Blame this post on nostalgia, because the recent gift of a ring pop got me thinking about popular lollipops from the '90s. It was like the great lollipop area, with candy makers coming out with new flavors and gimmicks designed to delight the senses, titillate the taste buds, and rot the teeth. These are the lollipops from the '90s that I remember most fondly. Feel free to jump in with your sticky, sweet, strawberry-infused memories.
1 Ring Pops
For me, Ring Pops will always be the best lollipops from the '90s – and they're still available, so how cool is that? They had some of the most inventive flavors, with combos such as kiwi-strawberry mixing in with the traditional flavors, and they were rings. You could wear them. They were juicy jewels of flavor!
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2 Baby Bottle Pops
Baby Bottle Pops emerged in the late '90s, which means that I saw a lot of high school kids sucking on bottles at the time. The original jingle was the business, but it's since been redone by the Jonas Brothers (why?!). Forget about that, though, because the flavors are nuts. Bubblegum will give you an instant cavity, but the green apple was maybe the best thing in the world.
3 Chupa Chups Melody Pops
Chupa Chups is responsible for so many excellent lollipops. Melody Pops are sometimes hard to find stateside, but you were queen for a day if you brought them to school back in the '90s. As the name suggests, they can make music. Specifically, they can whistle. You could get sheet music and everything to figure out how to play little tunes. Teachers everywhere despised them, and no doubt still do.
4 Charms Blow Pops
Blow Pops were popular long before the '90s and they're still popular, but they experienced a huge surge during that decade. What was it? The delicious flavors, which got even more inventive in the 1990s? Or the joy of licking all the way through your strawberry, blue-raspberry, or cotton candy lolly, just to get to that stale gum that lost all semblance of flavor within three chews?
5 Push Pops
Push Pops were annoying, but delicious. The premise was a good one: a hollow tube at the bottom allowed you to push the candy stick up as you needed it, and then you could top it, like a pen, when you were done. This meant you didn't end up getting hair, eraser shavings, and other debris all over your lollipop if you didn't finish it in one setting. The problem, however, was that you'd invariably take your finger out of the tube and lose your lolly, or else you'd misplace the cap and get your sucker dirty anyway. The best part was pretending the lolly was a lipstick, though. That color lasted for days.
6 Caramel Apple Pops
You'd get cavities simply by looking at these. Don't believe me? They're still around, so just go look at one. Don't worry; I'll wait. Horrible as they were for your teeth, however, they were and still are delicious. Green apple, real caramel, all on a convenient stick … who can resist?
7 Hubba Bubba Squeeze Pops
These were actually disgusting. They were just sugar, syrup or something, and lots of artificial flavor. However, kids loved them because they were essentially liquid lollipops. They only came in cherry and grape back then, as I recall, and you'd get tired of the flavor before you could ever finish one, but it didn't matter because all your friends wanted to steal a squeeze and you felt like the most powerful kid in class.
In retrospect, the 1990s seem like these era of perfection – for kids, at least. We remember the toys, the games, the clothes, and the pop culture like they were the greatest things in the world. Are you obsessed with the '90s? If not, do you at least clamor for '90s candy decades later?
