There's a category of "things that you experienced in Anchorage, Alaska in the 1980s" and "things that everyone experienced in the 1980s." And sometimes I'm not sure which category something fits into. Flavored popcorn stores are one of those things. Did everyone have these? Or was it just a weird local fad?

For at least the first half of the 1980s, Anchorage experienced a boom in stores which sold flavored popcorn. These were set up using the visual language of the ice cream parlor.

The popcorn was stored in big round cardboard tubs, which were shelved in something that looked very much like an ice cream parlor's chest freezer. You peered in through the glass front to pick out your flavors.

What, you might ask, is flavored popcorn? Why it's perfectly ordinary popcorn which has been sprayed with a sticky, flavored coating. I don't know what that coating was. Mostly sugar, if memory serves. Probably some kind of toxic polymer. It was like caramel popcorn, except instead of being caramel flavored, you could choose blueberry, or tutti fruitti, or coconut.

Gross and weird, right? Right.

One interesting facet of these stores is that they scented their locations very thoroughly. Just walking into the mall, you could smell the distinctive mixed fruity sweet flavors of the popcorn store. In the 1980s we all spent a lot of time at the mall (particularly in Anchorage in winter, where the mall was one of the few indoor locations where you could spend a weekend afternoon). My memories of the mall are inextricably tied up with the smell of flavored popcorn.

I went Googling and could not find any evidence for flavored popcorn stores, either now or then. But of course, the internet has little memory for anything which happened before today's 20 year-olds were participating members of society.

The popcorn stores faded from the mid to late 1980s. Many of them were replaced with actual ice cream stores, perhaps because the location and the fittings were so similar. (One of these stores made their own ice cream, and I vividly recall my favorite: cinnamon ice cream, which was simply vanilla ice cream with cinnamon mixed in. Delicious!)

These bizarre flavored popcorn stores were just another facet of the strange mall food crazes of the 1980s. It may seem strange to have an entire store that just sells flavored popcorn. (And weird-ass flavors, to boot.) But is it any more strange to have a store that just sells cookies? Or just sells flavored pretzels?

In fact, today's Mrs. Fields and Orange Julius* stores are one of the few survivors of the great mall catastrophe of the mid to late 1990s, when people started staying home and buying stuff off the internet instead. At one point you couldn't throw a rock in a mall without hitting a specialty snack food store. TCBY only survived (in so far as it does survive) by opening stand-alone locations in strip malls.

ASTERISK In the 1980s at Orange Julius you could order a raw egg in your blended drink for an extra fee. It made the drink thicker and foamier, and of course it provided lots of extra protein. Also, Rocky did it, so it was cool.

Photo credit: Flickr/dammachoid