It must be nostalgia week. Yesterday the Grundig and today it's the Mattel Thingmaker Creepy Crawler (I promise, this does tie up with this morning's drive in). Anyone else remember this:
Die cast molds into which you squirted a colored goop called (fittingly enough) Plastigoop. Drop the mold into the Thingmaker heater and several minutes later you got a rubbery plastic bug or whatever. Thing is, this being the 60's, they took the concept one step further and introduced "edible" flavored Plastigoop. Now you could make rubbery plastic bugs and lizards you could eat. They had a taste and texture that is unlike anything else I can think of; no idea how to describe my memory of it.
One flavor, in particular, stands out in my memory: root beer. Root beer was one of the offered flavors, probably because the artificial version of root beer flavoring was already so close to petrochemical that they only had to keep enough of the original oil-based brown color to have a finished product. I'm sure it was totally carcinogenic, especially after being heated in a die-cast mold, and those of us who share this singularly American 60's diet history are probably paying a physiological price for it even now.
I also find, with a little searching this morning, that they are now making this thing again (though slightly different and sold by a different company: Jakks Creepy Crawlers Bugmaker. It still promises to convert "slime into bugs" and now twice as many as quickly as before. No mention of edible goop these days.
But back to the root beer flavored "edible" Thingmaker Creepy-Crawlies. They have a spot firmly fixed in my memory, with taste, texture, picture, and time/location stamp (summer, backyard patio, Bellingham, laundry flapping on the line, small planes flying overhead to or from the nearby airport). I know this because that memory got triggered on the drive in this morning, and now I can't get the taste out of my head.
I got behind a short schoolbus whose diesel exhaust was just similar enough to the smell of root beer plastigoop cooking in a Thingmaker cooker that it all came flooding back to me, as unwanted a memory as slowly doopity-doopiting behind a diesel school bus was to my morning commute.
Today's soundtrack was... well, different. The last song, at least, hails from roughly the same era of artificiality as the Thingmaker:
- Travis: She's So Strange
- Leonard Cohen: Closing Time (Live)
- Karrin Allyson: Plasir D' Amour
- Engelbert Humperdink: After the Lovin'
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