Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? (25 page)

T
HE slogan said it all: “It's underwear that's fun to wear!”True, but what the Fruit of the Loom marketing department didn't mention was that Underoos were also underwear that could get you a severe beat-down if locker-room bullies caught a glimpse as you were changing for gym class.

Safely hidden under clothing, though? Underrific. Before you tore off the Christmas wrapping paper, they felt like a package of cotton disappointment (aka tighty-whities). But once you realized that they were the real deal—a colorful top emblazoned with a bat symbol or “S” insignia, and briefs, often with the waistband made to look like a belt—no amount of parental pleading could stop you from donning them right there in the living room. These super skivvies made kids feel exactly like comic-book heroes Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Hulk, and Spider-Man. Except, of course, for the fact that Spidey's costume didn't have a wiener hole.

No matter what your mom made you wear on the outside, with Underoos on underneath, you knew you were always ready to rip off your Garanimals and fight crime at a moment's notice—like a third-grade Clark Kent. Underwear has never been so super.

A
NY kid who played on a 1970s playground should kiss the feet of whoever invented the tetanus shot. Before child-safe equipment became the norm, metal, sharp, and dangerous were the order of the day. Pinched fingers, skinned knees, broken bones, amputations. Hundreds of kids laid out like the Civil War triage scene from
Gone with the Wind
. Injury was simply the price you paid for having fun.

Who didn't get their fingers trapped between metal links in the chain holding the swing? Blood blisters for everybody! Rickety ladders and seesaws with weather-beaten wood were giant slivers waiting to happen. Metal slides were surface-of-the-sun broiling; if you stopped halfway down, you'd have griddle marks on your butt. Slides were also prone to rusting away, and if you made the mistake of running your fingers along the jagged, brown sides, you'd end up with a handful of pain. Old-school merry-go-rounds could whip around in such a frenzy, kids would fly off and hit the side of the school. Or at the very least, their blood and internal organs would be relocated to one side of their body for the rest of recess.

S
EVENTIES kids were too young to meet the Beatles on
Ed Sullivan
, but that doesn't mean we weren't inundated with TV variety shows. It was a familiar genre to any kid who'd ever attended a school talent show—people you knew put on gaudy costumes and sang, danced, and cracked jokes. And just as in a school talent show, some stars were naturals at it, while others made you wish you were Jamie Farr wielding a giant mallet on
The Gong Show
.

On any school playground, you could find kids trying to imitate Carol Burnett's awesome Tarzan yell. If Burnett was the cool mom of the genre, Sonny & Cher were the slightly frightening parents of your best friend. Sure, they were nice enough to you, but their digs at each other seemed devised to really draw blood.

Variety shows came and went so frequently it was really tough to keep up. Was it
The Brady Bunch Hour
or
Donny & Marie
that opened with ice skating, and which one had synchronized swimming? Was it the Carpenters or Captain and Tennille who ran their segments in alphabetical order? Even the Starland Vocal Band had a variety show. But the weirdest variety show to date,
Pink Lady and Jeff
, lasted all of four weeks, which seems kind of long considering two of its three stars barely spoke English.

I
F Mom thought Judy Blume was bad, hoo boy, it's a good thing she didn't know about V. C.Andrews. Sure, Blume's
Forever
talked about sex, but Andrews's
Flowers in the Attic
talked about sex WITH YOUR BROTHER.

Yeah. Um. Gross. But thankfully, Andrews's characters were so rip-roaringly over the top that it was impossible to take them seriously. They had names like Heaven Leigh, Rain, and Ice, and were as breathtakingly beautiful as they were indistinguishable. Andrews (and her prolific ghostwriter) thought up exquisite tortures for them, the kind of thing that made us shudder but never stop reading. Eating rats! Drinking blood! Whippings! And we devoured the stories as if they were the arsenic-powdered donuts served up by Cathy and Chris's unbelievably evil grandmother.

The covers were shiny, dark, and menacing, with an actual hole cut into each one so that our heroine's angelic face could peer out, begging us to read her story and save her from a life of starvation and hot tar poured in her hair.

Why did we seek out such horrific tales? Most of us lived pretty standard suburban lives, where the biggest trauma was a pimple or a flunked test.We might have hated our parents for grounding us, but hey, at least we weren't starving to death in an attic. No matter how bad we thought we had it, Andrews's heroines always one-upped us.

O
NCE upon a time, the “M” in MTV stood for “music.” Now we're pretty sure it stands for “mediocre reality-show stars.” Once Puck from
The Real World
and Johnny Knoxville from
Jackass
moved in, the cable channel apparently went deaf to its once-edgy and proud history.

MTV launched way back in 1981, and those of us who didn't have cable had to settle instead for NBC's once-a-week impersonator,
Friday Night Videos.
But eventually we all got our MTV, reveling in the thrill of seeing our favorite pop songs performed live, acted out in little playlets, or turned into wacky cartoons.

Just try to think of Michael Jackson's “Thriller” without picturing his zombie pals,“Take on Me” without A-ha's pencil-sketched lovers, or Robert Palmer's “Addicted to Love” without his sullen lady friends. Sure, some of the early videos seemed as though they were shot in an hour over lunch, but they laid the groundwork for a revolution in short-form storytelling and had a phenomenal impact on pop culture.

Back then, we weren't lying when we repeated MTV's simple but truthful tagline, “I want my MTV.” Although now that the network has thrust
Jersey Shore
upon the world, we're honestly not so sure.

I
N the 1978 Ward's Christmas catalog, View-Master took up two entire pages. That's twice as much space as a little phenomenon called
Star Wars
.You could buy the standard red plastic View-Master, but why would you? Other options included the theater-in-the-round View-Master, the rear-screen-projector View-Master, and the blue View-Master with its own light. And that just covered the viewers. Reels included generic science-class specials on such topics as sharks and prehistoric animals, classics like
Charlotte's Web
, travelogues from Disneyland to Detroit, and such TV faves as
CHiPs
and
Dark Shadows
.

Based on nineteenth-century stereograms, View-Masters first came out in the 1930s. Forty years later, everyone had one buried in a toy chest. In those days before you could watch the Apollo moon landing footage over and over again on a computer, seeing it in View-Master's weirdly appealing 3-D, summarized into three snappy reels of seven images each, was just a little bit cool. Face it—you were always kind of sad when you clicked back around to the first picture.

Despite innovations like the talking version (for illiterate kids?) and the red, white, and blue bicentennial edition, these were never hip toys.Yet flipping through someone else's collection of reels was like nosing through their family photos combined with a quaint, outdated encyclopedia. Hey, they went to Cypress Gardens, too!

W
ACKY Packages combined three of kids' favorite things: goofy commercial mascots, paint-peeling stickers, and really, really lame jokes. Wacky creators never went for the subtle. Silly Putty became Killy Putty! Peter Pan peanut butter? Peter Pain! Spam? Cram! It's like the
Simpsons
episode where Marge suggests a pile of names for about-to-be-born Bart and Homer is ready with a stupid taunt for each. (“Marcus? They'll call him Mucus!”)

But kids were not exactly looking for Thomas Pynchon. Obvious ruled in Wackyland, and Gross shared the throne. Who could resist a bucket of the Colonel's finest when it was renamed Kentucky Fried Fingers? Crest toothpaste became garlic-flavored Crust. A horrified housewife shrieked as she cooked up a batch of Minute Lice.