Friday Fun – 10 Snacks & Drinks We Badly Miss
Trying to stick with our #fridayfun theme, and following last weeks post about adverts from the 80’s, we decided to continue with the 80’s theme and remind people about some of the AWESOME snacks and drinks that are sadly no longer with us.
1. Bandit Bars
When we were brainstorming the idea this week, someone mentioned the bandit bar. We have to admit we couldn’t remember a single thing about it until they sang part of the jingle to us – THEN it came flooding back.
“You can’t stand it with Bandit, get your chin off the floor
The Wrigley Bar Bandit is as big as a door!”
Now we can’t get the jingle out of our heads.
2. Treets
Long before M&Ms appeared on the scene (certainly in the UK), there was a fantastic packet of sweets called Treets. No fancy colours or logos, just a simple crispy chocolate shell encased around a peanut.
At 10 years of age these really were a treat!.
3. Terrys Pyramints
Probably our favourite on our trip down memory lane collection. Pyramints were just wonderful.
A liquid minty centre covered with dark Terry’s chocolate – we can remember washing many cars in order to go to our local post office and buy these (after seeing the advert). We weren’t disappointed.
The voice of the mummy was the great Leslie Phillips and the voice over at the end was Kenneth Williams (we think).
4. Nutty Bar by Rowntrees
We are beginning to think we might have had a fixation on peanuts after the Nutty Bar made our top 10 list.
The wrapper was a see-through brown flimsy thing, that allowed you to see the peanut coated caramel bar inside. Why was this important? Because it allowed you to see just how many nuts were coating the caramel bar.
Believe us, they differed dramatically and were produced in bygone days when we guess quality control was (possibly) not quite as strict as we imagine it is now.
5. Hanky Pankys by Pascall
Starring the fantastic Arthur Lowe, this is one of the earliest confectionery adverts any of us were able to remember. According to the video on YouTube this was from 1979 (and this author would have been a fantastically innocent 7 years old).
Can you imagine getting away with such an advert in our politically correct times?
6. Frys Five Centres
Without getting too carried away can we just say OMG!
Remembering back to this chocolate bar, covered in the tastiest chocolate produced by Frys, a hidden secret of five different fondant flavours awaited the lucky individual who crossed the palms of the local shopkeeper with silver.
7. Quatro Drink By Coca Cola
Why oh why did Coca Cola ever stop the production of Quatro?
A sparkling fruit drink, utterly synthetic in taste, but also craved by many young teen in the 80’s.
Most people remember the “advanced technology” shown in the advert, as well as the stuttering arms of the limahl lookalike who changes his card into a quatro drink!
8. Spanish Gold
Another incredibly early memory for us, Spanish Gold was packaged much like any tobacco packet is today.
The difference was instead of getting your Rizla stuffing, you were presented with coconut flavoured bits of stringy spider legs that were supposed to represent adult tobacco.
We can remember watching our grandparents rolling normal cigarettes with normal tobacco and wondering why on earth anyone would want to smoke our favourite coconut flavoured candy.
9. Texan Bar
The texan bar – sure is a mighty chew!
We loved texan bars (to be honest there isn’t a great deal we didn’t love out of this top 10) and the silky smooth voice was enough to convince us to spend our hard earned pocket money on these chocolate delights.
To be fair, we only had the choice of chocolates, sweets and star wars figures when we were young!
(Off topic – just out of interest, did anyone else go to their local supermarket – in our case Asda – and actually hide the new stock of Star Wars figures that had just arrived in store because they didn’t have enough money that week to buy them – but would return the next week and magically produced Yoda from behind a large box or Persil?)
10. Cabana Bar By Rowntrees
Last on our list is the Rowntrees Cabana bar. And we HATED it!
All we can remember about this confectionery bar was that it was a mixture of coconut and cherries coated in Rowntrees milk chocolate.
I think we were sold it as an alternative to the still popular Bounty bar – and believe us, it never even came close.
So what have we missed?
Are there any of your favourites that you would like us to include in future Friday Fun post?
Please leave you comments and thoughts below.
