaker, and the tinny audio would pierce your eardrums.

Car after car would be crammed with toddlers in footie pajamas, all struggling to make it through even the first hour of
Freaky Friday
. They'd inevitably conk out in the backseat, only to wake up for a second, catch a glimpse of Mom and Dad making out, and pray for the sweet release of sleep.

Older kids would be out prowling the grounds. Theater playgrounds let you meet and mingle with the tough kids from the grade school on the other side of the tracks.You could slink around and hunt for cars with steamed-up windows, then jump up and terrify the hormone-raging teens inside. By the time you got back to your own Country Squire, who cared if you even saw the movie?

I
F you have a twenty-sided die in your junk drawer, a ream of graph paper in your closet, and a tingle of remorse that you never made it past fifth-level elf, you just might be a recovering D&Der. Or maybe you still get together in someone's basement for a Thursday-night game, even though you're pushing forty and have kids and a mortgage and a real job that has very little to do with killing dragons. (We bet it's in computers.)

This fantasy role-playing game first hit the scene in 1974 and trickled down to high-schoolers by the 1980s.This was the hobby for smart kids and misfits, who bonded together over an imagination-bending endeavor that let them pretend they were mighty warriors who didn't get nosebleeds when they talked to girls. It was kind of like a weekly poker game, with Cheetos and Orange Crush instead of cigars and scotch.

Every couple of years, it seemed, parents and principals would cast a magic spell of paranoia and declare that the game was tied to Satanism and the occult. Kids just shrugged it off:They knew they had less to fear from the D&D-playing nerd who sat next to them in English than they did from the roid-raged bully who didn't know an orc from an ogre.

H
IGHLIGHTS
was OK for flipping through in the dentist's waiting room, but hipper preteens signed up for
Dynamite
magazine. Sure, you could get it in the mail, but it was supremely cooler to subscribe through the Scholastic Book Club and have your teacher hand it to you in class once a month. School-approved distraction!

Celebs like Shaun Cassidy and Farrah Fawcett decked the covers, but this was no star-crazy
Tiger Beat
.
Dynamite
had plenty of stand-alone features.A comic strip followed the Dynamite Duo, twins Pam and Bill, who turned into superheroes Dawn-star and Nightglider to solve crimes. Cartoon vampire Count Morbida offered brainteasers. Magic Wanda taught readers tricks.
Dynamite
even catered to its horse-crazy age group by adopting a colt, Foxy Fiddler, and producing photo-filled features on its growth. The monthly “Bummers” page illustrated kid-submitted gripes (“Don't you hate it when your cat is afraid of mice!”) and paid a whopping $5 per selection. Getting one of your “Bummers” published was the grade-school equivalent of having a cartoon bought by the
New Yorker
—instant hallway cred.

Dynamite
, and its teen-aimed sibling,
Bananas
, were probably brought down in the end by their own innocence. As kids got more jaded and celebrity culture took over, it didn't seem cool anymore to teach kids card tricks and show them photos of horses.
Dynamite
finally fizzled out in 1992. Talk about a “Bummer.”

L
ED by original octo-dad Dick Van Patten and his comb-over hairdo,
Eight Is Enough
, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1981, was a heaping helping of white-bread wholesomeness.

The Bradfords lived in a Sacramento house that looked normal-sized on the outside but was apparently humongous on the inside, like a clown car. The kids kind of blended together—there was little Nicholas, oldest brother David, curly-haired screwup Tommy, and a bunch of girls somewhere in the middle. Plots mostly centered around benign sibling struggles, like elbowing for time in the bathroom or frantically scrambling to clean up after a party before their parents came home.

Despite the laugh track, the show often dealt with serious topics, too. It had to: Actress Diana Hyland, who played the Bradford mom, died after filming just a few episodes. In the second season, Van Patten's character remarried, bringing stepmom Abby, and a whole new dynamic, into the family.

Eight Is Enough
was a sanitized, Hollywood-skewed view of real life, but to us kids, it rang true. Except for the theme song. How many years will it take to finally understand the trippy lyrics, like “A plate of homemade wishes on the kitchen windowsill”? Eighty will never be enough.

I
T'S cool now to mock eight-track tapes as useless doorstops, but that completely overlooks their place in history. Sure, they were bulky, were easily broken, and often made it sound as if both your woofer and your tweeter were under water. But these clunky cartridges arrived on the scene as a welcome bridge to musical freedom. Music lovers who'd once desperately tried to wire their record players into the electrical system of their 1964 Chevy Impala were no longer slaves to the radio and could now play the tunes they wanted whenever they wanted. Well, kind of. You couldn't rewind or fast forward, which meant that once you pressed the button for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” you were committed until the ship sank.

There were other issues, to be sure. The legendary “eight-track click” was a clunky sound that occurred four times during the playing of each tape, sometimes mid-song.You'd be rocking out to the John Denver and the Muppets Christmas tape when suddenly,
click
—it sounded like Kermit had momentarily grabbed Miss Piggy by the throat.

We never understood the magic behind the eight-track.Was it a system of pulleys and gears? Little hippie music gnomes? It didn't matter. It let you play the Carpenters in your car, and that was plenty.

W
HEN you'd outgrown
Sesame Street
, you turned on the power with
The Electric Company
, which ran from 1971 to 1977 on PBS. It was entertaining, educational, and more than a little freaky. Who didn't want to punch the kids named Whimper and Whine, for obvious reasons? Ditto for plaid-clad J. Arthur Crank, with his voice set to the annoyance level just below “power drill.” And why, oh why, was that giant anthropomorphic lollipop following that poor little girl?

But most of the show was irresistible.We longed to join the singing group the Short Circus, swing on vines with Jennifer of the Jungle, or foil the Spell Binder with Letterman. Some skits were both addictive and crazy-making—the live-action Spidey skits were often the hit of the episode, but it was unnerving that the webslinger had apparently been rendered mute, speaking only through squeaky word balloons.