'SCARY KITCHEN SCORNED BEEF HASH': CRUDDY SIGHT GAG, OR INCISIVE COMMENTARY ON MAD COW FEARS & YANKEE OBESITY?

I loved Wacky Packages as a kid. They were part of the whole Cracked magazine playground culture deal when I was in the third grade, and just learning how to play hockey and talk to strangers without them taking my lunch money.

It was the kind of indicator that made separating the Cool Patrol from the eventual comic relief artists and Dungeons and Dragons aficionados easy. I remember sunning myself on the concrete ground of some friend's apartment pool one hot summer afternoon, having gone through so many packs of baseball & hockey cards & Wacky Packs that our sweat smelled like that crappy hard pink gum. I delivered the Globe and Mail for a few years as a kid, so for a kid I was flush with money, which I spent on packs of all these things, and sharing them with my friends probably stopped me from getting beaten up a lot more than I was. (It all comes back. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.)

You always think these things stop existing when you stop being a kid, because well, they're no longer there. But it turned out that by the time I and my friends had discovered them, they weren't being made any longer, and the Havenbrook tuck shop where we were buying the things was thrilled to be selling off aging overstock. But I remember having a Coffin-Mate and a Jail-O stuck inside my hockey helmet, not to be cool, but because I was fidgety and that seemed like the right thing to do.

But now they're going to try and bring them back. I suspect this is going to sell to a lot more grownups than before, if only because in their heyday, it was the zany 70s, an era where everyone dressed like clowns and listened to bouncy stupid music and felt like they had no control of the greater world around them, and just needed the one-off dumb gag... yeah, actually, this is a good time for them to come back, ain't it. Or perhaps, in this the golden age of Photoshop, we should make our own. (Fark/Something Awful contest, anyone?)