Sweet Zombies of the Stratosphere! And I thought it was bad when we had to divide real property, cars, jewelry, artwork and first-edition books, only to get stuck on the friggin’ toaster oven.
Unfortunately, these keep coming back like fashion trends…
Isn’t that rather a long, but fading continuum? With a big popularity in the first half of the 20th century, then falling out of fashion, but still some cranks/shrinks swearing on it (and exploiting their patients)?
Last I heard about freudian analysis taken seriously was in a Woody Allen movie about 40 years ago, but I may be badly informed.
And some of the worst fads do indeed come back again and again like weeds.
Hah, first thing I thought about too, old Woody Allen films, I even wanted to mention them 
.
My nephew had a huge collection of them and was sure he was going to be rich. Instead, he ended up stuck with a bag of stuffed toys that no one wanted.
I’ve never witnessed this but apparently Jewish children in the US are pelted with Sunkist Fruit Gems (orange and lemon candies) at their bar and bat mitzvahs. This was passed on to me by my nephews as they read a New York Times article to me this morning. I can share a taste for these candies. Mmm!
Before I read the rest of the thread:
Bell-bottomed jeans
Pet rocks
8-track tapes
Gaucho pants (didn’t last long for obvious reasons)
Squarts (those fetch a LOT of money on eBay nowadays)
Wacky Packages
The Hustle
The Electric Slide
Silly Bands
and most recently, Stanley cups.
The cabbage soup diet was also a big thing in the 1990s. Good soup, but it gets tiresome after a few bowls.
Check out some Weight Watchers cookbooks from the 1970s. Yeah, if you were served that, you would lose weight, because you wouldn’t want to eat any of it.
We were never allowed to have Jarts. Dad was a firefighter, and now I understand why.
As an antique mall dealer, I’ve had to tell other vendors that they’re selling something illegal. They honestly didn’t know this; they just thought it was illegal to sell NEW sets of lawn darts.
These aren’t “fads”. They’re perfectly good technology, at the limits of the time, that were supplanted by later technological improvements. No one bought 8 tracks because they were cool, or they were trendy hipsters, the bought them so they could listen to music in the car. Earlier, car record players had the obvious limitations, which didn’t stop them from existing, and not being a fad.
In college we played a variation of lawn darts in the dorm hallways using regular darts and plastic can lids for targets. So, yes, fun to play.
Don’t forget the Drinking Man’s Diet, which spawned an Allan Sherman song:
Ornamental codpieces.
Wearable pet beetles. They were from Mexico and had jewels glued on their backs. My grandma had one. They came with a small gold chain for a leash and a pin to keep then on your chest. Pedro lived a long time. He had a glass jar with rotted wood in it to eat (?)
And then there are Mexican Jumping Beans. All the kids had them in the late 1960s. You made them jump by leaving them in the sun or the heat from the palm of your hand. The jumping is caused by the moth larva trying to escape the heat which explains why they always died before hatching.
And Sea Monkeys. Seems they were around too long to be called a fad. I never met a kid who didn’t regret his purchase.
Sea monkeys sure didn’t look like what the ad depicted, that’s for sure. They were just tiny brine shrimp, although they were kind of fun to watch.
When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, mopeds were the big thing, and now electric bikes are wreaking the same havoc.
Goddamn it. I intentionally came back on the boards to list both of these things.
I remember in the 60’s and 70’s Mexican Jumping Beans on the counter right before the register at every drug store and variety shops. Kids would beg their parents for them while standing in line to check out.
In the early 70’s we won the door prize at the grand opening of a large pet store. It was a deluxe Sea Monkeys kit. It came with a little plastic tank that had an area that had a magnifying glass so you could see them. I thought they were absolutely boring. Even the cat was uninterested in them.
I don’t know that this qualifies as a ‘fad,’ but are NFTs still a thing? Definitely don’t hear much about them now.
Sunkist is discontinuing the product, so unless some other company starts making them, this fad will come to an end soon.
I don’t see that coonskin caps have been mentioned. They were a big thing amongst kids when Davey Crockett was on TV in the 1950s.
And then there was wearing an onion on your belt. It was purportedly the style at one time.
I read this book recently, Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac, so this was 1800s France. Apparently there was a fad in Paris where you just added silly endings to normal words.
“Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret,” said the employee from the Museum, “how is your health-orama?”.
“There is an uncommon frozerama outside,” said Vautrin. “Make room there, Father Goriot! Confound it, your foot covers the whole front of the stove.”
“Illustrious M. Vautrin,” put in Bianchon, “why do you say frozerama? It is incorrect; it should be frozenrama.” “No, it shouldn’t,” said the official from the Museum; “frozerama is right by the same rule that you say ‘My feet are froze.’ “
It strikes me as very “6-7” where the point is that there’s no point.
Is this where “orama” really came from? I was reading the English translation but it was translated in the 1800s.
-Orama was very popular in the 1990s.