I saw a post by a favorite creator on Instagram about candy just as I was softening a handful of Sugar Babies. If you’re a kid from the 1980s, you know it’d be diabolical to toss a handful of Sugar Babies into your mouth without softening them first in your hand—you could end up with a mouth full of cavity fillings and crowns. You have to baby the Sugar Babies, let them form a soft cud in your mouth like a cow or an MLB pitcher.
The 1980s was the last era of good candy, before helicopter parents came along and started caring about food dyes, high fructose corn syrup and whatever gluten is. What was safety to a generation that bought candy cigarettes and puffed “smoke” out of them like we were in an old Hollywood movie? In Gen X, we could walk to a corner market with a dollar bill (or, more likely, four quarters we hadn’t blown on the Ms. Pac Man machine), and come out with a load of “penny candy” that by that point was around a nickel or a dime; a quarter was a big splurge for something made of chocolate.
For my money, if I was going chocolate there was Reese’s, the perpetual classic, or Twix. However, I continue lifelong crushes on a few bars that are harder to find today: if I see a 100 Grand bar, Whatchamacallit or Caramello today in a store or some kind of old-fashioned pharmacy, it’s hard to pass them by, ditto my all-time fave: the Clark bar. I’m convinced they stopped making Clarks in the 1970s so when I find one, it’s at least a half century old which is fine with me.
As for the non-chocolate cheaper candies, I’d fill a brown paper bag in a vintage candy store with faves like Cow Tales, Fun Dip, BB Bats, Bottle Caps, and Pixy Stix like the one Ally Sheedy uses as a sandwich ingredient in The Breakfast Club. I was never a huge fan of Jolly Ranchers but make an exception for Watermelon. I’ll never pass by Chuckles—the five-pack of oversized flat gumdrops, and I eat them in a weird particular order from least favorite to most favorite (black licorice, also my favorite Twizzler if I can't find chocolate which is rare as hell).
Gen X was big on candy as an activity or experience. Kids today have candy portioned like it’s narcotics if they get it at all, while in the 1980s we casually wore both ring lollipops and necklaces made of candy to eat “bead by bead” as we went about our days. In addition to the reality play of puffing candy cigarettes, whether it was licking a Fun Dip candy crack spoon to dip into sugar, crunching rock candy lollipops, or munching candy dots off paper along with a lot of the paper, we constantly had weird shit happening in our mouths. Zotz, Razzles, Nerds and Warheads came on the scene like a band of spiked-hair punk band candy, providing entirely new and alarming experiences for the senses. There were wax bottles you had to chew apart to get the candy out, and filling a high-maintenance Pez dispenser was always a pain in the ass. There was the Pop Rocks experience—such a fireworks-in-your-mouth event that I used it in a sex scene in my first romance novel.
Gen X knew about gum too. From baseball players cramming Big League Chew into the sides of their faces pretending it was tobacco to Chiclets, Big Red, Wrigley’s and Fruit Stripe gum which you either loved or hated, we had entire racks of gum to choose from. New flavors of Bubble Yum, Bubblelicious and Hubba Bubba competed on the rack for our babysitting money while $0.02 single-wrapper Bazooka gum on the counter with the comic inside knew exactly what it was doing to snag our purchase change.