Blast From the Past That You'll Never See Again

Oh my yes! And the afore-mentioned creeple-people, and also - hmm, I think they were called “fun flowers”? And there were butterfly molds too, although those might have been part of the flower set.

My friends and I could spend hours with those sets.

Betty Crocker microwave cakes (take it out of the box, add egg and water, stir and nuke for very few minutes (I forget how long), eat.

Music cassette player/changers, Sony, I believe–oops, and then I found this -

RCA 45-rpm record (stack) players—oops2, then I found this, so maybe I can get mine fixed -

Look. I can see this (and can even cook this) but some of you can’t.

For the Other 49…Taylor Ham, Egg & Cheese. :wink:

Heh. I’m in a college town; the constant turnover of hipster kids who’d enjoy the retro soda-fountain experience might be helping to keep the unironic drug store afloat.

That must have been fun. But yeah, even in the good old days the Air Force might have been a tad upset if they knew about it. I would think hard about which part I wanted get that low in, mostly the getting down and back out is where you would run out of room …

Well, without a real strong after burner and I don’t think the F-86 had that so I bet he looked careful before heading down.

Speaking of 45’s:

REAL Jukeboxes - esp. with the remote selectors on the table at each booth at the Drive-In.

Is there still the “Big Boy” chain? Each licensee could stick his name in front of the ‘Big Boy’ name, so each town likely had a different (name)'s Big Boy. The plastic ‘Big Boy’ was a classic,
Like the Dachshund Doggy Heads on the Doggy Diner.

Glory Days…

Sigh … I remember that stuff quite fondly. It was the active ingredient in Contac when I was a kid. I loved it because it was an effective decongestant and didn’t give me a nasty case of the twitches like pseudoephedrine does. (Maybe it wasn’t supposed to make you sleepy, but it conked me right out.)

Sadly for me and others who found it an effective alternative to pseudoephedrine and its extremely unpleasant side effects, it’s no longer available in most countries. I even asked a doctor friend to see if she could track some down for me on a trip through Eastern Europe. She tried, but no luck. Ah well.

The Snik Snak candy bar-nothing like it in the world. :smiley:

Small kids walking or cycling to school every day by themselves. Ten-year-olds catching buses to the other side of town on their own. Kids going off for the afternoon by themselves with nobody knowing where they were going, and no cell phones.

…and it being almost unheard of for anything bad to happen.

I grew up like that, and I feel sorry for kids today.

Jolt Cola from my childhood. Maybe it’s still around in some form or another, but it’s not the ultra caffeinated drink it once was.

Along the same lines as kids going out by themselves and there not being danger…

I nominate the old internet.

I used to log into chatrooms and talk to random people my age (at the time I was 11 or 12) about topics like writing and tv and movies. I randomly met a girl who lived in my city and we talked for a while, eventually set a date, and met…all online!

Nowadays the only way you can get something like that are message boards or the creepfest known as omegle. I suffered from terrible loneliness in the past 5 years and really wanted someone to just talk to, but the scary internet took that away.

Tahiti Treat here.

Also “4 Flavours” chocolate bars - 2 rows of filled squares, each row had a different flavour so you got 2 of each flavour. Chocolate, Vanilla, Caramel & Butterscotch.

There were also “Nestle Chunk” chocolates which were unwrapped up by the cash register in variety stores. Plain, Peanut, & Caramel. I was addicted to those when I was 13 lol.

Along with Creepy Crawlers were Incredible Edibles - which you could use the same forms with, so occasionally could fool your brother into biting a piece of plastic.

A beverage that contains coca and/or cola.

Wow. I’d never even heard of that before. Launched in the same year they brought out the Marathon bar, too. Not that they didn’t have previous form for that sort of thing, but still…

I can only imagine that the buzz-word around Mars HQ in 1973 was “brazen”.

Penny candy stores . . . containing thousands of different kinds of candies, and everything was 1 cent each. I wonder how they stayed in business.

Ah yes, a beer and a pizza between classes as a freshman in college. Served on campus.

when I was 5 we could buy a box of those with a prize inside. I think the red color was a dye to cover blemishes in the shell from imported nuts.

If you have a CCW in OH (after March 23, 2015) that now qualifies as a background check.
Adding to the list:

Rotary phones - you could dial your own number, hang up, and the phone would ring because the old mechanical switching systems took time to make the connection.

Driving in the right lane on the highway and only switching to the left lane to pass. Traffic was that light with only 2 lanes.

carrying a pocket knife in school.

Virtually every aspect of flying commercial with a shred of dignity.

full service gas stations where you got your window washed, oil checked and gas pumped… for a quarter a gallon. And kids got collectable tokens. And they had free maps. And free air for tires.

17 year old virgins

Average age of first intercourse in the US is 17, which means about 50% of 17 year olds are still virgins. Hardly an endangered species.

QtM, average guy.

nitpick, actually no it doesn’t. 50% is the median. An average can be different from the median depending on the number and size of the outliers. But I agree that if the average is 17, there are a lot of 17 year old virgins out there. Fortunately.