Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (8 page)

Later in life,
EC
fans felt as if they'd played minor-league ball with a lineup that went on to become superstars. Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, Gene Wilder, and Joan Rivers, we knew you when. HEY,YOU GUYS!

T
HE Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew had nothing on Encyclopedia Brown, the star of dozens of middle-grade books. Using trivia that was random at best and embarrassingly wrong at worst, Brown solved countless crimes, if you could even call them crimes. Once he figured out that a penny was hidden in a hot dog. Another time he solved the case of a purloined piece of precious toilet paper. All things considered, it's kind of startling that Sherlock Holmes didn't show up and smack the kid in the head with his pipe for daring to call himself a detective in the first place.

But, come on—what kind of crooks flocked to Brown's hometown of Idaville, anyway? It was like the town was perennially hosting a World's Dumbest Criminals convention. How'd you like to live that down in prison: being put away by a ten-year-old who charged 25 cents a day plus expenses? To top it off, many mysteries featured Encyclopedia getting the best of town bully Bugs Meany. (Lesson learned: If you don't want your kid to go into a life of crime, probably don't name him Bugs Meany.)

But the books were addictive. Kids could test their wits against Brown, since each story ended without giving the solution, which was hidden at the back of the book. But since solving the crimes relied on knowing that rotary phones don't have a letter “Z” or that lightning always occurs before thunder, readers sometimes felt cheated. In the most incredibly frustrating solution, Brown found the missing penny by claiming that no one would ever put mustard on top of sauerkraut. So some poor fool was locked up simply because he refused to conform to one kid's rigid view of condiment etiquette? That's grounds for a retrial right there.

I
T'S one of those embarrassing secrets, like wetting your bed: A whole flock of kids were closet encyclopedia readers growing up. Almost everyone's family had a set, and the fact that it might be outdated by a decade or more just added to the frozen-in-amber charm. In the world of the 1962
World Book
, JFK was forever president and Vietnam just a quaint little Asian country.

Reading encyclopedias for fun was like sitting down with a benevolent but slightly nerdy teacher after class and just letting him ramble. Medieval riddles. Biographies of German sculptors. A full page explaining the history of the letter “Q.”A real favorite were the pages on each individual state—how else would you know that Georgia's state bird was the brown thrasher and California's state motto was “Eureka”? Plus, the flipping from article to article and volume to volume prepped kids for a future of channel surfing.

The entire concept of a twenty-six-volume set of encyclopedias seems laughable now. Our parents spent a lot of money for an ungainly stack of heavy books that were outdated from the minute they were printed. But the night before your report on George Washington was due, when the public library was closed and the Internet was just a dream from science fiction, encyclopedias were a gift from the gods.

A
SK any little boy from the '70s, especially those who were partial to rock fights and garter snakes: Dolls weren't exactly cool. Dolls you could try to kill, on the other hand? Totally choice. Modeled after the real-life motorcycle daredevil, the Evel Knievel doll's skeleton was made out of metal—possibly mimicking the makeup of the real-life, much-operated-upon Evel.

First, kids stood the shiny-jumpsuited daredevil on the cycle. Then they frantically wound the handle on the base, and off Evel went, like a red, white, and blue bullet, up a ramp fashioned from a checkerboard and a stack of math books, into the air, and over your sister's doll collection. And the powerful rear wheel kept on spinning, even after man and machine smashed into the wall and ground to a halt, caught up in a tangle of shag carpeting, plastic body parts, and Barbie hair.

Talk about resilience: After a bone-crunching wipeout, sadistic kids could dust off Evel's tiny doppelganger, bend his twisted limbs back into shape, jam him back on the cycle, and force him to do it all again, without so much as a St. Joseph's chewable aspirin to dull the pain. Poor little doll. May he rest in pieces.

T
HE
Facts of Life
theme song urged viewers to “take the good” and “take the bad,” and true to form, the show dished up plenty of both.Among the good? Tootie meets Jermaine Jackson. Natalie hires an incompetent Blair for a job at a taco joint. Late-season housemother Beverly Ann has a
Twilight Zone
–style nightmare where the girls are all horribly murdered. (Seriously!)

Among the bad? A first season featuring approximately eighty million classmates, all of whom get two minutes of airtime, even Molly Ringwald. George Clooney's mullet. Annoying Australian Pippa. The random '80s-ness of the musical guests. (El DeBarge? Stacey Q?) The preachy issue-oriented episodes, covering everything from book banning to breast cancer. The groaner punch lines from comic Geri Jewell as Blair's cousin.

But the four main girls had a friendship that felt real, and the fact that dowdy Natalie, for one, didn't exactly fit the Hollywood star mode only lent to the show's charm. And although Mrs. Garrett's advice was corny, she was still a way cooler mom figure than Carol Brady. Still, it was fairly obvious she was running some scam. One wrecked school van does not eight years of indentured servitude make.

I
T was a remote tropical island rife with magic, danger, time travel, and supernatural intrigue.
Lost
? Nope. Unless
Lost
featured guest stars like Maureen McCormick, Roddy McDowall, and Adrienne Barbeau. And we're pretty sure it didn't.

From 1978 to '84,
Fantasy Island
was a hunk of Aaron Spelling–produced schlocktertainment, led by the smooth-as-rich-Corinthianleather Ricardo Montalban as Mr. Roarke and Hervé Villechaize as his pint-sized sidekick, Tattoo.

“Smiles, everyone, smiles,” the enigmatic Roarke would demand of his bikinied staff as a planeful of new guests disembarked.And who wouldn't smile when they saw the weird mix of B-list celebrities who stepped off de plane? Charo one week, Robert Goulet the next. Bob “Gilligan” Denver, Bill Bixby, even the crying Indian from the don't-litter commercials paid a visit.They were there to get their fantasies fulfilled, and Roarke and his crazy voodoo generally obliged, except for the times when the guests, uh, almost got killed instead.

Mostly, though, the visitors—who seemed oddly unconcerned by running into Don Juan or Frankenstein's monster—would learn a Valuable Lesson, courtesy of mystical Mr. Roarke and his preachy paradise. And that lesson was? If you knew what was good for you, you'd stay the hell off of Fantasy Island.

M
AYBE it was because the 1970s themselves were just such an ugly decade, but while they were going on, we kids had 1950s nostalgia jammed in our faces every time we turned around.
Grease
the musical came out in 1971 and became a hit movie in 1978.
Happy Days
started in 1974 and spun off
Laverne & Shirley
in 1976. Retro rockers Sha Na Na were doing the black-leather-jacket-and-gummed-up-hair look even before the 1970s began—they performed at Woodstock, for greaser's sake.

The 1950s we saw on-screen was nothing like the real decade. Fonzie was a little insecure and had trouble saying he was s-s-sorry, but nowhere in his coolness was there a hint of any
Rebel Without a Cause
angst.
Grease
was all about cars and romance and irresistibly catchy songs, and we kids totally missed the bitter edge of Rizzo's “Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee.” (We also didn't get why she was “late.” Late for what?)
M*A*S*H
was set during the Korean War, but its sensitive smart-aleck doctors were as '70s as shag carpet.

The '50s revival that we were sold was a manufactured product with any hard edges filed down. But it was sold so well that even our parents, who lived through the real decade, got caught up in it.They weren't all happy days, but a good fantasy will trump reality every time.

T
ODAY'S kids can watch
Project Runway
and dream of being the next Gianni Versace or Vera Wang. In the 1970s and 1980s, wannabe fashionistas were more hands-on.Tomy Fashion Plates offered a pile of plastic stencils with raised drawings of various heads, bodices, skirts, pants, and shoes.You traced them in the holder provided and decorated your completed creation with colored pencils. The thrill of design without the stabby needles and tangly threads of sewing class!

Fashion Plates separated the Princess Dianas of the world from the Chers. Dianas carefully selected complementary plates, shading them precisely in muted, tasteful hues. Chers thought the whole point was to make an outfit only a blind person would wear. Who wouldn't want to combine a high-necked Gothic bodice with a paisley tennis skirt and roller skates? Pass the purple and orange pencils, please.

A fondly remembered variant, Flip and Fold Fashions skipped the pencils entirely and offered real fabric to wrap around a Barbie-like figure. Tomy also offered the Mighty Men & Monster Maker. Junior Dr. Moreaus could deftly combine a square-jawed blond head and muscle-rippled torso with scaly, reptilian legs and a giant tail. If Superman and a Gila monster ever ended up in the transporter from
The Fly
, this would be the result.

T
HEY weren't cuddly enough to be dolls, or active enough to be action figures. Fisher-Price Little People were representatives from another world, one in which dogs could drive cars, bullies were easily identifiable by their pissed-off perma-expressions, and some tragic communal birth defect meant no one had any arms or legs.

Hourglass-figured Mom always wore blue, her blond hair trussed up as tight as her repressed emotions. Dad and Son shared the same male-pattern baldness and/or overenthusiastic barber. Sister was straight off the Swiss Miss label, with a lace collar and Heidi-esque braids. But oh, the places they'd go.

The fire station had a bell, a crank-up hook-and-ladder, and a mutant Dalmatian.The garage had an irresistible parking ramp with elevator.The school had a built-in blackboard and changeable clock. But the Little People barn is perhaps the most famous structure—it mooed when its door was opened, and the low dulcet tones just never got old, thrilling kids and sending Mom diving for the Anacin.