You ruined ice cream!

One of the weirdest feelings when you're a junk food nut like I am is the realization that certain food products are gone forever.  I'll always mourn over lost cereals more than anything else, but I've noticed over the past few years that ice cream bars just aren't as good as they used to be.

Most of this probably comes down to the fact that Dickie Dee doesn't exist anymore.  For those sorry folks that remain ignorant of the greatness of Dickie Dee, it comes down to one thing: we in Eastern Canada were too welfare to have ice cream trucks.  Instead, we got crazy bike jobbies like this one:

Granted, this isn't an official Dickie Dee model, but everyone that knows what I'm talking about just got a bit giddy when they saw this badassery.  Dickie Dee was great because of two reasons: 

1) The bikes were only around in the summertime and they'd only cruise through your neighbourhood once a week or so if you were lucky enough to live in a well-populated area (Mount Pearl was crawling with these things, but screw them).  

2) They had ice cream that absolutely nobody else did.  They used some kind of a frozen ice milk product and at least two of their bars used gumballs on them.  A ghost with gumball eyes, a baseball mitt with a gumball baseball in the middle, I think there was even a Pac Man with a gumball eye (someone please confirm this for me if you can).

Speaking of gumballs in ice cream, there were also Screwballs.

Not to be confused with the sex comedy of the same name.

Apparently these exist in other places, but we sure as heck don't have them in Canada anymore.  Although it's probably just as easy to throw a gumball at the bottom of your bowl of ice cream for the same effect.

Another great one that I hear people lamenting all the time is Buried Treasure.

Sadly, the only evidence I could find were pictures of the sticks.

This ice cream was almost like an ice cream cone until you unwrapped it and found it was just a glob of ice cream on top of a stick.  Inside the ice cream was a plastic figure of some kind would be revealed as you ate it (this would be the "hidden treasure", even though it was actually really crappy and tossed in the trash just as fast as the wrapper was).  The reason everyone misses this is pretty simple: the ice cream on top was amazing.  It was actually more of an orange sherbet with a creamy texture, completely unlike anything else out there.

Speaking of textures, Pudding Pops!

If you had these, you know what I'm talking about.  My wife talks about the vanilla ones all the time, but I only ever had the chocolate.  They had a completely different mouth feel than anything else.  Sadly, not even Bill Cosby himself could save them.

There's quite a lot to be said about ice cream products that don't exist anymore.  The only thing that could possibly come close to being as crappy is when a product is still around but got peed on by corporate jerks. No still-existing ice cream bar best represents the "peed on and ruined by corporate jerks" better than Strawberry Shortcake.

Sure, they're still here.  Sure, the cake-like chunks on the outside are still awesome.  There's only one problem: the jerks put a layer of what can be best described as "vaguely strawberry-flavored chemical jelly" inside of the friggin' thing.  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" apparently wasn't part of the curriculum at Ice Cream Executive University (I just made that up, I'd probably go if it were real).