Since I did a post about Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials (remember he supposedly died from eating pop rock and drinking coke), I thought I would find out all about Pop Rocks.
Pop Rocks were first invented in and patented in 1956 by General Mills, but were not introduced to the public until 1975. Pop Rocks are a carbonated candy made from sugar, lactose, corn syrup and flavoring (yum)! They are made by mixing the ingredients and heating them until they melt. Then introducing pressurized carbon dioxide gas which gets trapped inside the candy.
When the Pop Rocks are placed in your mouth they come in contact with saliva which breaks down the candy and causes the carbon dioxide to be released. The result? Tiny bubbles popping inside your mouth!
The candy was discontinued in 1983 and the rights were bought by Kraft Foods in 1985 and re-marketed the product.
General Mills spent a considerable amount of money trying to debunk the old rumor that pop rocks mixed with cola could explode your stomach!
I had forgotten all about this public service announcement until Colleen brought it up! Do you remember the weird looking cartoon character with long arms and long legs that would sing about cheese on Saturday mornings during the commercial breaks from your favorite cartoons? His name was Timer and he was the same guy who told us all how to make juice pops by putting the juice in the ice trays and sticking toothpicks in them.
Time for Timer was an educational short cartoon that was played in between cartoons. The purpose of the cartoon was to teach kids about health and nutrition (of course they weren’t getting any exercise sitting around watching cartoons all morning).
If you do a search on YouTube on “Time for Timer” you find some of the old cartoons. Here is the cheese one:
[tags]television commercials, hanker for a hunka cheese, timer[/tags]
This week we celebrated my son’s 4th birthday and my daughter’s 13th birthday with a big family party. I put out a bowl of pistachios on the table for snacking. They were not the red dyed ones, but the natural ones. Of course the question arose “Whatever happened to Red Pistachios?”
The Pistachio is a small tree that is native to central and southwestern Asia. The fruit grows in bunches. The outside of the pistachio is white and the inside green. The trees are planted in orchards and take seven to ten years to reach a good production. They split open slightly when they are ripe with a slight popping sound. Good luck comes to those who stand under the tree and hear the popping sound.
The shells used to be dyed red by importers to hide any stains on the shells that were caused by hand picking. Most pistachios are picked by machine now so the red dye is not necessary. Some importers still dye them red because of customer demand.
Little known fact – Pistachio nuts are actually highly flammable when stored in large quantities. They are been known to spontaneously combust!
In older movies you can sometimes hear the characters referring to drinking “Grape Nehi.” I always wondered what happened to this drink that was once so popular.
Nehi, a flavored soft drink, actually had many flavors including Grape, Orange, Root Beer, Lemonade, Peach, Strawberry, Fruit Punch, Wild Red, Pink Lemonade, Chocolate, Blueberry and Blue Cream. Whew! It was founded by Claude Hatcher who began bottling ginger ale and root beer in 1905. This developed into Union Bottle Works in 1924. The Nehi Corporation name was later used in 1928 after the popularity of the soft drinks. The name of the company was changed in 1955 to Royal Crown Company after its RC Cola product.
Today, Nehi is a brand of Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages. You can still get these delicious sodas online.
Do you remember when Tang was first introduced? I thought that it was in the 60s, but it was actually in the marketplace in 1959. It did not become popular until 1965 though when NASA began using it on their Gemini flights. It traveled to the moon in 1969 and that is what made it so cool to drink! Orange Tang is still around today.
There was another flavor, though, Grape! We used to buy that not as frequently, and it wasn’t nearly as popular. According to http://www.inthe70s.com, Grape Tang is still available in other countries, just not in the United States.
