Ah, July 4th weekend. It’s finally here. I’ve been thinking about this moment for at least…three or four days now. Pretty much since I wrote out my rent check and realized, “Oh. It’s July. Well how about that!” I’m sure you all have really exciting Independence Day plans, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this website.
See that joke I made! Ha! It’s funny because it makes you look like a stupid loser, which is totally not cool! if this was a John Hughes movie my gang of friends would be beating you up right now.
Actually, that’d be really funny to see. My friends are all so fey I can’t imagine more than one or two of ’em as fighters. Hell, I’ve only ever been in two fights in my life. One time I grabbed and held a guy while his friend beat the shit out of someone I knew (the guy I was tangled up with and I were both laughing about it as it happened) and one time I met a kid outside our high school at the end of the day only to have him throw a punch at me and miss, then run away crying. Why haven’t I told that story yet? It was really funny. And it involves blogging. Kind of…
I was on a nostalgia kick the other day talking to a new friend about products we remember from our youth that are no longer available. There were plenty of obscure references bandied about, everything from Roy Rogers fast food to Keebler Magic Middles (which weren’t my favorite Keebler offering, but I’ll get to that later), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pies (eww!), Cheeseballz, LifeSavers Holes (the most useless thing on the planet) and 3-D Doritos (worst chip design ever, they were always broken). So I decided to create a list of the ten best discontinued fast food items I want back. Let’s see if you Einstein’s can figure out the name of this week’s Friday top ten list.
The Top Ten Discontinued Food Products I Want Back
10. Heinz Kick’rs – This one is basically an honorable mention because technically you can still order it from Tabasco.com, but you can’t find the original ketchup at any food stores anymore. At least that’s what I was told by Heinz four or five years ago when I called them on it. For a while in New Jersey you had to go to a Stop ‘N Shop chain supermarket to find this delightful condiment (if you haven’t figured it out yet, it was ketchup mixed with Tabasco sauce). For some reason until my mom brought this home from the store I’d never thought of mixing Tabasco with ketchup, but now it’s something I do all the time. Especially with hash browns or breakfast potatoes. No matter how hard I try to perfect the formula, it never tastes quite as good as the Heinz product. Bring it back, Heinz. The people (meaning I) have spoken.
09. 7-Up Gum – On the way to my first baseball game in 1988, my friend Matthew’s father passed us a rare treat shortly before we hit the George Washington Bridge (yeah, we sang the song the entire length of the bridge). It was 7-Up Gum, and it tasted just like 7-Up. It had the soda syrup in the middle so you’d bite into it and it would taste like regular gum and then the syrup would be released and it tasted so good. I want to say there was a Cherry 7-Up gum too, but I can’t be certain. By the way, did they discontinue Cherry 7-Up recently? I feel like I haven’t seen that one around either. Oh well…I’m sure it’s in a better place now. With its good friends Diet RC Cola and Slice. Speaking of which, don’t even fucking pretend that Sprite and 7-Up are better than Slice was. The official PR line that you’ll hear from Pepsi regarding Slice is that it was just a precursor to Sierra Mist. Trust me, that’s a lie. And have you even tasted Sierra Mist? It tastes like horse dick. Wait. What? Nevermind. Slice was by far the best lemon-flavored soda on the market. According to its Wikipedia page it can still be found ONLY at WalMart, but I’m skeptical. They took it off the market like 10 years ago and then started reproducing it just for WalMart in 2009? To me that translates into: It’s a new formula that tastes like shit. Bring back original
08. Hi-C Ecto Cooler – As a kid in elementary and middle school there were only two drinks I ever consumed with my daily lunches: Ssips Lemon Iced Tea and Hi-C Ecto Cooler. My mom tried in vain to introduce me to other flavors of Hi-C but I was so obsessed with Ghostbusters as a child that I refused to try anything else. My friend Evan M. and I were always the two kids at the lunch table in elementary school who would rock Ecto Cooler. He was also as obsessed with Ghostbusters as I was. We had Proton packs with the yellow foam streams and Pke Meter accessory, all the toys and the firehouse, and even the same matching baby blue Ghostbusters sweatsuit. And we always drank Ecto Cooler. Shit, that was good. So was Ssips but they still market the Lemon Iced Tea jukeboxes even though I haven’t seen one in ten or fifteen years. I feel like maybe Hi-C brought back Ecto Cooler for a while recently but it’s definitely not mass produced anymore. What a shame.
07. Crispy M&Ms – My grandmother used to give my sister and I M&Ms whenever she saw us. It was her thing. And then she died and I didn’t like eating regular M&Ms anymore. So I switched to Peanut Butter M&Ms (not Peanut M&Ms, those were gross and I never liked them). For a while I think they stopped making Peanut Butter M&Ms. They’re available now so clearly they were brought back at some point. But right before the year 2000 Mars came up with two unique promotions. One was the name the new M&M color (blue won, right?) and the other was Crispy M&Ms. Holy shit were they good. They came in a blue bag. They were one of the best snack foods ever. I was in high school at the time so I’d buy ’em at 7-11 when I was high mostly. I don’t think I took snacks to eat at lunch when I was in high school. I could just buy a ham, egg and cheese sandwich and a 20oz. Coke if I wanted. Oh, one of the two best snack foods you’d find in my brown paper lunch bag every day in elementary school was Dunk-a-roos. Are those discontinued? I’ve read varying reports on the Internet. I only liked the vanilla frosting dipping sauce because chocolate scared me. In fact I didn’t eat chocolate (outside of Reese’s or Snickers bars) until I was maybe 24 years old. I still won’t touch chocolate ice cream. I don’t know why. But anyway, Dunk-a-roos were awesome. The best part was when you finished conservatively dunking all your little kangaroo cookies and then you could scrape out all the remaining frosting with your finger and eat it “unfiltered”. I think that’s what we used to call it when I was five years old. Just kidding. We actually called it “mainlining.”
06. Shark Bites – The other snack food that you could find in my lunch bag on days when my mom thought I was eating too many Dunk-a-roos. Shark Bites were fruit flavored candy snacks made with real fruit juice and OH M GOD DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN THEY ADDED IN THE GREAT WHITE SHARK? Was it a mystery flavor or something? I don’t even remember. I just remember it was supposed to be like finding buried treasure when you found a Great White, but really there were like two in each package. Some blog claims that these haven’t been discontinued, but if that’s the case WHY CAN’T I BUY A PACK ON AMAZON.COM? By the way, are Gushers still around? Those were really good too. Probably the #3 lunch snack option in my mom’s repertoire.
05. Combos Peanut Butter – Combos were a huge craze for a while when I was growing up. Especially the ones that were supposed to taste like pepperoni pizza. Oh my God was that the foulest thing I remember tasting during my childhood. But, like, you couldn’t not eat Combos. That was just asking to get your ass kicked. So I settled on Combos Peanut Butter because I love peanut butter and even though the filling tasted too artificial it was better than getting my ass kicked. Bring back the peanut butter Combos, please.
04. Mystic Raspberry Boysenberry Sparkling Natural Soda – Yeah, the official name is a mouthful, but what I wouldn’t give for another mouthful of this soda. I think they took it off the shelves and discontinued it right around the time I left home for college. I remember reading about a recall but I don’t know why. Still, this was the best fruit-flavored soda ever, and one-half of my stoner late-night snack fix (the other half, of course, being an entire box of Entenmann’s Soft Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies). Wait a minute, have those been discontinued also? Or are they just not available at supermarkets in Southern California. Because I definitely haven’t seen those guys since I moved out here. Shit. Someone call Entenmann’s and find out. If so the cookies would easily be number one on this list.
03. Keebler Elfin Delights (Vanilla Sandwich Cream) – Magic Middles had the numbers, but I’m pretty sure anyone who ever tried an Elfin Delight would admit that they were probably the best Keebler product ever invented NOT called the E.L. Fudge Cookie. I’ll give you one guess as to why I liked the E.L. fudge cookie the best. Think about it, retard. It should be obvious. The sad thing about the Elfin Delights is that barely anyone on the Internet seems to care about them. The first page of Google results when one searches for info about the snacks includes multiple stories dated from 1993-1995. Where’s the grassroots organization who wants to boycott Keebler until they bring these guys back? Do we just need a leader? I’ll lead the crusade. Let’s get our Elfin Delights back, people!
02. Pizza Hut Triple Deckeroni Pizza – A 1995 press release for McDonald’s cites the Triple Deckeroni pizza as containing two pounds of pepperoni and six kinds of cheeses. It was so fucking good. If my memory serves me correctly it was offered for a limited time during the NCAA March Madness rush. I remember that because the first time we ordered a pie we got a free basketball with it, and the basketball was emblazoned with the logos for some of the top college teams in the country. No pictures of the Triple Deckeroni exist on the Internet. One of the top results for the pie is this blog post, in which I officially boycotted Pizza Hut. A boycott which still stands, by the way. The only thing that could tear me away from my strike against Pizza Hut would be the reinstatement of the Triple Deckeroni pizza as a menu item. The ball is in your court, guys.
01. Pop Tarts Crunch Cereal (Strawberry) – I wasn’t allowed sweets as a child. The only time I ever tasted Pop Tarts was each summer at overnight camp, and only then did they have Pop Tarts available on the very last morning of camp right before your parents came to pick you up. It was a brilliant and horrible idea for the camp directors to serve no sugary treats all summer long and then leave out a buffet of Pop Tarts on the last day of camp. It was good because all the kids would be sugar high and wired and their parents would think they had an amazing 8 weeks away from home. It was bad because we were all jonesing for sugar and we’d eat a dozen Pop Tarts and then throw up because our bodies couldn’t handle it. Anyway, Pop Tarts Crunch cereal made its way into my house but a handful of times, and it was as glorious as it sounds. Like the few rare instances when my mom let my sister and I eat Lucky Charms cereal, there was an austerity surrounding Pop Tarts Crunch that far outweighed its relative flavor. But It was a treat. It was for special one-time-only occasions. To me, a box of Pop Tarts Crunch Cereal was like getting five new packs of baseball cards, a Nintendo game and L.A. Gear sneakers rolled into one event.
By the way, I read somewhere that Brown Sugar Pop Tarts were discontinued? That can’t be true, can it? Do they still make S’Mores Pop Tarts? Those things got me through my freshman year of college. Those and Grandma’s Brownies. Oh, shit. Do THOSE still exist? Grandma’s is a brand, I’m not talking about a family member. Grandma’s Brownies were amazing. I had them for breakfast almost every day when I was in college. Pop Tarts for lunch. A P’Zone for dinner. It was the best time of my life. Oh, and had Pizza Hut not brought back the P’Zone a few years ago it would be #1. Absolutely. To me that is the greatest food invention ever. No contest. P’Zone. Number 1. Deal with it.
Johnny Thunders – You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory
