Free Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper Page A

fell for his impressively named Kung Fu Grip, even though all it did was replace his hard-sculpted hands with soft rubber. It didn’t exactly give him any martial arts skills, but he could hold things (including hands with another G.I. Joe if he wanted to—nobody asked, nobody told).
    X-TINCTION RATING: Revised and revived.
    REPLACED BY: The regular-sized Joe got his discharge papers in 1979. Hasbro reintroduced the concept as a 3¾-inch figure in 1982. Hasbro eventually produced more than five hundred different pint-sized counterterrorism heroes and rule-the-world villains, with names like Downtown, Charbroil, and Dr. Mindbender.
    FUN FACT: In the 2009 movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra , Marlon Wayans’s character comments that another character has a kung fu grip.

Giorgio Beverly Hills Perfume
    G IRLS’ bathrooms the nation over reeked of two scents in 1982: cigarette smoke and Giorgio Beverly Hills. Just looking at the perfume’s name now, decades after its heyday, sets off a massive headache that starts right behind the eyes and soon has your whole head throbbing.
    As with Audrey II, the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors , the takeover was silent but sudden. One day no one had heard of Giorgio, the next day it had ruthlessly jammed its tendrils into every dressing table and bathroom counter in all fifty states and Canada. Girls who’d been content to spritz on Avon were suddenly pooling their babysitting money and forking over an unheard-of $40-plus for a seductively hourglass-figured bottle of Giorgio. Then there was the decision: to throw away the distinctive yellow-and-white striped box or to keep it, further lording your purchase over your poorer friends.
    And once you had the holy grail, there was no sense being judicious about its usage. Other perfumes were for spraying; Giorgio was for drenching . The scent reportedly has 450 ingredients, and on a clear day at high school, you could smell every last one of ’em.
    X-TINCTION RATING: Still going strong.
    REPLACED BY: Giorgio not only lives on but spawned an entire family of descendants, most notably Red in 1989.
    FUN FACT: Giorgio’s male equivalent was probably Aramis, though Polo and Drakkar Noir also saturated high-school halls in their day.

The Goonies
    T HIS 1985 flick had everything an ’80s kid found totally awesome: bats, water-filled caves, pirate ships, treasure maps, and skeletons with beetles crawling out of their eyes. The Goonies even had a little romance, which was, for many of us, the grossest part of the flick. Regardless, it was a two-hour amusement-park ride, and kids in the audience easily imagined themselves as part of the adventure—right along with Martha Plimpton, Corey Feldman, and the kid who played Short Round—swooshing down a water slide, swashbuckling on a pirate ship, or befriending a freakish monster.
    Fast-paced and funny, the film was Indiana Jones for the middle-school set, introducing a generation of kids to deformed-ogre-with-a-heart-of-gold Sloth, legendary pirate One-Eyed Willy, the toupeed antics of Soprano-to-be Joe Pantoliano, and the Truffle Shuffle—fat kid Chunk’s blubber-shaking dance. Most important, though, it proved that underdogs and misfits—the chubby kid, the asthmatic, the brain, the geek—could sometimes save the day, goony or not.
    X-TINCTION RATING: Gone for good but available on DVD.
    REPLACED BY: There’s long been talk of a big-screen remake featuring the original characters’ kids. Chunk Jr.!
    FUN FACT: Post- Goonies , some of the kid actors did pretty well for themselves. Josh Brolin would eventually play George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s W . And Sean Astin would grow up—and out—to become a fat Hobbit.

Halloween Candy Paranoia
    H ALLOWEEN was scary enough to a kid, what with teens out to steal your candy, peeled grapes that felt like eyeballs, and that one creepy neighbor who played the spooky-sound-effects