Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (23 page)

It was
Love Story
with hippies instead of Harvardites, plus a motherless toddler. If your paperback wasn't tearstained by the part where the heroine says she can't learn to walk on one leg while her daughter is learning to walk on two, you clearly had a heart of stone.

Sunshine
was later turned into an equally devastating TV movie and a short-lived series, which used “Sunshine on My Shoulders” as its haunting theme song. Today the book is hard to come by, and videotapes of the TV movie and series are impossible to find. But if you ever catch a woman bawling while the elevator Muzak plays a certain John Denver song, this may be the reason.

S
WEET Spielberg, getting our hands on a Super 8 movie camera set our inner film geek free. What other artistic outlet let a kid build a dinosaur out of Play-Doh and animate it, frame by frame, so the little green guy lumbered herky-jerky across the floor? Suck on that, Crayola.

In our pre-VCR world, we could even film something off the TV and watch it any time we wanted! In theory, at least. Somewhere in a shoe box lies a reel of the opening credits of
Love Boat
, abandoned when we realized it wasn't worth the effort of setting up a projector and giant white screen just to watch thirty seconds of Gopher and Captain Stubing staring at the camera.

No iMovie, no YouTube.We sliced the film with a razor blade and painstakingly taped two pieces together, then repeated the process for every edit.We arranged showings of our masterpieces, cutting tickets out of construction paper and burning our fingers on the projector bulb. The movies may have been silent, but from the
flap flap flap
of the reel as it fluttered to a finish, to the
clap clap clap
of our parents as we proudly took our bows, it all still sounded like satisfaction to us.

I
T was as if DC Comics had been taken over by
Highlights
magazine. These were not the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman of your comic books; instead, dumbed down for younger audiences by Hanna-Barbera, they were superhero stories that John-Boy Walton might tell—violence-free and oh-so-wholesome.

Frustrations: Wonder Woman was clearly visible while flying in her invisible jet.Aquaman was completely helpless unless the current world-domination plot took place underwater. Batman and Robin had any tool at their disposal with the word “Bat” in front of it. When the series decided to diversify, it did so in a weirdly racist way—using Black Vulcan's very name to point out that he was black, something that was never done with, say, “White Aquaman.”

Don't get us started on Marvin, Wendy, and Wonderdog, and their alien replacements Zan, Jayna, and that stupid monkey, Gleek. Annoying as they were, they did get kids running around the playground bumping fists and yelling “Wonder Twin Powers, activate!” Jayna's animal-transformation skill had potential, but she constantly used it to turn into lame things like woodpeckers. Zan's waterchanging power was even stupider, especially when he insisted on turning into an ice trapeze or, worse, smiling water in a bucket. It's as if they chose their transformations via Mad Libs.

J
ESSICA and Elizabeth Wakefield were the Goofus and Gallant of 1980s teen books. The average reader envied sassy cheerleading captain Jessica but was secretly more like Liz, the saintly school newspaper editor whose boyfriend, bland Todd Wilkins, was as dangerous as a saltine.

The books themselves were so ploddingly similar they all but demanded a drinking game. The twins' “silky blond hair and blue-green eyes” are mentioned? Drink! There's a reference to their “perfect size-six figures”? Drink! A reader has to go look up the word “lavaliere” because it's mentioned the twins wear matching ones? CHUG! (It's just a necklace, by the way. Not even made out of lava. Rip. Off.)

Liz and Jess were as likely to be kidnapped as attend class. Any new friends were the equivalent of red-shirted
Star Trek
ensigns, introduced strictly to reveal a drug addiction, an eating disorder, or a secret psychosis before being washed away on a wave of Liz's moral righteousness. This awesomeness carried on for 150-plus books, including the
Sweet Valley Kids
and
Sweet Valley University
series. But sadly, we never got to see the inevitable
Sweet Valley Divorcées
, as a new generation dumped the twins for vampires and Harry Potter.

Y
ES, the Mexican fast-food chain whose slogan later became “Think outside the bun” once thought inside the bun was a mighty fine place to be. We like to think the BellBeefer (originally named the Bell Burger, which was pretty Bell Boring) was invented one day when a frantic franchise ran out of taco shells. Really, it was just the contents of a regular beef taco—beef, sauce, onions, lettuce, and cheese—dumped onto a soft white hamburger bun, kinda like a Mexican sloppy Joe. But somehow the hot meat and fixings melted the wimpy bun into sheer junk-food perfection, the perfect cross-cultural marriage.

Kids from meat-and-potatoes homes who thought a tortilla was too daring, or those who really, really loved their school cafeteria chili burgers, weren't the only ones who ordered them. BellBeefers developed a cult following but, sadly, not enough of one to keep them around. However, the name lived on for years in certain circles, where it served as slang for either “vomit” or “fart,” depending on your class of friend.

J
UST try and keep still when the opening bars of Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” or “Beat It” come on the radio. Wasn't possible in 1982, when
Thriller
first came out, and it's not any more realistic now. Even the klutziest kid on the block just had to crank up these tunes and move his feet like they were on fire.

Thriller
was our
Sgt. Pepper
. Not owning a copy was like not owning lungs. Maybe you started with vinyl, then replaced it with a cassette for the boombox, then, after Jackson died in 2009, finally upgraded to CD. We knew every song, mouthed every lyric, merrily screeched right up into falsetto along with Michael. This was the soundtrack to proms, play rehearsals, basketball games, make-out sessions in Mom's old Bonneville. Untangling their notes from your memories would be like throwing away your yearbook.

Jackson was already famous, but
Thriller
's release swept him up on a fame wave so massive that his sad end was all but foretold. But back on the
Thriller
album cover, he hadn't yet made that jump. Resting on one elbow, he looks young and nervous, like he's just asked for a date and is playing it cool while awaiting a response. What do you say, pretty young thing? Do you wanna be startin' somethin'?

I
T'S not easy to differentiate one antiperspirant from another.They all smell vaguely floral, they all do pretty much the same thing. So Tickle burst out of the gate in the 1970s and went after its female audience with the coolest looking antiperspirant bottle ever seen. It featured a giant rollerball on a curvy pedestal base that was encased in a clear, polka-dotted sleeve.You could slip off the sleeve, and it was almost like you had a little pop-art sculpture right there on your bathroom counter.

The commercials were vaguely sexual, which was possibly unavoidable thanks to the shape of the bottle. It was apparently considered too personal to show a model actually putting on the product, kind of like how
The Brady Bunch
shot entire scenes in the bathroom without ever showing the toilet. So instead a model's carefully manicured finger was shown rollllling over Tickle's enormous, um, ball. Kids couldn't help but copy the maneuver, which led to that finger inevitably finding its way into their mouths, which meant that most of Generation X probably ingested waaaay more Tickle than could possibly be healthy. At least we knew our tongues weren't going to break out in a sweat.

T
WO, two, two dolls in one! In the 1970s, doll makers shook off the constraints of plain old Barbie and branched out into Wacky World. Blythe dolls changed their eye color! Crissy dolls changed their hair length! And along came Tiffany Taylor, who combined the two and let little girls change her hair color. Now, girls had changed their dolls' hair color for years, but that process usually began with Magic Markers or Easter egg dye and ended with parental screaming fits and kids getting grounded.Tiffany made it acceptable. Her skull spun around to switch her hair from platinum blond to dark brunette, perfect for the kid who couldn't decide if Jill or Kelly was her favorite Charlie's Angel. (A black version of the doll offered black or coppery auburn hair.)