I heard from a couple of folks who recalled chug-a-lugging Funny Face drinks when they were young. I meant to ask them if they had any teeth left.
I was never a fan of Kool-Aid or Funny Face or even of the drink mix that most of the local kid show hosts used to push, a noxious liquid called Sonny Boy. I could tolerate the occasional Flav-R Straw (I wrote about those here) and I actually enjoyed my Fizz-Nik (which I wrote about here). But I didn't like things like Fizzies tablets (written about here) that turned perfectly good water into sweet, artificially-flavored and sweetened nectars.
Oddly enough, as an alleged adult, I've come around to a drink mix, though it's not one with artificial sweeteners in it. Ever since my surgery last May, I've had to find something I could drink besides water. Fruit juices contain more sugar than my body can now tolerate and I won't drink anything with Splenda, Nutrasweet or any of those. (I suspect they're bad for you but that's not even my main reason. My main reason is that I can't stand the taste of any of them.) My body doesn't like milk and the rest of me doesn't like tea, and I'm not supposed to have anything carbonated. So that leaves…
Well, not much. I drink a lot of tomato juice and I've also developed a watery orange drink and a watery lemonade. The watery orange drink is made by diluting down a Knudsen product called Orange Recharge that I buy at the Whole Foods Market. It's one of these sports drinks but it's lower in sugar than most, and I water it down by at least a third. Not a bad little beverage.
For the lemonade, I tried a few and settled on Country Time Lemonade drink mix. You know, the stuff isn't bad, even when I make it my way. I use half of what the directions tell me to use and then I add in a couple of big squirts of Real Lemon lemon juice. The result is a low-in-sugar lemonade that contains some artificial flavoring but no artificial sweetening.
I think someone's missing a bet by not developing a line of low-sugar soft drinks for kids. There seems to be the assumption out there that if you don't like a lot of sugar in your diet, you want zero so you'll go for something with Nutrasweet or Splenda. And if you don't like those, then you want as much sugar as you can get. I think there'd be a market for a middle ground product…and if I owned the old Funny Face trademarks, I'd bring them back with that as the premise. But maybe that's not feasible…and maybe no one owns those characters today. Maybe the whole franchise went bankrupt. I keep thinking that after they kicked Injun Orange off the package, he got his revenge by opening a casino and taking Jolly Olly Orange to the cleaners.