Sunday, September 2, 2018

HOW THE EXPLOSIVE 'POP ROCKS AND COKE' LEGEND DESTROYED AN ICONIC CANDY BRAND

 
John Gilchrist, the child actor best-known as Mikey from Life cereal's most notable commercial, was tossing around a baseball in 1979 when his mom got a bizarre phone call from a stranger in tears.

"I'm so sorry to hear about your son!" the woman wailed.

"What do you mean?" Gilchrist's mother shot back. "He's at the park -- he just came home from school."

Probably just a wacko, his mom thought -- but "it weirded her out," recalls Gilchrist, now 49, "so she sent my oldest brother to drive by the field where I was playing to make sure I was OK. That’s when I first heard the Pop Rocks story."

Gilchrist -- then an athletic 11-year-old living in Westchester, New York -- had unwittingly become the subject of a wild rumor: the actor who played Mikey in the 1972 Life cereal ad mixed too much of the carbonated candy with too much Coca-Cola and his stomach exploded.

Variations of the urban legend claimed that it was his head that had exploded or specified the precise number of Pop Rocks packets and Cokes involved (six each). But however it happened, the poor kid had died tragically and the entire country was talking about it.

"Mikey lost his Life!," hollered children on playgrounds across America. Spooked parents who heard the tale flooded the headquarters of General Foods, the company behind Pop Rocks, with worried calls and refused to let their kids eat the fizzy fad candy, which had arrived on shelves with great fanfare in 1975. Sales plunged. "When that story hit the country, it was like, 'Bam!'" says Jerry Saltzgaber, former Pop Rocks business manager for General Foods.

Even long after the lore was debunked (Gilchrist, obviously, is fine), few have heard the whole truth behind the first-of-its-kind candy and its beginnings as an accidental lab experiment. Behind the scenes, production was more dark than sweet: Confectionary chemists lost fingers churning out the highly pressurized treat. Splashy product rollout plans were foiled by candy bootleggers. And the fallout from the Mikey rumor sent Pop Rocks into a spiral of crisis from which it would never recover.

"By the end, we were forced to destroy tons of the candy," says Marv Rudolph, a product developer for Pop Rocks in the '70s. "We literally buried it in the ground."


Read more at: www.thrillist.com

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