So I was reading a post on site Dinosaur Dracula about old comic book ads,
I couldn’t sleep and I kill time like this. The first two ads were for
Soda-Licious sweets starring 7-UP’s Cool Spot and the film Candyman and I realised that these two completely unrelated things are coincidentally responsible for two of
my most vivid memories from the same period of my childhood (roughly late 1993,
I would have been 7). I also realised that I hadn’t told anyone either of these
stories, not family, not friends, there is nobody in my life or who has been in
my life in the last 10 years who knows these two things, if I die tomorrow no
one will ever know these things about me. I wasn’t happy with that. I was suffering
from heavy bout of depression and with it long, extreme panic attacks so I wasn’t
exactly emotionally stable and the thought that no one would ever know the
story about me and Candyman upset me, so I wrote both stories out on Word,
along the way I added a third story that was in the same boat because the Cool
Spot story reminded me of it. Now I’m going to share them with the internet so
that at least one person knows them and sleep a little easier. So are you
sitting comfortably? Then I’ll being:
Me and Cool Spot
For a while I completely
worshipped Cool Spot, I should have just built an alter made out of 7-UP
bottles and those horrible cheap sunglasses they sold by the counter and
honestly I did so much weird shit by myself when I was under 10 that I can’t
say for certain I didn’t. Spot or Cool Spot was a mascot for 7-UP, he was
introduced in 1987 and was an anthropomorphic version of the big red circle in
the 7-UP logo, he also wore sunglasses and trainers because that’s what cool
people do. The Spot was never used to promote 7-UP here in the UK (Fido Dido
was, more on that in a minute) but the video game Cool Spot was released. It makes more sense than you think, Cool
Spot looked and played like any other me-too mascot platformer that came out in
the wake of Sonic the Hedgehog’s success and it was developed by Virgin Games –
who were a British firm. I latched the fuck onto this game and if you’d’ve
asked me at the time I’d’ve said it was my second favourite, behind only Sonic the Hedgehog 2, I rated this thing
that much – I still think it’s a decent (if a little unforgiving) 2D platformer
but then I wouldn’t expect anything else from a game programmed by David ‘The
Earthworm Jim Bloke’ Perry. To me Cool Spot was as big as any video game star,
if I drew a picture of video game stars (a fairly common occurrence) he’d be on
there alongside Sonic, Mario, Link and Pac-Man, when my grandad gave me a fancy
wooden wine bottle box to store my Mega Drive cartridges in I drew Cool Spot on
it – again putting him in the same league as Sonic, Knuckles, Ecco, the Ferrari
Testarossa and Alex Kidd. But the memory that I stumbled across, the point of this
segment is this:
One day while wandering
around in my garden I decided to create my
own garden, the best of gardens, and sat down to drawn it. I drew
everything the same way at this point, in biro on Computer Paper – that’s what
we all called it, my mum used to ‘get’ it from work and it was neither A4 nor
A3 – I insisted this was the way to get the best results, I eventually learned
what a pencil was. I thought I still had this drawing and had it scanned but I
don’t, I’m sorry, but I can remember it shocking vividly, I also remember that
I didn’t finish it. It was a big garden, there was a few things I’d still put a
my dram garden today (fibre-glass dinosaurs and a swimming pool) and some stuff
that society and advertising had taught me was cool in late ’93 early ’94 , it
included a skate park for instance even though I could not and still cannot skateboard
in any way that doesn’t involve me sitting on the board and drinking juice cartons
but it wasn’t for me anyway it was for all the cool friends having this awesome
garden would absolutely guarantee me, I used to imagine being 13 and being part
of a gang fairly often then, everyone had bomber jackets, Converse All-Stars
and sunglasses and I was thin. Getting back to the point though is that below
the skate park was my fountain, because all big gardens need one and it was a
Cool Spot themed fountain where in the centre water would squirt and raise Spot
into the air (this is genuinely a thing that water features can do, I don’t
know if they can lift a large statue of a fizzy drink mascot but it’s legit
thing). I was so into this food mascot who I didn’t even know was a food mascot
that immortalizing him in thousands of pounds worth of marble fountain wasn’t
even a maybe but just something that obviously had to be. It was one of the
first things I thought of if I remember correctly ‘in my dream garden I must
have…a swimming pool, a Cool Spot fountain, dinosaurs…”.
Me and Fido Dido
While we’re on the very
specific subject of 7-UP mascots: The Fido Dido Jacket. Fido Dido was the
mascot for 7-UP in the UK for a long time, a lot longer than in the states because
we never had Spot, and I still consider him to be THE mascot for the brand,
it’s Tony the Tiger or Ronald McDonald or whathaveya. Turns out he’s not owned
by PepsiCo but was licenced, he was created by two women from New York (Joanna
Ferrone and Sue Rose, who is the horrible human being responsible for
inflicting Angela Anaconda on the world) and dates back to 1985, who knew.
Anyway I grew up in (and currently live in) a town called Collier Row which is
in Romford (it’s next door to Romford itself), it’s built around a roundabout
(Americans: those are circular things you drive cars around) with four streets
coming off it in a rough X shape, this is ‘up the top’ where our shops all are.
For a while my mum and nan worked in a ‘cheap shop’ called Saint’s – I miss it
so –which was on the same side as the Library (it was about two shops up from
it actually) where there was also for a while this clothing shop that sold,
amongst other things, bomber jackets. It was run by a short Indian gentleman
who had a really full head of hair and shouted a lot, that’s all I remember
about it other than the Fido Dido Jackets.
He used to hang them from
his shop’s canopy; they were that shiny material and used to shimmer in the sun
like Aztek treasure. I lusted after them so badly, I used to stand and stare at
them to the sounds of the owner shouting at someone (I presume it was at
someone, he could have just been insane). I’m pretty sure they each had Fido
Dido wearing a Fido Dido bomber jacket (meta?) with his back turned, but
turning around to look at ‘the camera’, I wanted to be as cool as Fido Dido. I
was weirdly obsessed with the concept of cool as a kid, I blame Sonic the
Hedgehog, my weird preconceived notions about coolness and what it meant meant
I never told anyone about my wanting for these jackets except maybe a passing
mention to my mum in the most fake-casual way a child can mention something. They
weren’t particularly expensive and I’m sure my mum or nan would have got me one
as my winter coat that year had I asked but I assumed the following: because
they were so cool (and shiny) they were really expensive, further I didn’t
understand the concept of ‘unofficial’ (read: bootleg) back then and would
never have thought that something was anything more than 100% official if it
featured a ‘proper’ person or character and not a knock-off and 100% official meant
it was expensive (I’d learnt this via knock-off action figures, seriously); that
I simply wasn’t allowed to own such a
jacket because I was too young and too uncool to do so, so I shouldn’t ask for
one because it wasn’t appropriate. Instead I just stopped and stared at the
shiny jackets with the 7-UP mascot who looked a bit too much like Gary Rhodes
and imagined being roughly 13 and owning one (because they would never go out
of style and never not be available in my hometown) walking down the street
with a posse of similarly attired youths.
Also it always struck me as
really wrong that Fido Dido jackets came in anything other than green, I think
it still would today.
Me and Candyman
Fuck Candyman, oh don’t get
me wrong Candyman is a superb horror film and easily one of the finest of its
decade but fuck Candyman because Candyman manged to traumatise me for around a
month as a child and I hadn’t even seen the bloody thing (also because it’s all
one word and that upsets Microsoft World, this paragraph is filled with angry
jaggedy red lines, cross at me for ignoring them when I clearly have a word
spelt wrong and need to change it). Candyman came out in 1992 when I was 6 so
no one at school had seen it, a couple of kids claimed they had but I knew
their parents for fuck’s sake and they would never let them watch shit like
Candyman but the kids with older siblings or bastard parents had been told
about the film’s plot or overheard about the film’s plot and the legend of
Candyman. For those who haven’t seen it Candyman is just Bloody Mary but a big
black bloke with only one hand and an awesome dress sense, you say ‘Candyman’
three times in front of a mirror and he turns up and kills your ass dead. While
writing this I remembered the name of the little bastards who told me about
this legend, it was fucking Sammi-Jo and Jason and Sammi-Jo still lives ‘round
here so I think I may have to extract twisted revenge. Anyway these two
giggling little turds told me about it and my six year old mind took it
completely at face value, I wasn’t so much scared of the Candyman coming out
the mirror but that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing it when in
front of a mirror and thus dooming myself. We had a lot of mirrors in my house, there was a big one in the hall, one
in the bog obviously and my mum’s bedroom was and is still boarded with
wardrobes with mirrored doors. So I couldn’t piss, leave the house or get a
clean t-shirt (my room was so tiny I stored my clothes in my mum’s room)
without the temptation to call upon the Candyman.
Then I had to spend the
night sleeping in my mum’s room, I can only assume I was
ill because that was usually the only time I slept in there (it was cooler, closer
to the loo and the bed was closer to the ground) and I woke up in the middle of
the night and laying all rolled up like a terrified little hotdog I gave in and
whispered Candyman three times out loud and then shat myself and waited for
death. Which didn’t come – no surprise there, I hate to ruin it for everyone
but even if you want to believe Bloody Mary might work Candyman never does
because Candyman is not based on a real-world legend it’s based on a short
story by Clive Barker. But because I didn’t know that at the time I was instead
convinced that Candyman was just waiting for the right moment and for a good
four weeks afterwards I was as uptight as a priest on trial because I knew that
any moment Candyman was going to lean out any reflective surface at any moment
and slash me open. Oh yeah, because no one had seen the film the rough image
I’d been given of Candyman was that he was a tall bald Black man (mostly true,
he had hair) in a huge fur coat with a huge collar (sort of true, I was told
more along the lines of John Ruth that Isaac Hayes) with an all metal version
of Freddy Krueger’s glove (not true at all). I do mean any reflective surface
btw, I remember walking through a small shopping centre in Romford called The
Liberty and shitting myself past shops like WH Smiths because I thought
Candyman might lunge out from between signs advertising Ruth Rendell and
GamesMaster Magazine and collect the debt owed him. Eventually I just got more
and more confident that he wasn’t coming and the worry subsided, notice that I
didn’t say that I realised Candyman didn’t exist, that never occurred to me and
I had no idea until I went to senior school that Candyman was a film, I just
assumed he hadn’t heard me or because I wasn’t standing facing the mirror it
didn’t count or something like that.
What’s saddest about this
is that sometimes I still have nightmares where I’m lying in my mum’s bed, all
rolled up like a hotdog and can’t stop myself from whispering Candyman three
times. Tony Todd never turns up in it and guts me though; the fear just comes
from being unable to stop myself. So if you live in the UK, when you see a news
report that someone has smeared a 12 foot high ‘I never forgot’ in cowshit on
the house of one Sammi-Jo of Romford, Essex you know where to send the police.
I feel better. I think I
should probably feel embarrassed about revealing these to the world but I was 7!
Everyone does stupid shit when they’re under 10, it’s not like it reflects
badly on them as adults, well unless they killed someone I guess - but I didn’t
kill anyone, at least not that I or you can prove. Ta for reading me go on
about food mascots and slasher villains, you’re all wonderful.
