Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (20 page)

T
IGER Beat
hyped celebrities, and
Seventeen
was heavy on makeup and clothes. If those three things weren't the mainstays of your teen existence, the magazine rack was a pretty frustrating place—until 1988, when
Sassy
magazine blasted onto the scene.

Here was a teen magazine that didn't speak only to the cheerleaders and homecoming queens but reached out to the burnouts, the brains, and every girl who didn't believe that a new mascara would change her life.
Sassy
not only celebrated indie music but convinced girls that they just needed a garage and a guitar to start their own band. It reviewed zines and got alternative rockers to offer dating advice. Certain stars (Michael Stipe, onetime
Sassy
intern Chloë Sevigny) were favorites, but there was no kowtowing to the vapid celeb of the moment. (One article was headlined “23 Celebrities Not to Dress Like.” Helllooooo,
Seventeen
fave Whitney Houston.)

Reading
Sassy
felt like talking to an über-cool big sister, and the writers encouraged that feeling by signing their articles with just their first names. Jane, Christina, Mary Kaye, and Margie didn't seem like ivory-tower editors in a Manhattan skyscraper but like trusted pals. When
Sassy
was sold (humiliatingly, to the company that published
Teen
) and eventually shut down, it wasn't like a magazine ended; it was like letters from your coolest friend simply stopped arriving.

D
EAR disco era: Thanks for the music. The clothes, though? What were you on?

Most Gen-X kids were too young to see 1977's
Saturday Night Fever
in theaters, but they were well aware of the iconic image of John Travolta striking a pose in his three-piece, skin-hugging white suit, finger pointed defiantly into the air and hip cocked like he'd thrown out his back. The famed picture was emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to trading cards, pins to giant belt buckles.

Knockoffs of Travolta's outfit were everywhere, including hanging in our older siblings' closets, smelling vaguely like sweat, cigarettes, and Drakkar. Tony Manero wannabes teetered outside disco clubs on platform shoes, sporting painted-on dark shirts with collars sharp enough to draw blood and open enough to reveal a nest of chest hair cradling gold chains. The suits were so tight some '70s club-goers are now likely using the pants as support hose to prevent deep vein thrombosis. Sure,Travolta was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, but the real star of the movie was the white polyester suit.

T
HE concept sounds horrible: Hey, kids! We're going to pepper your Saturday TV time with learning! But if a whole generation knows the Preamble to the Constitution or the order of the planets or that fat cigar-smoking cats shouldn't be allowed in pool halls, they can thank the happy little family of videos called
Schoolhouse Rock!

As with the
Brady Bunch
siblings, certain members of the family were overhyped. “Conjunction Junction” and “I'm Just a Bill” overshadowed the Jan-like charms of kangaroo-adopting, pronoun-hawking “Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla” or the dreamy ice skater in “Figure Eight.” And
Schoolhouse Rock!
created as many questions as it answered. What kind of camp sent kids unpacking their adjectives near a hairy, scary bear? Was that youngest Lolly really old enough to be slaving away in an adverb store? Who got beat up worse, the football player in “Interjections” who threw the wrong way, or the Poindexter who cheered, “Hurray! I'm for the other team”?

Still, the tunes sank into kids' brains like grape jelly into Wonder bread, and we would be a better nation today if older folks, too, had their own versions. Imagine
Schoolhouse Rock!
songs for such topics as “Floss! That's What's Happening” and “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adjustable Rate Subprime Mortgages Here.” Well, maybe not that one.

W
HAT does a rainbow smell like? How about a cowboy boot? Rope? Bone? A computer? Pilgrims? Stars?
Space?
Kids might not know, but with one scrape of a fingernail across a scratch'n' sniff sticker, they could sure find out. (The answers? Plastic, leather, plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic, soap, and plastic.)

Scratch 'n' sniff stickers exploded like a sneeze in the 1970s and 1980s. Teachers stuck them on assignments that made the grade, kids plastered them on their Trapper Keepers, and harried parents scraped them off bedroom doors. Sweet scents dominated, but daring kids were drawn to the savory stickers, even though “pizza” smelled less like tomatoes and pepperoni and more like a late-night burp.

Best were the completely random or gross-out scents, often of items you'd never think to smell: the coconut ghost, the custard-scented egg, the stickers labeled “old shoe” or “onion.” Also, sticker makers seemed to envision a kid populace that loved black licorice much more than was actually the case. But no one can knock their smell longevity: Decades after the fad cooled, old stickers still cling to their scents like Tootie to her roller skates.

J
UMPIN' Jiminy Cricket, they looked like us. Or at least what we'd look like after a few generations spent mating with Pokémon characters.We first fell in love with Sea-Monkeys via their classic ads in comic books, which featured tantalizingly colorful images of a family of pink creatures—all long, gangly limbs, smiling faces, and twisty tails. “Own a bowlful of happiness!” the headlines screamed.

More like a bowlful of disappointment.When the critters showed up in the mail, eager kids ripped open the packets, mixed the contents with water, and waited patiently for a new society to emerge from the murk.

Alas, no amount of wishing was going to turn the Sea-Monkeys into anything other than what they actually were: barely noticeable brine shrimp that, when mixed with water, wriggled around like teeny tiny bugs. The cruddy crustaceans would eventually end up getting tipped over and falling to their deaths after their owners grew weary of the reality of their pointless existence. How many carpets from the '70s have dried-up Sea-Monkeys entombed among their fibers? Probably all of them.

P
ERFECT for the indecisive kid, Pearson's Seven Up bar took all the option paralysis out of choosing a candy. Unrelated to the Un-cola, the bar must have been created by a real people-pleaser who just couldn't stand to leave one flavor unrepresented. Butterscotch! Cherry! Fudge! Coconut! Orange! Nougat! Buttercream! Aaugh, I can't decide, just cram them
all
in there! The flavors even changed over the years—older snackers fondly remember Brazil nut and maple walnut centers.

The bar was kind of like a chocolate-covered row house, with tiny walls of chocolate separating each tasty dwelling. It was not the choice of picky eaters or those who didn't care for coconut or turned up their noses at cherry. But for those who never felt the need to poke their fingers into each Valentine's Day chocolate and throw away half of them uneaten, here was your candy. Sweet.

I
N those prehistoric days before you could make a call and have some dude deliver a steaming pizza straight to your door, the best way to get a fix of molten cheese and yeasty dough was to head to the neighborhood pizza parlor. And no destination was higher on a kid's wish list than Shakey's Pizza.

Long tables and wooden signs with a ye olde font set the mood. And ubiquitous player pianos and banjo pluckers burned a love—or horrible distaste—for ragtime music into a generation's collective consciousness. Shakey's thrived during a simpler time. Something as basic as a window into the kitchen kept kids' attention for hours on end.

Could you get your average high-school kid to work at a place like this today? With all the striped shirts, straw hats, and ice-pick-to-the-head music, it might be tough to find employees outside of a Future Barbershop Quarteters of America convention.

T
HE show was about an old guy wearing a turtleneck and driving around in a tricked-out RV with a teenage boy he wasn't related to. What's wrong with that? Before
Superman: The Movie
convinced us a man could fly, the considerably lower-budget Saturday-morning
Shazam!/Isis Hour
made us fairly aware that a guy could kind of look like he was sort of up in the air. A little.