It’s a boring day at work.  My work is caught up for now and I’m down to doing those chores I always say I’ll do when I have the time, like organizing my samples in the -80 degree C freezers, cleaning my drawers, etc.  My mind wanders a lot on days like this.  (Okay, okay, not that I need any excuses for my mind wandering.  It goes off on little junkets whenever it wants to, regardless of what else I have going on.)

Anyway, on one of my little mind meanderings, I realized that I could still recall all the names of the Funny Face drinks from my youth: Choo-Choo Cherry, Rootin’-Tootin’ Raspberry, Jolly Olly Orange, Freckle Face Strawberry, Goofy Grape,  Loud Mouth Lime.  What I didn’t immediately recall was that Jolly Olly Orange originally was named Injun Orange, and that Choo-Choo Cherry was first Chinese Cherry.  Apparently, there was some diversity sensitivity issues involved with those ethnic names and they were quickly replaced.  I do, however, remember viewing this commercial on television when I was eight or nine years old:

Oh, yes, it was a simpler time, back in the day before it was discovered that feeding pounds of cyclamate, the artificial sweetener in many soft drinks, to lab rats gave them cancer. Suddenly, all our Funny Face drinks were gone from the shelves in a mass exodus. No more Goofy Grape. No more Rootin’-Tootin’ Raspberry. Saved from the dreaded cyclamates in our fruit drinks, we were allowed to grow up to face the perils of our adult lives.