Gael Fashingbauer Cooper - Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the 70s & 80s

Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the 70s & 80s — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the 70s & 80s" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...43

Table of Contents

To our parents,

Ann and Ed Fashingbauer and Bob and Karen Bellmont,
who let us watch the TV shows, eat the junk food, and play
with the toys that inspired this book.

To Rob Cooper and Jen Bellmont, our adored spouses,
who put up with so much while we worked on this project.

To our beloved daughters,
Kelly Cooper and Rory and Maddy Bellmont.
We cant wait to see the pop culture of your future!

And in memory of Ann Biales and David Walden.
You are missed.

INTRODUCTION

IF you owe a couple cavities to Pudding Pops and Marathon candy bars, learned your adverbs from Schoolhouse Rock!, ever spent a few of your birthdays at Shakeys Pizza, and can still imitate the slo-mo bionic running sound of the Six Million Dollar Man, this book is for you.

For a supposedly fractured generation, we kids of the 1970s and 1980s share a far more universal past than kids today. We all watched the same five channels, shopped at the same few chain stores, hummed the same commercial jingles. We may not remember the moon landing, but we remember Moon Boots. The Mystery Date board game didnt seem sexist, and exploding Pop Rocks were the epitome of candy science.

At school, everyone who didnt smell of Giorgio or Aramis reeked of Sun-In or Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific. Our slides and jungle gyms were made of shin-burning metal with sharp edges, kids regularly looked things up in card catalogs, and learning how to change a typewriter ribbon still seemed like a good idea. We would have laughed at the thought of purchasing bottled water, and even the youngest among us were trusted to play with javelin-sharp lawn darts.

Those things didnt just dramatically vanish one day in a flurry of farewells and confetti. Childhoods dont end that way. Sure, there are marking points, like graduations and moving days, but they dont tell the whole story. The little things slip away every day, and most of them go without warning.

Some vanished totally, like Freakies cereal. Some stayed around but faded from the spotlight, like Sea-Monkeys or Shrinky Dinks. Others were replaced by better technology, like school filmstrips giving way to DVD players, or piles of vinyl records changing to eight-tracks, then to cassettes, then to CDs, and now to MP3s. Still others stuck around and earned places in the hearts of the next generationhave you seen how many varieties of Lip Smackers kids today can buy?

A LOT of people our age hate the label Generation X, preferring to call themselves children of the 1970s and 1980s. Those are goofy decades to embrace, with their avocado refrigerators and wood-paneled rec rooms, their leg warmers and shoulder pads. But if you loved your childhood home even though it wasnt the most glamorous place on the block, you likely have fond memories of the years in which you grew upno matter how goofy, no matter how clumsy. In a way, these two are decades only a native could take to heart.

Its not really the things that we loved; its our memories of those things and how they fit into our lives. The orange-and-red shag carpeting in your bedroom isnt as important as the hours you spent trying to make your Lincoln Logs stand up on it. Malibu Barbie isnt necessarily the worlds best doll, but if when you think of her you picture your cousin and remember how hard you laughed when her baby brother bit Barbie in the boob, then to you she is the best doll, now and for eternity.

Life moves pretty fast, said our fellow 1980s child Ferris Bueller. If you dont stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Thats what were trying to do in this bookstop and look around, close our eyes, and redecorate the rooms of our childhood. We want to remember the sounds we heard, the foods we ate, the toys that passed into our hands for a day or for a decade.We couldnt possibly write about everything, and if one of your favorites isnt here, rest assured we probably loved it, too; we just ran out of room and time. Not everything here was invented in the 1970s or 1980s, but everything listed was important to us in that time period and, perhaps, to you.

In addition to sharing specific childhood memories, weve assigned each item an X-tinction rating. Theyre pretty self-explanatory, but we include them as a way to bring our reminiscences up-to-date. Many things live on, others are gone for good, and some have had a makeover and been reintroduced in some way. Where we can, we note if a certain item has been completely replaced by something else.

So flip up the collar of that polo shirt and dig in.Were off on a guided tour through a childhood of lost memories, back to the days when MTV played music videos and Quisp and Quake duked it out for cereal supremacy. Memories are made of this.

After School Specials

AS preachy as Sunday school and as subtle as Gallagher, After School Specials tackled the juicy social issues, from divorce to date rape, that public schools in the 70s and 80s couldnt talk about. Watching these shows was like peeking at those books the people you babysat for kept hidden high on a bedroom shelf. But because they were dubbed educational, you could watch completely guilt-free.

A Martian could figure out the plots from the titles alone:Schoolboy Father. Andreas Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy. Please Dont Hit Me, Mom. The Boy Who Drank Too Much. Who wouldnt rush home after algebra to tune in to these tawdry tales?

Hilariously, the scripts could have been written by a nun who didnt get out much. Every social issue was treated with the same amount of gravitas, be it shoplifting or Satanism. But the casts were like an all-star team of teen favorites. Rob Lowe and Dana Plato made a baby! Kristy McNichol couldnt get along with her stepdad! After School Specials were like the mall for kid actors: Eventually, you saw everyone there.

X-TINCTION RATING: Gone for good.

REPLACED BY: Made-for-TV movies come close, with titles like Death of a Cheerleader, Too Young to Be a Dad, and Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? But you can relive the real thing by picking up the original After School Specials on DVD, complete with school busand Trapper Keepershaped boxes.

Air Hockey

EVERYBODY knew one lucky kid who had an air hockey table in his rec room. These were often the same spoiled Richie Riches whose parents also bought them a pinball machine and full-sized popcorn cart. But who cared? For a day, they were our best friends, as long as they let us join in the Jetson-like wonder of this truly space-age sport.

Introduced in 1972, the oxygen-powered game put lower-tech basement activities like pool and Ping-Pong to shame. With the flip of a switch, the compressor would noisily shudder into action, firing air through tiny holes in the table and giving kids the power to levitate a tiny puck.

And then, blower-fueled ecstasy. The action was fast paced and airplane-bathroom loud. The mallet, which looked like a little sombrero, let kids whack the plastic puck with the intensity of a pint-sized Wayne Gretzky. The puck would click and clack as it banked off the sides until one killing blow would send it flying into the airand into our opponents orthodontia.

Next page

1234567...43

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the 70s & 80s»

Look at similar books to Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the 70s & 80s. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Jassy Davis

Party Pops!: Frozen Summer Treats With and Without Alcohol

Ron Hunter

Toy Box Leadership: Leadership Lessons from the Toys You Loved as a Child

Pam Holden

What Tastes Good?

Marcie Ballard

Pie Pops

Massimo Montanari

Medieval Tastes

Castella

Pops!: icy treats for everyone

Bakerella

Cake Pops Halloween

Ashcraft

Cake Mix Cooking for Kids

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

The Totally Sweet 90s: From Clear Cola to Furby, and Grunge to Whatever, the Toys, Tastes, and Trends That Defined a Decade

Courtney Dial Whitmore

Candy Making for Kids

Gesine Bullock-Prado

Sugar Baby: Confections, Candies, Cakes, & Other Delicious Recipes for Cooking with Sugar

Susan Heeger

Hand-Crafted Candy Bars: From-Scratch, All-Natural, Gloriously Grown-Up Confections

Discussion, reviews of the book Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the 70s & 80s and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.