Slice Cola. I think we all remember it (and by "all" I mean us old people, and by "remember" I mean have a very slight recollection, mostly due to our age and our brains already being at max capacity with all this glorious pop culture stuff. Some things just have to be forgotten, such as short lived 80s sodas, and math.)
I think we all remember Orange Slice, and of course, Lemon Lime Slice (the OG), and possibly even that punishment we didn't deserve known as Apple Slice (I just threw up in my mouth a little).
But do you remember that there was a Cherry Cola Slice? I didn't. Not one bit. I tried to remember back and visualize a shopping trip with my mom......strolling down the soda aisle. That would have been back in the mid 80s.....years ago....I'd tell you exactly how long ago that was, but you know....math.
I think the funniest part of this old Newspaper ad is that they are touting how they beat Cherry Coke in a taste test. Maybe they should have been looking over their other shoulder, as Cherry Cola Slice was discontinued in 1988 due to the popularity of Cherry Pepsi.
Hind-sight is always 20-20...or 40-40.......or some other numbers?
Attention customers: Were running a special in our deli department this week - buy one pound of mashed potatoes with homestyle gravy, get a second pound for half off! This is a great bargain for all you potato lovers out there (and gravy lovers too, I suppose, which is in itself, is kind of weird.)
It's a whole truckload of awesome retro commercials from the 60's - 90's! Food! Cars! Video Games! PSAs! Cereal! A little bit of everything! Even Taco Ranch from Pillsbury!
So stop on by and check it out - I'll be adding new commercials daily as I work my way through my hundreds of hours of vintage video tapes of TV shows recorded with the original commercials.
We thank you for being not only a customer, but also a friend.
Product: 3D Monster Pops
Company: Good Humor
Years: It's a mystery.....
Image not my own - if this is yours let me know so I can give you credit!
So here's a strange little treat that I honestly had never heard of, but there has been a small buzz around the internet (as it seems many people DO remember these). Problem is, nobody really knows much about them. Contacting Good Humor resulted in the usual "We don't keep track of our stuff" response, and online other then fuzzy memories and the box art there isn't much to go on.
These were orange, cherry and grape popsicles shaped like your favorite monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and other devilish creatures. A Mummy perhaps? A Skeleton? We just don't really know.
I do think these are totally rad, though (totally) - and knew they had to be on the shelves here. But as far as more info, that's where you loyal shoppers come in. If you know anything about these (fuzzy memories and all), let me know! Like what part of the country (or world) did you eat these in? What years did you remember them from? How were they? Did they give you nightmares? Cavities? I need your help!
Comment below if you remember these and want them back in stores!
And don't confuse these with Welch's Monster Freez'ems - another 70's/80's product I will be adding to the shelves here.
Product: Circus Fun Cereal
Company: General Mills
Years: 1986-?
Coulrophobia [kool-ruh-foh-bee-uh] - noun - An abnormal fear of clowns. There have been several cereals over the years who had clowns for mascots. Kaboom...Sugar Krinkles...Sugar Smacks....and each one ended the same way. MURDER.
OK, I'm making that up. Most just ended up giving people a delicious breakfast.And I guess Circus Fun did the same.It hit the shelves in 1986, and like the multitudes of other sugary kid friendly cereals to hit the shelves in the mid 80's, it only lasted a few years before being discontinued.
Circus fun had a lot going on in that box.....several different shapes (Hoops and balls), several different marshmallows (horses, elephants, lions, bears, tigers), and one underlying motive: MURDER. (OK, mostly shapes and marshmallows with very little murder.) I remember eating this as a kid, and I loved it. It was like Fruit Loops, Kix, Trix and Lucky Charms all got together (Bow-chicka wa-wa...) and this was the offspring it produced. It was very sweet, very delicious, and as long as you didn't have coulrophobia you probably enjoyed it.If you did have coulrophobia, however, the commercials probably freaked you out.
It really was a pretty good cereal, and I am just kidding when it comes to the clowns, and all the MURDER......I think this cereal just fell victim to the over saturation of similar cereals in the 80's, and went away when people started to get a more healthy outlook on breakfast for their kids.Which is a shame..... Because they all float in milk down here..........
Product: Aspen Soda
Company: PepsiCo
Years: 1978-1982
Alert Reader Alert! (Wait, huh?) Loyal reader and all around standup guy, Mike Henry, recently sent me an email about a product we currently don't have in stock. That product was one that I hadn't heard of, which in a way, made me feel kind of sad. I like to think I know everything, based solely on my own observations of myself and what my mom tells me, and with two simple words, Mike brought me crashing down to earth.
Those 2 words were: Aspen Soda.
Wait, Whats this now? What in tarnation is Aspen soda? Are you making it up???
BUT I KNOW EVERYTHING!
Mild depression set in for a few days upon realization that I don't know everything. I spent an entire week on the internets, learning about all the things that I didn't know, including but not limited too: Wombats (real), trigonometry (was pretty sure the teacher was making it up as he went along), and now, Aspen Soda.
Aspen soda was an "Crisp and clear" apple flavored soda created by PepsiCo in the late 70's. It was meant to compete with all the lemon lime sodas on the market, which there were many of. For some reason, though, there wasn't an apple flavored soda, and PepsiCo stuck a bunch of money trying to fill this void.
Turns out the reason was that apple soda really wasn't that good. I mean, it wasn't BAD, or anything.....it just isn't something people really want a whole lot of. In the early 80's, Pepsi decided to rebrand this soda as Slice (another failed soda, for the same reason).
Then, Apple soda went away all together, like the wombats did.
(Correction, wombats are still around.)
Here's the Aspen commercial.
I can't believe this is a real thing. I die a little inside every time I watch this.
Who remembers these? I sure as heck didn't, when alert reader Gerald Logue emailed me and said "What about Cajun Spice Ruffles?", to which I was like "Cajun Spice Ruffles? Now you're just making stuff up!", to which Gerald was all like "Un-uh - they're real!", and I was like "No they're not"................this went on for days.
Finally, I remembered Gerald had said something in the initial email about Justin Wilson, the Cajun Cook, so I looked it up.........and holy s%*t, I found the commercial on Youtube, and bam, I remembered. (Well, I remembered the commercial, anyway....) Justin Wilson was the pitch person for these delicious, Cajun flavored chips.
Justin Wilson was from Southern Louisiana. He was a cook, a recording artist, a writer, a humorist, and best known for his catch phrase: "I gar-on-tee!"
In the mid 80's, Cajun cooking was all the rage (much in the way Sriracha is today). Every brand of chips and snacks around this time had to have a cajun flavor, and Ruffles had a hit on their hands with their version. Problem is, like every other fad, people lost interest pretty quick, and these chips were discontinued after only a few years.
I do now remember liking these back in the day....I've always been a sucker for new potato chip flavors, and Cajun Spices have that kick I dig.
So if someone starts a petition to Ruffles to bring these back, I'd gladly stand in line to sign it.
I gar-on-tee!* *Yep. I went there. It's been a long week, cut me some slack. He's dead, I hope he doesn't sue me for catchphrase infringement. Is that even a thing? I mean, I could spell it a little different, then it should be ok, right? Right???
Weird Commercials with attractive women laughing continuously - Check.
This product had it all. It had the sexually charged 70's, wrapped up with very era specific package design, wrapped up with a dirty sounding tagline, wrapped up with commercials that make you blush, wrapped up with beans, lettuce and cheese in what I like to call a "Holy Crap, This Product is Amazing" Burrito.
It came in 4 scents, or as my wife hates when I say it, flavors: Herbal , Floral, Citrus, and Unscented.
Besides the obvious, well, um......shape of the "package", the ads for this product cleverly referred to this as the antiperspirant "With the big, wide ball", to which all the girls start to laugh.
The commercials are a whole new level of bonkers, and they were actually voted the worst commercials of 1977. Check em out:
Sex sells, but who's buying? Well, a few years ago a new Tickle stick (now THAT sounds dirty...) sold on Ebay for over $100. Some guy found it when cleaning out his parents bathroom cupboard, and now that guy is rich! Ok, maybe not rich, but he sold a deodorant shaped like a you know what to somebody who wanted to check out it's big wide ball, and that my friends, is pretty f-ing rich.
Product: Flings
Company: Nabisco
Years: Late 1960's - 1980's (?)
Dear Nabisco,
Stop trying so hard. We get it already. You can turn anything, no matter what the flavor, into a delicious chip, snack, or cracker. Here at Gone But Not Forgotten Groceries, we stumble across something new (old/new) from you almost every day, and honestly, I've almost stopped keeping track. You are good at what you do, Nabisco, so why spread yourself so thin? Pick a core group of products and make those products the best damn products we have ever seen....and maybe, just maybe, you are already starting to do that. But in the 60s, 70s and 80s.......well, lets say you were snack aisle whores. You put it all out there year after year, every flavor.....every shape. "Don't like Curls? We have Sticks? Don't like Sticks, we have cones? Don't like cones? We have a goddamn chip shaped like a platypus. "Well that's random", you say? Goddamn right it is, because we're Nabisco, and we can make these chips/snacks and crackers into any M%#$@R F^&%ING shape we want? Got it......GOT IT???"
"Oh, and you can get that Platypus shaped cracker in 5 flavors, Cheese, Ranch, Papaya, Dandelion, and New Car Smell. "But New Car Smell isn't a Flavor" you say.....look, do you want me to lose my shit? Because Nabisco can lose it's shit REAL easy, and one day, when you wake up, all these shape and flavors will be gone.....and all you'll have left are Triscuits, Wheat Thins, and Chicken in a Biscuit. So don't push it, pal."
I'm almost certain Nabisco would say something like that if confronted. Maybe.
Box picture from Dan Goodsell
Flings were a chip that looked similar to today's Cheese puffs, and came in 3 flavors: Chicken, Cheese, and Ham and Swiss. These were mostly around in the late 60's/early 70's, but I did stumble upon a newspaper ad from 1984, where it appears Nabisco tried to bring back Flings, this time in a bag instead of a box.
Like the other hundreds (possibly millions, or possibly less) of Nabisco Products that have appeared on store shelves over the last 50 years, I'm going to guess that very few of you readers out there remember these. I don't. Which is pretty cool when you add it onto the vast sea of groceries that have filled up store shelves over the years...these could have been someones favorite snack to curl up with on a Saturday night. People have a weird nostalgia towards food, especially discontinued food (which is why I started this blog), so it's neat to find stuff like this that might bring someone a smile.
Product: Hubba Bubba Soda
Company: AJ Canfield Company - AKA "Novelty Beverage"
Years: 1988 - ?
If I was playing "100,000 Pyramid" in 1988, and was the one giving the clues, and the category just so happened to be "Things You Shouldn't Put into Your Mouth", you can bet that "Hubba Bubba Soda" would be the first thing I would say (after I had a good chuckle about all the OTHER, much dirtier things I could say, many of which wouldn't be suitable for daytime TV, most of them offensive enough to get Dick Clark to probably ban me from the show indefinitely, or at least until Ed Begley Jr. or Betty White were unavailable.)
Hubba Bubba Soda started to "pop" up (ha! see what I did there???) on shelves in 1988. It was the brain child of Steve Roeder, who concocted the flavor using bubble gum snow cone syrup. Initially released in the Chicago area, it became such a hit novelty drink that it started to have a much wider distribution, reaching most other parts of the US for a limited time. How limited? Good question. I'm not really sure if this soda lasted a year, or possibly 2, but it wasn't around for long. I remember seeing it, but never quite worked up the courage.
Because nobody wants to drink bubblegum. Fact.
Oh, and if it wasn't bad enough, it also came in Diet, because if you saw a Bubble gum flavored soda on the shelves and didn't want all the calories, you are a horrible person and should realize that Hubba Bubba bubblegum was made for children, and is made of 126% sugar. (wait, can something be over 100%? I'm 108% certain that it can...) If they made diet flavored bubble gum, would you buy it? No. No you would not. So why would you even THINK about buying a diet bubble gum flavored soda??? My god, man, take a look at your life, and try to put together the events that led you to standing here in this soda aisle, actually contemplating buying Diet Hubba Bubba Soda. Is this where you want to be in your life? Is it? IS IT?????
Cans of this soda still "pop up" (Boom! I did it again!!!) on Ebay from time to time, so if you've got about $30 or so tucked away for a rainy day and don't really feel like giving it to me, bid away and hopefully you can own one.
Novelty foods aren't meant to last forever, and Hubba Bubba Soda certainly was that. It was possibly created on a dare....I'm not sure. If I had a can right here in front of me, I'd try it, though I'd rather try a Diet one if you have it......I'm trying to lose some of this weight......
Product: Space Dust/Cosmic Candy
Company: General Foods
Years - Late 70's-early 80's
Image by Greg Koenig
Ground control to major Tom.....
Ground Control to Major Tom.......
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.....
Here's a fun one. In the late 1976, General Foods really took the novelty candy world by storm with it's new candy, Pop Rocks. It was a hit, so a few years later, they released a new candy (which was similar) called Space Dust. It was basically Pop Rocks, just crushed up into a fine powder.
It was instantly a huge success, but it didn't take long for train to go off the rails.
First, Parents complained that the name "Space Dust", along with the appearance of the candy, was too similar to illegal drugs such as Angel Dust. Accusations were even made that the candy, because of its similarity to powdered drugs, would lead kids into real drug use.
As a result, the name was changed from Space Dust" to "Cosmic Candy".
That problem seemed to be solved, but more trouble was brewing. A rumor started going around that the candy was unsafe, and that a kid died while consuming the candy while drinking a soda. (I heard it was Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials). These rumors once again got parents in an uproar over the candy (just chill, parents). It got so bad that Bill Mitchell, chemist and creator of Pop Rocks and Cosmic Candy actually took out a full page newspaper ad in the Feb. 6th edition of the Pittsburgh Press in 1979, explaining that the entire thing was not true. He explains how he started making the candy back in the 1950's for his kids, and how it was perfectly save despite all the rumors about it.
The candy remained wildly popular for a few years. Stores struggled to keep it in stock.
But in a year or too, it seemed everyone lost interest in it. Store who had stockpiled the candy suddenly found themselves stuck with boxes of it they couldn't sell (I wonder if this is why unopened cases of it seem to show up for sale from time to time...)
Image from Traci*s Retro via Flickr
I love the packaging for this candy. It is so.....70's drug culture-y in it's style. It makes me want to put on some Bowie, pop in a movie like Nelvana's "Cosmic Christmas" or "The Devil and Daniel Mouse", and just space out. Maybe pop open a few packets of this......and wash it down with a Coke.....and wait.......to see........what magical places it takes me.......
For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world........
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.
So normally I would just end it there, but there is one other interesting, if you can call it that, article I found while looking into this stuff. It comes from the May 22nd, 1978 edition of the Vilage Voice Newspaper. I thought it was a rather strange article to be in a newspaper, but then I noticed the ad directly to it's right, and I was like "Oh...it's THAT kind of newspaper....)
It involves Space Dust Candy and, well, a sex act......
This is from an actual newspaper. I am not making this up.
The article in question in on the left, entitled "Lip-Smacker" - the other Ad is to the right....
Product - 7up Gold
Company - 7up/Dr. Pepper
Years - 1987-1988
When I think of boring soda, I think of 7up. Now, that isn't an indictment on its taste....it does have a clean, refreshing taste that every now and again hits the spot. But lets face it, it's what your grandparents have in their fridge. It's what you give the kids when you don't want them to have caffeine. It's a good, safe, soda. Which is the reason 7up Gold was an utter and gigantic failure. It was reaching for a target demographic that wasn't even there (hip, cool people who enjoy 7up). It tried to have edge when none was needed.
What happened is that in 1987, 7up and Dr. Pepper merged into on company. Cherry 7up had just hit the market and was doing really well, so they wanted to follow that success up with another variety of 7up. But there were several reasons why that wasn't such a good idea and would lead to the soda's demise.
Flavor: Sort of an apple Cinnamon flavor, not at all what you'd expect from 7up (I'm sure the cinnamon flavor came from someone on the Dr. Pepper side...great idea, boys. If you have any more ideas, please keep them to yourself)
Color: It was a brown color. Again, not at all what you'd expect when cracking open a can of 7up (ok, when your grandparents were cracking open a can of 7up for you when you were 8)
Caffeine: Yep, it had it. Once again, to beat a dead horse (probably died drinking this swill) people who drink 7up don't expect to get any caffeine. That's why my grandparents drank it.They wanted to be able to sleep at night (or afternoon, or mid-morning.....)
Marketing: I would love to tell you that they test marketed the shit out of this stuff, and that all signs pointed to it being a smash hit, which makes it even stranger that the stuff never took off. But I can't tell you that, because it was basically rushed into production with very little testing. The company didn't want to miss the boat on the success of Cherry 7up, so they rolled it out way too quickly.
Name: Had they given this soda it's own identity, it might not have failed so hard. I'm talking a completely new brand. Instead, they kept it part of the 7up family, and instead of calling it Apple Cinnamon 7up or what-have-you, they called it GOLD. Now I don't know about you, but I don't usually drink gold, so I don't have a reference point for it's taste (actually, gold is completely tasteless and odorless, so there's that too....). So calling it Gold left the taste of the soda a mystery for consumers. And like most people, if you don't know what your buying, you don't.
The Curse: The original prototypes for the cans were made with real gold leafing, and rumor has it that gold came from the lost tombs of King Tut. Because of this, every can created on the production line was cursed, and anyone who drank it turned into a brain hungry zombie. Remember that song Zombie by the Cranberries? That was a great song.
"In your head, in your head, Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, dou, dou, dou, dou, dou..."
Ok, I made that last one up, there was no curse. But there may as well have been, everything else was against them on this idea. (Note: 7up DID in fact release a Cranberry 7up, which was successful, so everything came full circle there and worked out for you, the reader).
Anyway, to sum up, 7up Gold failed hard. Even the CEO of the company admitted it.
In an article in the New York Times (1988), CEO John Albers stated, ''I'll be honest. It's a failure. I've been around for a long
time, and you think you learn your lessons and practice intelligent
marketing, but you can be sidetracked.''
And lets be honest with ourselves.....nobody really misses it.
If you'd like to refute that claim, feel free to post in the comments below.
Check out this awesome 7up Gold commercial, featuring one Kyle Gass of the famed Tenacious D -
