Whatever Happened To Pudding Pops? Explores The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends Of The '70s & '80s

Online, June 20, 2011 (Newswire.com) - If you owe a couple cavities to Marathon candy bars, learned your adverbs from Schoolhouse Rock!, and can still imitate the slo-mo bionic running sound of The Six Million Dollar Man, Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? is for you.

Embracing the delightfully unique pop culture of the period, Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes & Trends of the '70s & '80s (Perigee Trade Paperback; June 7, 2011; $12.95) is the ultimate compendium for people nostalgic for Planters Cheez Balls, Rankin/Bass stop-action TV specials and Sea Monkeys. For more information, visit www.whateverhappenedtopuddingpops.com.

Pop culture aficionados Gael Fashingbauer Copper and Brian Bellmont have lovingly mined the battlefields of discarded paraphernalia from the days when MTV played music videos and Quisp and Quake duked it out for cereal supremacy.

Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? is a pop-culture encyclopedia focusing on the lost items of '70s and '80s childhoods, from After School Specials to ZOOM. For each of the more than 200 items featured in the book, the authors offer up humorous and rich memories, some history of the item, and also trace what happened to it - did it vanish completely, is it still going strong, or has it been revised, reintroduced or even completely replaced by something else?

"Kids of the 1970s and 1980s share a far more universal past than kids today," says Fashingbauer Cooper. "We all watched the same five channels, shopped at the same few chain stores, hummed the same commercial jingles. But really, it's not the things that we loved, it's our memories of those things and how they fit into our lives."

"When we talk with other Gen-Xers about some of the things we cover in the book, the reaction we get nearly every single time is 'Oh, I remember that!'" Bellmont says. "And it doesn't matter if we're reminiscing about rusty playground equipment, 'Battle of the Network Stars,' Pepsi Light, Dynamite Magazine, Shrinky Dinks or Debbie Gibson. There's always some common ground."

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ael Fashingbauer Cooper is a Twin Cities-born-and-raised journalist who now lives in Seattle with her husband, Rob, and daughter Kelly. USAToday.com named her one of the Top Pop Culture People of 2002. Her personal weblog, Pop Culture Junk Mail, dates to 1999. Entertainment Weekly named the site one of "100 Web sites you must know now," and The New York Times has called it "one of the best places to explore pop culture online." She didn't exactly name her daughter after Kelly Garrett on "Charlie's Angels" or Kelly Leak from "The Bad News Bears," but there may have been some influence.

Former TV news reporter and producer Brian Bellmont is a public relations consultant in the Twin Cities, where he lives with his wife Jen and daughters Rory and Maddy. He's an award-winning food writer and aspiring novelist, and is a fan of all things pop-culturey, from horror flicks to comic books, Broadway musicals to beach reads, terrible sitcoms to The Backyardigans. Over the years, he's interviewed pop-culture staples like Adam West, Barry Williams, Loni Anderson, and Davy Jones; contributed to msnbc.com and dozens of other media outlets; and written the copy on the back of a bag of yogurt-covered raisins.

Visit their website at www.whateverhappenedtopuddingpops.com.