Things that featured prominantly in your childhood but which pretty much disappear without trace from your adult existence?

i dont even know the numberplate of my parents car, today

"ice cream trucks"

Oh yes! I remember buying an icecream every single frigging day during the summer. No wonder I was dragging too much weight around.

I collected fancy pens and bags.

..I wish I was still a kid sometimes. A lot of times. I miss my imagination telling me the stuff I did was ACTUAL AND REAL. *sigh*

something to do with chalk, says the urban myth...

i used to be able to identify cars, models of cars, very easily. i can't even drive at 24, and couldn't identify a car if it... erm, you get the picture.

When I was young there was a real fad for fancy notepaper and girls would trade sheets of the stuff and keep it in fancy folders. It seemed really stupid to me for years afterwards, and now that I'm involved with collectors and dealers and ephemera in a small way I'm really sorry I don't still have my collection of notepaper. In fifty years or so it would be worth cash money.

Other things I no longer do:
Tape things off the radio
Care about the number one single
Crave a pony (in fact I now find it bizarre to own an animal that can't even live at your house and you only see for a few hours a week, unless you're really, really lucky)
Put unframed posters on my wall
Read comics
Wear socks with sandals
Write my name on my books
Get excited about the day the grocery shopping happens. This used to be a huge deal when we were small. Mam would bring us to the supermarket and we would buy the food for the week, including biscuits and sweets and Coke (or Coke substitute), and then, as the week progressed, the Viscounts would disappear and all you'd be left with were digestive biscuits with Panda chocolate spread on them. Nowadays I can just buy sweets if I want them. Which is why I am a Fat Ass.

Which makes me think of those labels with your name stitched on. My god, I felt really dorky about that.

Also, pulling your socks up even if they would reach just under the knee. Somehow this became a really uncool thing to do from the age of about ten. (You had to leave'em around your ankles.) This is still the case, but only in my town, in all the other towns (in Belgium) the old custom remains. Very strange.

Are you me?

Other things:
Radiator grilles
Record players (something magical and nostalgic in a childlike way about playing records and not tapes or cds)
Automatic locking on car doors

An interest in the British Formula 3 championship is, oddly, what springs to my mind.

white dog poo (i used to see it all the time- disapeared from existence entirely)

ballet shoes

jodphurs

my cabin bed

hiding places

blankie

dolls with no hair/clothes/heads... dolls altogether

tree climbing

no fear

transformers

and

http://www.tomas-katz.com/images/HappyEater.jpg

(the badges, specifically)

(and everything accentmonkey said)

Blimey, OTM alisa! I'd forgot about that one. A good thing, I guess...

Also, not just plastic wellies but short wellies. What's the point in giving small children wellies that don't come up past their shins? Surely if you're smaller, all the muck is deeper, so you need longer wellies, no?

TV in general.

Tights (at some point it became uncool for boys to wear those).

Neon colours.

Math.

Taping our own radio shows.

Explosives.

Living life a day at a time (sadly).

If anyone's interested in visiting, taking photos etc., there is some white dog poo outside 448 Upper Richmond Road in Putney - I saw it last night.

Thinking that casserole is chic. (nicked that off of Look Around You but it's so true!)

Ah, yes! Fake cigarettes, itch powder, fart bags, mousetrap bubble gum... Such fond memories.

Yeah, that too...

Also: not caring about how one looks.

I'd also like to add: Running down the street with your arms out pretending to be an aeroplane. I'm tempted to do this on the way home tonight.

(I think I was 3 when Threads was made, but our school was still showing it to teenagers 12 years later)

It's true: in Finland in the eighties boys wore tights, at least where I come from. But sometime around when I was 8 or 9 my friends told me was it was not okay for a boy of my age to wear them anymore. I remember being rather disappointed, because I liked tights, and I couldn't see why you suddenly had to stop wearing them. This is probably the first time I realized that something which was perfectly fine a while ago could at some point become not acceptable without a proper reason.

http://www.thedancersshop.co.uk/acatalog/boys_tights.jpg

...though kiddies' tights were usually more colourful.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6302946387.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

ha! i haven't seen white dog shit in years! i forgot about that as well.

and another OTM re fear of nuclear war and "the day after" scenarios.

and re cars, somewhere along the way i stopped thinking the mazda miata is a very cool looking vehicle and a sensible alternative to admitedly cooler but more expensive sports cars like spyders or a real ford cobra or ferrari or whatever.

Playing board games and role-playing games.

Knowing all the makes and models of cars on the street.

Anything to do with Star Wars.

the welfare state

Vacations in a regular summer place with extended family.

gag and joke shop items... rubber chickens, arrow-thru-the-head, switchblade combs

People telling jokes.

jokes, urban legends, weirdo rumors...I still don't get how that stuff spread before the internet era. it blew my mind to find out that apparently a bunch of people heard the rumor that Paul from The Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson. I thought some kid in my class just made that up. was it mentioned on TV or something?

novel topics of conversation

my family was into these elaborate story jokes, that were like five minutes long... and everybody knew the punchline
But after a few glasses of wine they would tell them again

Seems like a thousand years ago

fear of drowning in quicksand

Playing card games.

owning things that said MADE IN HONG KONG and being kinda stoked on it

Exorcisms, seances, the occult in general.

Exorcisms, seances, the occult in general.

I want to hear more about this childhood.

People telling jokes

This is now known as "dad jokes".

xp yeah, all that 'haunted generation' stuff... checking out library books about ghosts, etc.

or asking the 8 Ball if so&so likes so&so

Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts
Variety shows and celebrity roasts on tv
Disneyland and the Pacific Ocean

People telling jokes disappeared as soon as I moved to London tbh.

weekend night monster movies (Creature Feature)

Horses
Musical theater

Decent cable television.
― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Thursday, May 26, 2005 4:46 PM (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Amazon did not invent shittification, but did turbocharge the process.

jokes, urban legends, weirdo rumors...I still don't get how that stuff spread before the internet era. it blew my mind to find out that apparently a bunch of people heard the rumor that Paul from The Wonder Years grew up to be Marilyn Manson. I thought some kid in my class just made that up. was it mentioned on TV or something?

― frogbs, Thursday, July 17, 2025 1:46 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

School playground and similar student chatter.

ya but like this was clearly travelling across state lines. maybe some kid went on a family vacation and told another kid at a playground?

yeah I would hear shit at summer camp and bring it back in the fall

I think I single-handedly popularized the 'Mr. Rogers was a combat sniper with a hundred confirmed kills' mythos

fear of drowning in quicksand

Great revive!

the phrase "cheat code"...feel like I'm hearing it in ads constantly, but do games actually have cheat codes anymore? like a secret combination of buttons you hit to make things happen? feel like that hasn't really been a thing since the SNES era.

xylophones

Penpals. I had a few in different states, those letters were a source of amazing facts and stories.

oh yeah I had a penpal in NZ and really looked forward to those letters, so exotic

scabs

Asthma attacks
Dubbing vinyl records to cassette tape
Playing with dolls

Tinned ravioli

Belief in progress

Tinned ravioli

ha, I was just eyeing a can last night but talked myself out of it

Obvious answer, but drive-in movie theatres. My childhood was the '60s; they were huge. I know COVID brought a few back, but mostly their overgrown fields now, with visible traces of what they once were.

Also: there/their/they're. Thanks to spell-check, people never get those mixed up anymore.

there was an adult drive-in north of San Francisco, and we used to crane our necks to sneak a peak when driving by

'peek' rather

o rly

90s boy here

- Pets
- Beware of strangers
- Speed of internet connection / start-up time / screen freezing
- Brands
- Pins
- Encyclopedia / general knowledge / quizzes
- Ghosts
- Dares
- Audio-video equipment: 5.1 / TV size / subwoofers / consoles
- Rollerskates
- Sodas / sweets / chewing gum
- Table football / pool
- Handstands

People talking about "camera tricks" on shows like How Did They Do That?

home videos

"oldies"

Gumball/Candy Vending Machines

Yikes Pencils

Orange Juice

Being knowledgeable of sports team logos

Trading Cards

Not eating before going swimming

"oldies"

the station I remember most from childhood played a ton of doo-wop, '50s r'n'r, some '60s soul and a little '60s classic rock

seemingly disappeared overnight and the dominant strain of classic rock even jumped past the '60s into the mid-late '70s

high speed dubbing on dual cassette decks

sweet fruity chewy candies

Trading Cards
― MarkoP

Or at least cards that didn't require a six-figure income to start collecting.

Sweatpants

spindles of blank CD-Rs

quicksand, pinups, going to the beach, mustaches

Midnight feasts.
Staying up late because a film might have boobs in it. See also setting alarm.
Spontaneous combustion.

Hawaiian Punch

Alphabites / alphabet spaghetti.
Curses.
Treasure maps.

fear of damnation
abandoned building purportedly an former mental hospital
exorcism / poltergeist stuff
trade unions

UFO sightings and stories about alien abductions.

The Bermuda Triangle alone seems to have been solved. Thanks, Obama!

1990s: X-files is one of the most popular shows on TV, massive spike in alien/UFO sightings

2020s: Everyone is carrying an HD camera in their pockets, no alien/UFO sightings to speak of

Yes, funny that.

I found nutrigrain bars on sale the other week and got them for the days I get up at 5:30 and don't have time to make breakfast. Either they are worse than before or my standards have improved or a bit of both. They are definitely smaller.

also found Hooch for sale yesterday and was tempted to buy a can and relive my teenage years but nah.

Sorry about this CAAL but https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/settled.png

Anyway

jokes, urban legends, weirdo rumors...I still don't get how that stuff spread before the internet era.

My wife and I were talking about this recently. Late 80s/early 90s explosion of talk in legacy media about urban legends plus "fax lore," "Xerox lore," things that were photocopied over and over again (presaging the heavily pixelated meme image where visual shittiness indicates quality). Anyone in a white-collar office circa 1985 knew what a meme was even if they didn't know it yet.

It was timed exquisitely to coincide with, and to be given a major boost by, early internet (usenet, chat rooms, MUDs). Not entirely a coincidence, I would characterize it as a confluence.

This was the activity of Jan Harold Brunvand and Barbara Mikkelson, together with Cecil Adams (Straight Dope message boards). The word meme was introduced from Richard Dawkins, and the germ of a thousand lolcats bloomed. As soon as the net existed it was set to work on what would become goatse.

I remember the excitement. And let me stress that I encountered these phenomena almost exclusively through print media, as I didn't have a computer until 1998.

I was on a college tour a few weeks ago, and when a parent asked about paying for laundry with cash as opposed to a phone or card (school issued or credit or whatever) the guide joked that kids don't even know what quarters or dollar bills look like anymore.

Also, growing up the biggest allergy I was aware of was beestings, but now I never encounter anyone with bee allergies, just food allergies. I know the former exists, it's just been eclipsed by so many other allergies.

"Beestings." For a sec there I thought, "ah, so that's what that Bob Mould album title is in reference to."

Zubaz
Starter jackets

pre-internet, jokes and urban legends were spread by long distance truck drivers. the original information superhighway.

Sweatpants

i wear sweatpants nearly every day in the colder months?

but i guess this is where the thread premise comes into play— is it subjective (which i would argue is
true for a number of things that people have listed, like sweatpants and dual cassette decks with high speed dubbing) or more general (the aliens and paranormal obsession of the 90s etc)

Speaking of sweatpants, I never wore them and I wasn’t really a child at their peak but Zubaz

Hope for the future

Waterguns

I grew up in the Super Nintendo/Playstation 1 era, so:

- Renting video games / video game demos. I guess one could still try a game by buying it on Steam and using the 24 hour return window, but that's a lot of GB to download just to sample. I vaguely recall a brief period where the local Hollywood Video rented PC games, but don't recall how that worked.

- Video game manuals and paper strategy guides. Even if I do buy a physical PS5 disc so I can later resell, there's no manual. I occasionally see that physical guides exist (Cyberpunk 2025 had one, IIRC) but GameFAQ etc has rendered them superfluous except as artbooks.

arcade cabinets at every supermarket and convenience store, different ones at each, though Phoenix was like everywhere. i first saw Dragon's Lair at the local Kroger's

Silly putty

Baseball cards at the grocery store

with the worst gum in history in each pack

It’s a loss for society

my brother has a roommate who worked at a convenience store, circle k or whatever, and gave me several boxes of topps wax packs baseball cards (stolen i assume).

anyway, i opened all the packs to see what i scored and my mom made me collect all the bubblegum sticks and put them in a ziplock so she could dole it out at appropriate intervals (we were a strictly sugar free gum household)

anytime i got to indulge in topps pink gum sticks, i’d take three or four at a time, get about 10 chews in before it turned into stiff rubber. my jaw still hurts thinking about it

Before I collected baseball cards I was way into the sticker books and 35c or whatever sticker packs from the store down the street. Shit was like crack

potato waffles and findus crispy pancakes

Ice Magic

transfer albums

I have a box of potato waffles in the freezer at the moment. Haven't had Findus Crispy Pancakes in a while, I'll have to get some in. They're made by Bird's Eye now and are apparently A modern spin on a timeless classic., so possibly complete crap.
I never liked Ice Magic, even as a child. The texture was always weird.

Still on a Bird's Eye tip, I haven't had their paella since I was 12, back when it was still boil in the bag not microwave.

Also the various meat adjacent products of the Dalepak company, including Dalesteaks and Chinese Style Ribsteaks.

At age 8 or 9, I rented the TMNT NES game for a weekend and played it every waking hour that I had it, and repeated the impossible 'swim through the sewers' level a hundred times and never beat it, and the experience instilled in me a life-long fear of freshwater aquatic growth, like I can't swim in lakes unless it's sandy, to this day

I don't know what I was reading but I feel like the hourglass figure and proportions (38-24-36?) came up a lot in my childhood, in adulthood... not at all.

36-24-36

... I think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnBRFhKlrbk

I think you mean 42-39-56:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL58K-3XGKs

36-24-36

only if she's 5'3"

Model airplanes
Knowing about military aircraft

ex-jukebox seven inches, from last year's charts, scratched as hell, for sale in the local newsagents for pocket money prices. middles missing.

the only numbers like that i know are 54-46

Marbles.

Losing them is a sign you're getting older tbf

At age 8 or 9, I rented the TMNT NES game for a weekend and played it every waking hour that I had it, and repeated the impossible 'swim through the sewers' level a hundred times and never beat it, and the experience instilled in me a life-long fear of freshwater aquatic growth, like I can't swim in lakes unless it's sandy, to this day

― you have to be avant-garde and stupid at the same (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:12 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was so obsessed with this game that I played it non-stop for almost an entire summer. My mother got so pissed she yanked it out of the shelf, took the console outside, and smashed it to pieces in front of me with a hammer.

I have never been swimming in a lake for exactly the reason you described. I'm an ocean person. Maybe I can blame the turtles!

see, my parents were right, video games are dangerous. (swimming in freshwater lakes is one of life’s great pleasures)

I took out a kayak on a lake in the Lake District this morning, and it reminded me of family vacations where we would take a canoe and kayaks and go to a lake and camp, and so I would spend a lot of time just floating around in a kayak in the middle of a lake, reading a book. I think I read Middlemarch that way.

just seemingly endless time to fuck about and not feel guilty about it

I don't know what I was reading but I feel like the hourglass figure and proportions (38-24-36?) came up a lot in my childhood, in adulthood... not at all.

― Lulu and Stormzy live back to back (ledge), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

36-24-36

― Posts That Witness Madness (Tom D.), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

... I think?

― Posts That Witness Madness (Tom D.), Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

― henry s, Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:28 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think you mean 42-39-56:

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Sunday, July 20, 2025 4:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Also, in Motley Crue's Bad Boy Boogie

We're innocent in every way
Like apple pie and Chevrolet
Sweeter pies with different shapes
38, 28, 38

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBHpOQVLoTo

I was so obsessed with this game that I played it non-stop for almost an entire summer. My mother got so pissed she yanked it out of the shelf, took the console outside, and smashed it to pieces in front of me with a hammer.

i have now reached a life stage where i find your mom's behaviour highly relatable

I have never swum in a lake because (a) I have a beach not too far away (that I never use); and (b) swimming in freshwater lakes in Florida exposes you to brain-eating bacteria and to gators.

Polk Salad Annie
The brain eating bacteria got your granny

isn't that a Little Richard song

Depends on what you emphasize

read that as "fanny"

pre-internet, jokes and urban legends were spread by long distance truck drivers. the original information superhighway.

― fetter, Saturday, July 19, 2025 11:58 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

CB radio (not part of my childhood, but perhaps that of an older cohort) apparently was an unmoderated medium for this sort of communication. Then the internet opened to the wider public, and much of this chatter was preserved for the ages. Or at least until the server failed.

just seemingly endless time to fuck about and not feel guilty about it

Seriously the thing I miss the most about childhood.

read that as "fanny"

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, July 21, 2025 10:16 AM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

GARU G WAZ HERE

_just seemingly endless time to fuck about and not feel guilty about it_

Seriously the thing I miss the most about childhood.

the purpose of life imo

car conversations

Definitely video games. Used to play quite a lot and then after 16 or so completely stopped.

I would say TV too. I do v little streaming, but that way of consuming TV, just hours sat in front of the box watching news, soaps, just anything, all gone.

years on coins

speaking of coins, having to make change and counting coins.

Video games for me to.
Tab soda

I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you anything different. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Orange soda for me. While I played games on my computer, slowly going through that 2L. So much time.

Speaking of computer games, all those weird tricks you had to go through to get some games working under DOS in the early 90s (boot disks which loaded just the bare minimum of drivers into memory so you had enough of the 640k available for whatever game you wanted to play, setting up either EMS or XMS memory, etc.). How I somehow became an expert at this pre-internet seems inexplicable to me now.

Haven't had Findus Crispy Pancakes in a while, I'll have to get some in.

Sainsbury's didn't have any, even though they had plenty of their woeful Stamford Street microwave meals. I'll try the Co-Op tomorrow.

The last time I found them it was in Morrison, but unless anything has changed since then (about 5 years ago) they were garbage - barely any fillings.

That's how I remember them being in the 80s.

Coors Cutter

your body know the difference but your mouth don't know

gag and joke shop items... rubber chickens, arrow-thru-the-head, switchblade combs

God, yes. I used to get the Johnson Smith Catalog in the mail. Ordering from there was always a big event in my life. Of course many gags/tricks turned out not to be quite as amazing in real life as they looked in the catalog, but it never stopped me from getting my hopes up just as much the next time.

Planets in our solar system
Ancient Rome
Buying and raising Sea Monkeys
Making a point of seeing particular rock videos
Keeping/breaking commandments
Wondering about sexual orientation

Buying MAD magazines monthly (largely quit age 15-16)

black light posters - they used to have a big selection at Spencer's in my local mall (1980s edition)

Anticipating when MTV becomes AlTV for a day

incredibly horny television commercials

Did adults sing along to TV theme songs in the past? Now there are fewer to see if they do.

I have zealously hoarded the big nerdy picture books I liked when I was a child. Like Doring-Kindersley "If you lived in ancient Mesopotamia" type shiz.

Whenever I see them in the library's used book sale I snag them.

https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images3/1/0613/30/lot-30-dk-eyewitness-book-dorling_1_5431c865c207fab67c3013c110e23b0d.jpg.

These ^ plus the Biesty cross-section books, all of David Macaulay (Pyramid, Castle, Cathedral). I have like nine atlases and a concise encyclopedia from 1988.

I had earnestly hoped that my children would love them as I did, and neither has the slightest interest. Because internet, duh. Kids these days can get all their urgently needed facts about the mound-builders of Cahokia from Wikipedia. Hmph.

The concept of counting sheep in your sleep

Travelers checks
VHS release dates
Airphones
Call waiting

Kids these days can get all their urgently needed facts about the mound-builders of Cahokia from Wikipedia.

Heh as I'd said upthread reading encyclopedias was one of mine, but tbh now I just go down wikipedia rabbit holes so I guess it hasnt really gone away!

Encarta

a bicycle

Magic Fingers

Water Beds, for that matter

Kids these days can get all their urgently needed facts about the mound-builders of Cahokia from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia demolished whole genres of books. I used to have a bunch of official and unofficial X-Files episode guides that gave summaries and behind-the-scenes info. Or all those books that simply compiled Billboard chart positions. The magazine I read about collectible card games used to devote a third of the back pages to simply listing the text and prices of Magic the Gathering cards.

Did adults sing along to TV theme songs in the past? Now there are fewer to see if they do.

I'm struggling to think of any show I've watched in the last decade or so whose theme isn't an instrumental or needle drop. It's standard still in anime to have an original opening song that pertains to the premise or theme of the show, but I don't know of any live action Western show with a relevant original song akin to Welcome Back, Kotter or Gilligan's Island.

many xxxps but holy shit ENBB thank you for validating me regarding freshwater weeds.

When I was 9 or 10, my older brother and I went out on a tiny pond in lifejackets, and he rocked the boat and I fell into the very shallow pond, rife with weeds. I turned into a ball and started screaming. I couldn’t stop screaming, I was so afraid! People pulled their cars over, my mom came to get us, and when they yelled at me if I was OK I could only yell “THE WEEDS! THE WEEDS!” and all adults and my brother abandoned me in embarrassment and disgust. Eventually I swam to shore, wading through a tonne of disgusting green growth, and was roundly mocked for years afterward. Fuck freshwater weeds.

I can and do swim in lakes, but I still am afraid of weeds, and also unseen rocks jutting out (I’m terrified of banging my ankle against a knifey rock and losing a foot to subsequent amputation), so generally I just book it out to the deep water before enjoying myself.

Just last April I swam in Waikiki, and there were beautiful turtles, and I put on my goggles to peek, and saw a harmless round rock mere inches away from where I’d been treading water, and I screamed in horror and swam to shore. Water is weird! I’m a strong swimmer and have spent much of my life in the ocean, idk, some strange phobias still persist

I would be 100% onboard with having theme songs with premise-recapping lyrics for prestige tv.

Imagine Breaking Bad like "Here's the story... of a man named Walter..."

"It's Westworld, where nothing can go worng..."

I swam in a lake an hour ago, as part of this wild swimming trip I signed up for. As it was the first day, they kept us in the shallows to get us used to the water and assess our abilities. Can confirm it was very weedy and sort of muddy-smelling.

I'll try the Co-Op tomorrow.

They didn't have them in there either. So I guess that's an indicator of (lack of) quality.

I don't miss the shadow of nuclear war, but I do miss the shadow of World War II. It still suffused so much of seventies childhood, before the reckoning with Vietnam took hold. Building models of Sherman tanks and spitfires, playing with surplus gear, watching Midway, Bridge Too Far, Hogan's Hero's, trying to understand the older generations' desire for peace and quiet and their suspicion of VW's and Hondas. Not even noticing the tighter Overton Window. The doc Marwencol really captured how that shadow played out in Gen X subconscious.

Caring a lot about various award shows, and seeing them as dominant arbiters of both quality and importance

Trading belongings with other people

Thinking about people in a social hierarchy of how cool they are

In the spirit of the original post, scorpions

I would be 100% onboard with having theme songs with premise-recapping lyrics for prestige tv.

Imagine Breaking Bad like "Here's the story... of a man named Walter..."

"It's Westworld, where nothing can go worng..."

― je ne sequoia (Ye Mad Puffin), Tuesday, July 22, 2025 11:00 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

there is one guy who tried to re-do a bunch of TV themes this way, all original music too

https://hotdad.bandcamp.com/album/tv

of course the joke is very few of the lyrics are accurate, I think he admitted he would just read the wikipedia summary once and tried to recall the premise through memory, still the songs are remarkably catchy

always enjoyed this sort of thing:

https://i.redd.it/yukwhvu6ol4f1.gif