Mmmm so good!

Just because Jon Stewart mentioned Carvel on the Daily Show last night - here's the back cover of Carvel comic #1. Remember, it's a health food!

Before there was Fudgie the Whale, Before there was Cookie Puss

Back down here I shared one of my "very active" collections.  Here's another.  For the past few years, I've grown more and more interested in restaurants that I went to as a kid, that aren't really around for me anymore.  Some of them just went out of business long ago, and some were based more on the East Coast, and I left them behind when I moved to California in 1990.   It would be easy to list these all as one collection. "childhood eateries" or something like that, but they're all so distinct I'm going to put each one up separately.  Right now we'll look at an item from Carvel Ice Cream, the East Coast soft ice cream store I grew up with. 

It seems like a lot of displaced East Coasters in Los Angeles remember Carvel fondly - on HBO's series "Entourage" the boys from Queens have Carvel at a birthday party, and Patton Oswalt does a bit on Carvel on his "Feelin' Kinda Patton" album, where he describes Tom Carvel's self-narrated ads as sounding like "Tom Waits gargling hot asphalt."  If you heard him, you'd understand.  And Fudgie the Whale and Cookie Puss - the famous Carvel ice cream cakes- are often mentioned in pop culture, most recently (to my notice) in the last episode of The Office on NBC, where character Andy asks for and gets a Fudgie the Whale cake.  But almost completely forgotten today is a Carvel icon that predates them both:  Captain Carvel.

In 1973 Carvel  published issue 1 of "Carvel Comics," a book that could only be found in their stores.  The story inside is about a school field trip to a Carvel Ice Cream Store.   Leading the tour is Captain Carvel,  a tiny kid zooming around in a "Flying Saucer" ice cream sandwich (Normally one of my favorites).    They meet all the ice cream treats come to life (see cover) and explore all the many exciting places in a Carvel Store, like the walk-in freezer and the store room where the cups and ice cream sticks are stored.  The kids love every minute of it.  They also get some lessons the history of ice cream, and some information that we've forgotten here in the cold, stark future of the 21st century on the nutritional value of ice cream:

How could we, along the way to higher learning, forget that ice cream is a health food?  You have it here, in black and white, from an impartial source only interested in selling you as much ice cream as they can.  Hmm.

By issue two Captain Carvel has morphed into a completely different and more super-heroic form.  We'll take a look at him in a future post.

Well, there's very good news for all the displaced East Coasters who are hankering for a Fudgie the Whale cake:  Carvel ice cream stores have started popping up all over Los Angeles.  Pasadena and Las Vegas too.   I've been several times now, and the vanilla soft-serve with crunchies is as good as it was when I was a kid in New York.  The comic, by the way, is a brand new Ebay purchase, and will work its way onto my "childhood restaurants" shelf (which is partially visible in the banner that leads this blog).

Maybe they'll bring back Captain Carvel next?  A gritty "Dark Knight" version of him?

Nahh.