The Nostalgic TV Dinners Only Gen X Kids Will Remember

Generation X, situated between the prosperous Baby Boomers and downwardly mobile millennials, is a curious generation indeed. Due to coming of age at a time when both parents often worked for a living, they were frequently left to their own devices after school, earning the nickname "the Latchkey Generation". They enjoyed technological advances like home computers and cultural institutions like MTV. Also, for some reason, they're really proud of having drunk from garden hoses. And tons of pop culture these days, from "Stranger Things" to "Star Wars," are desperate to evoke Gen X nostalgia. To which we humbly suggest: maybe try reviving Libbyland TV Dinners for a tie-in, like "Stranger Things" did with New Coke. We'll take a million-dollar consulting check, thank you very much.

Granted, you probably won't find many middle-aged Gen X-ers willing to chow down on Libbyland TV dinners these days. They were designed specifically for kids in the early 1970s, a time when the marketers of America were coming up with all sorts of ways to sell food of dubious nutritional value to our nation's children. The idea was that, by eating from every square on the tray (even those yucky vegetables — blech!), kids would be greeted by cartoon animals embossed on the bottom of each compartment. These days, you can practically get "CocoMelon" livestreamed directly into your child's visual cortex, so the gimmick may seem underwhelming to modern eyes, but it served Libby well enough for a while.

So what sort of food might these eager children eat on their way to the sweet, sweet reward of an animal represented through tin foil? It depends on what specific variety of TV dinner they (or more accurately, their parents) bought. Each one had two different main courses (in this economy?!), a side, some corn niblets, and a dollop of chocolate pudding. For instance, there was one themed after Westerns, which offered a hamburger, hot dogs and beans, and fries. Then there was one themed after safaris, which had fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, and tater tots (which were invented by Ore-Ida to make use of potato scraps). They even came with "magic crystals" that could turn boring old milk into chocolate milk. What fun!

Libbyland only lasted five years, from 1971 to 1976. Why was it discontinued? We can only guess. Maybe the whole "two entrees" thing was a bridge too far — you may want to eat fried chicken or you may want to eat spaghetti and meatballs, but you rarely want to eat both at the same time. Or maybe it's the typical TV dinner issue where the food inevitably cross-contaminates, so you get nasty stuff like corn sloshing over into chocolate pudding (The proof should be in the pudding, not corn niblets). Either way, it's one nostalgic food that remains in the past. But hey, they rebooted "The Smurfs," didn't they?