Pointless Nostalgia 8: Snack Fruit Is Always The Sweetest

No, the picture to the left is not of a character from Alien Nation. Nor is it a vampire that's just been stabbed with a vial of the anticoagulant EDTA by Blade. Nope, it's just some kid that's had an extreme reaction to a lunchtime treat, and from the looks of it, a bad allergic reaction.

This edition of Pointless Nostalgia brings us back to school, and more specifically, the lunch hour we always looked forward to while there. While we were incarcerated in our provincially-sponsored educational jails, the few times we had to have a little fun on our own were cherished as the temporal treasures they were. From kindergarten to Grade 9, recess (short or long), gym class (for the athletic) or field trips (fun ones, not educational ones) provided a much needed respite to allow kids to be kids, that is, act stupid. Lunch was another one of those treasured times, but it wasn't the kids who got to act stupid. It was the parents. The parents who packed their kids' lunches.

Today I had to pop into Safeway to pick up a few things, when I found myself wandering aimlessly, as I often do at Safeway (there's just so much to look at!). I really like to watch people in all their grocery shopping glory and make internal comments about their choices. Mostly, I try to mentally urge overweight people to put away the 24-packs of pop. That's packs, as in many more than one. After catching a glimpse of an attractive lady, I stumbled into the aisle that had some nutritious things, like bran bars and other stuff that tastes like flavoured nut and particle board. In amongst the healthy and tasty snack façade, I saw something I thought went the way of Gene Siskel.

Gushers were still being made? And people were still buying this shit?

For the uninitiated, Gushers are one of many "fruit" snacks that claimed to be a good substitute for candy in children's lunches or any time that kids clamoured for a sugary treat. While it may be true that the snack contained Vitamin C (25% of the daily recommended, in fact), basically it was candy, just in a different form. Looking at this nutritional panel, one pack contained 13 grams of sugar. Sure, they're not Dunkaroos, but come on. If any parent bought these, and thought it would be a good source of nutrition, then they've failed the test of parenting, and repo men should be by shortly to repossess their children. No, Gushers were candy, and nobody should be fooled into thinking they're something different.

Also, they tasted like shit.

Seriously, I hated Gushers and their stupid commercials. The way the "juice" squirted into your mouth after biting was a rather disgusting sensation. However, since I grew up through the eighties and early nineties, I experienced the heyday of fruit snack development and selection. I yearn for the days when there was a plethora of fruit snacks that looked like stuff, or were based on things. Back then, fruit snacks were another juvenile status symbol, like name-brand clothing and top-of-the-line school supplies. If you had the best fruit snacks, the coolest lunchtime edibles, then you could be a god. And I'm sure if God ate fruit snacks, he'd eat any one of the following:

Probably the very first ever-versatile fruit snack was Fruit Roll-Ups. Every kid has eaten a Fruit Roll-up in North America. It's a part of our culture. In fact, I think you have to name at least three flavours on the American citizenship test. If you didn't have FRUs at some point in your school year, you might as well have been a leper or someone who wears Levi's Orange Tabs. After FRUs got a little boring, Betty Crocker decided to make "pop-outs", where kids could pop shapes out and play with them. That was pretty much as stupid as it sounds. It's a malleable jelly sheet, it's not an action figure.

In the late eighties/early nineties, Betty Crocker rolled out Fruit By The Foot, which was exactly like Fruit Roll-Ups, but longer! It boasted "3 feet of fun!" FBTF was pretty cool, mostly for the fact that you could whip your friends with it. However, I went to a Catholic school, and using the excuse "I'm pretending to whip Jesus" doesn't tend to go over that well. (commercial).

Among the many "shaped" fruit snacks out there, there was one that soared above the rest and rained flavour bombs on their homes. Thunder Jets Fruit Snacks. Sure, anyone could eat dinosaurs, gummi bears, sharks or whatever popular kids' TV show or movie was out at the time, but only the bravest children could eat fruit snacks shaped after jet-planes. Seems now like a blatant attempt to get boys to eat fruit (of any nature), but methinks there's an underlying attempt by the Air Force to get entrenched into kids' psyches early on. I know when I ate these, I just wanted to buzz the tower and play some shirtless volleyball.

But the greatest fruit snack of them all proved the age-old saying: "Kids like candy, moron". So what better way to disguise a fruit snack, then by fashioning it after pop? Enter Sodalicious. Every kid likes pop (except for the diabetics), so this was a natural move. Kids like the idea of having pop as a snack, and parents are dumb enough to believe that this should be a part of a healthy lunch. Look at the commercial! The memories! Who doesn't remember squawking the same "So, Sodalicious!" line over and over again? And everybody had their favourite flavour. Out of the flavours like Cherry, Cola and Orange, I think everyone had a special place in their hearts for Root Beer. If anyone anywhere has some Sodalicious still in a cupboard or something, I'll give up my first born child for it. Please note that the odds are slim on a child being conceived by me any time soon (on purpose, anyway), so I'll probably just end up threatening you for them.