The milky bars are on me

The milky bar and the milky bar kid are one of those classic nostalgic memories from my childhood.  It's one of those magic, rose-tinted views of the past, when summers were hotter, icecreams were colder and television was better.

Partly, it's because my brother was once a finalist in a competition to be the next milky bar kid- a rare childhood story that doesn't begin with the mythical "my cousin's friend once...".  And partly, back in the day before I developed a palate, I enjoyed the delicious taste of a milky bar- that cloying, full mouth taste of half a tub of margarine reconstituting into a congealed mass and then slowly dissolving. Mmm.

But, like many of my cherished childhood memories, it's been ruined.  I shouldn't be surprised.  It happened with all my favourite tv programmes.  Re-runs of old tv shows under the banner of 'classics' or 'those 70 shows' have revealed just how lame Knight Rider, Chips and MacGyver really were.  There was a time when my brother and I refused to exit Mum's car through the door, insisting on clambering out throught the window so we could be just like the Duke brothers.  Thanks to Saturday afternoon repeats I know now that it's a show with no plot line, dialogue or acting to speak of, loosely held together by a couple of 'chase' scenes.  And the same goes for movie re-makes.  Thanks, A-team.  Thanks for ruining it. I was quite happy in my blissful nostalgia-induced ignorance.

And now it's the turn of the milky bar.  Time for reinvention.  The milky bar kid has always been some floppy haired blond kid with glasses, who would dress up as a cowboy and dispense milky bars.  He went through a few iterations, but stayed true to this basic theme.  So I have a couple of issues with the current crop of finalists to be the new milky bar kid.

The new finalists are an over-compensatory rainbow of ethnic and gender diversity.  More than half are girls, some are half Asian.  Hell, there's even a ginger kid in there.  This is milky bar they're selling, not Cherry Ripe.  I thought half the point was that he's the physical avatar of a glass of milk- hence the blonde hair and pale skin.  Why does this have to change?  If you remake the Shaft movie you don't try and cast the titular hero as some nerdy white guy.  What's wrong with leaving it how it was.  They say assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.  But reinvention is a close second.