8x the most popular candy from the 1980s: is your favorite among them too?
Did your swimming pool also have one of those little hatches where you could buy candy? Probably sponsored by the local dentist, because all you could buy there was disgustingly sweet candy, full of colorants and other chemical junk that apparently wasn’t bad for you yet in the eighties. Good news: those swimming-pool-shop favorites are still available, and your wallet now contains a little more than fifty cents from your good report card!
Foam blocks
When you put one of those blocks on your tongue, it stuck fast. And for some reason, that was exactly what made it so enjoyable.
Lick shells
Inside a plastic shell was a lump of colored sugar, and the only way to get it out was by licking it. Your entire face covered in sugar, sticky hands, a bright-red tongue and one heck of a sugar rush. And hysterical when your mother threw away that dirty plastic shell.
Fire Balls
Rock-hard gum balls with pepper and cinnamon, so they burned your mouth. No doubt the orthodontist regularly had to pick little chunks of fire balls out from between braces.
Exploding rice
We stuffed handfuls into our mouths at once, because they never made you feel sick anyway. And with your pocket money, you could buy enough to fill pillowcases because it was ridiculously cheap.
Powder in a tube
I’m sure you had forgotten this candy, but now that you see the photo, you know exactly what it tasted like again. Sour! Sweet!
Candy watch
All afternoon, we paraded around wearing a candy necklace or candy watch. With a sharp canine tooth, you could bite the candies off the elastic band—starting with the orange ones, which were the least tasty. And when all you had left was a rather grubby elastic band, that big clock face was still there. What a delight.
Dipping sticks with popping candy
Lick the candy stick, dip it into the powder and then listen against each other’s cheeks to hear whether it was crackling yet. I can’t imagine there are parents who would still think giving this to their children is a good idea nowadays.
Gum from a tube
The clever kid who squeezed the entire tube into their mouth in one go couldn’t talk for the rest of the hour.
Read also:
- Eat all your Sinterklaas candy in one go
- Recipe: pig-shaped candy cubes with rice (weird and brilliantly delicious)
- Beer-flavored candy
Photos: Albert Heijn, Snoepexpress, Jumbo, Snoepmans
