Top Of The Pops

Kool-Aid Pops
Kraft Foods (1990-1992)

These packages were recently shared on Twitter by Retro News Now (left) and Dinosaur Dracula (right).  I haven't thought of these in years, but I used to love them when I was a kid.  The concept is pretty simple: a vanilla ice cream bar that has a frozen Kool-Aid coating in a variety of flavors, but they were absolutely delicious!

One of the things that made these bars fun when they were first released in 1990 is that each box included a Mystery Berry flavor.  The Kool-Aid coating on these bars was white, and the box came with a Wacky Mystery Decoder that you could use to reveal the secret flavor.  I still have a couple of these in my ridiculous horde of late 20th century ephemera which I have scanned for this post.

When you lifted the little door on the back of the Wacky Mystery Decoder, the Kool-Aid Man's face was removed, leaving behind a red film in an oval that you could then place on top of the coded message to identity the Mystery Berry flavor.

The flavor in this box that this decoder was packaged with was Berry Blue.  I don't remember if the Mystery Berry flavor in every box was Berry Blue or if you could have gotten one of the other flavors that you see printed around the "Lift Door Here" flap on the back of the decoder, but it wouldn't surprise me too much if that was the case.

You could save up your Wacky Mystery Berry Flavor Cards and use them the same way that you would use Kool-Aid Points from drink mix packages to redeem for prizes.  This is probably why I saved the two that I had for so long.  Over the years, I'll bet that I've gotten well over a dozen toys and other prizes from sending in Kool-Aid Points.

Later packages of Kool-Aid Pops from 1992 removed the Mystery Berry Flavor and the Wacky Mystery Decoder from the box, but they did include a couple of Totally Zany Trading Cards that you could cut out from the back of the box.

I don't have any of the trading cards, but I did find these two on eBay selling for a price that I'm not willing to pay.  I'm not positive that these are from the same package that was sold in stores back in 1992, but the Rock-A-Dile Red and Purplesaurus Rex flavors were being produced at the time, so there's a good chance that these are the cards that were on the back of these boxes.  Check out those card numbers though!  Were there really at least 329 different cards in the set?