March 17th, 2004
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Turtle pies, Chef Boyardee, and things that taste like pizza
Ah, the consumer franchise branding craze of the eigthies. I suppose that there were Starsky and Hutch lunchboxes well in advance of my infatuation with the seamless transition from character properties to nonperishables, but I’m pretty close to Generation Y so you can deal with it. I started playing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles just as the fad started taking off in 1988. A girl that lived on the next street over, Heather Cooper, and I would have all sorts of adventures in the tall grass medians of Amber Meadows (later to be accurately called Amber Ghettos). The deal was simple: half an hour of ninja shell-shocking action in exchange for me putting up with the Barbie Dream House and the slightly disturbing (and uninteresting) heavy petting that she enjoyed staging between the waxed, plastic dolls.
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Fortunately my brother stopped crying every time I poked him around the triumph of Nirvana, so it became much easier to engage in like-minded madcap ninja-flippin’ action. We had it all: the van, the blimp, the skateboards, the monster buggy, even the mammoth Technodrome. Everything except for the lair (which I still pine for), substituted by a vast array of overturned and taped together Pfaltzgraff boxes in form of a turtle city. (This ended up being infinitely cooler anyway.) Aside from the hundred-plus five dollar action figures, our turtle fandom reached into every aspect of our lives: ninja turtle bath foam, ninja turtle beach towels, Pez dispensers, Morse code communicators, school folders, bookbags, lunchboxes, even the Turtles’ “Coming Out of Our Shells” audio cassette from Pizza Hut (the tour poster still hangs on the back of my closet wall in Frederick).
And just as we played, bathed with, and slept on turtles, we also ate them. Turtle cereal, turtle Chef Boyardee pasta with “ninja nets”, and the most revolting of all, the hallowed “turtle pie“. Never a greater dose of Yellow #3 has been inserted to humans as all the sugar-filled artery-stoppers my brother and I devoured. Take an already unhealthy Hostess sugar-glazed pie and shellac it with about a quarter inch of pure turtle green baked mutagen goo. Yum. Of course, the most obvious of all was the endless array of pizza-flavored fried snacks that sprang up in concert of the green four’s greatest love. Pizza Combos, pizza potato chips, pizza rolls, pizza bagels… one hundred ACRES of pizza are consumed by Americans every _day_ (though that figure has dropped several hundred square feet since the advent of my expatriatism). The sad truth is there is actually nothing pizza-y about most of these snacks at all, just phony chemicals that will shrivel your pancreas but smell like oregano. And tonight, I dine on that craze twelve years later and as many thousand miles away, pizza flavored potato sticks.
