Top Ten Retro Snacks

My top ten retro choccy bars went down a treat so this time it's the turn of retro snacks. Once again some have faded out of existence and some have hung around in a shrunken version of their former selves.

It may look like there's only a couple of Walkers products in the list but actually Smiths and Walkers were two of the three brands used by Nabisco (aka National Biscuit Company), the company who makes Oreo's and Ritz Crackers. Walkers was taken over by Lay's crisps owner Frito-Lay which is part of the PepsiCo company. When this happened most of the snacks were given the Walkers brand bar Chipsticks and Frazzles which kept the Smiths brand. Although I did notice Snaps were originally branded as Walkers and then later Smiths.

Walkers gained Wotsits from Golden Wonder. KP, owned at the time by United Biscuits, also acquired some of Golden Wonders snacks, Wheat Crunchies and Nik Naks. KP is now owned by a German company called Intersnack. So from this we can ascertain that now just a couple of massive companies dominate the UK snack market and they're not British anymore.

I haven't done as much research this time around, no year of introduction or slogans. Maybe I got lazy by eating too many of these delicious snacks. Anyway it's now time to reminisce about the ones I ate that were great.

10 Nik Naks - Scampi & Lemon by Golden Wonder (Now KP)

Weird shapes chunks of scampi and lemon flavored corn.

09 Frazzles by Smiths

Shaped like bacon, tasted like bacon. As a kid I was convinced it was bacon.

08 Cheese & Onion Crisps by Walkers

Classic tangy and sharp cheese and onion flavour

Top Ten Retro Choccy Bars

Here are my personal top ten chocolate bars from over the years. Some are no longer on the sweet shop shelves and are sorely missed. Some still exist in one form or another although most of them seemed to have decreased in size, lost certain ingredients and of course become more expensive. But I guess that's the way of the world or maybe just my imagination since all products seem smaller once you as a person get bigger.

A couple of these are not actually chocolate bars but I didn't want a never ending title for this post. It's also worth mentioning the Nestle buy out of Rowntrees Mackintosh in 1988 as quite a few Rowntrees products are in the top ten. Kraft also took over Cadbury's in 2010. So without further ado here are my favourites.

10 - Topic (Mars 1962) - "What has a hazelnut in every bite? Topic!!"

A bit like a Snickers (aka. Marathon) with hazelnuts instead of peanuts.

9 - Double Decker (Cadbury 1976) - "Nothing fills a hole like a Double Decker"
 

Chewy nougat on top of cereal wrapped in chocolate. Originally with raisins too. 

8 - Starbar (Cadbury mid-1960's) - "Munchiest bar ever"

Caramel and crushed roasted peanut filling covered with chocolate. The Name changed to Boost before returning back to the original Starbar name.

Quantum Leap (1989-93)

Every once in a while a television series comes along that brings a fresh and interesting twist to a familiar genre. For me one of the best shows to do this in the nineties was Quantum Leap. It was time traveling entertainment with a history lesson thrown in for free, all be it American history. Sure there have been several time travel shows before and yes this show did follow the familiar theme of hero solves a problem and stops the bad guys every week with the help of his sidekick. But it did have a unique twist.

After Sam leaps Al is always on hand to help...... sometimes.

Usually this kind of show is not memorable from episode to episode at all as they are so similar. Classic shows like 'The A Team' seem to suffer from this a little in my opinion. Ask yourself, Can you remember more than half a dozen specific story lines from all those episodes of 'The A Team'? Probably not. All that you'll probably remember is what usually happened every episode.

Some memorable characters that Sam played

Fighting Fantasy Books (1982-95)

The first in the series

I still remember the blurb on the front cover of The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain and many of the subsequent Fighting Fantasy novels.

Starship Traveller was the first Sci-Fi FF Novel

"An original fantasy adventure in which YOU are the hero!". This described their unique selling point perfectly. A book where you take on the role of the lead character and decide their fate.

Deathtrap Dungeon was my personal favourite.

As a teenage geek back in the early eighties I enjoyed fantasy role playing games but the problem was you always needed a group of friends to be available and a good size place to play them. You were also expected to bring a fair amount of materials to someones house, at least your own painted models and a variety of different shaped and sided dice and quite frankly some of the rules seemed to be more complicated than they needed to be. So complicated that you usually needed a Dungeon Master to run game and if it's you who's running the game you miss out on all the fun of playing it. Well that's my opinion. In my experience very few people ever seemed to volunteer to take on the role of Dungeon Master. I quite enjoyed the creativity of it but I seemed to be in the minority.