A Musical Morsel Supreme

My favorite toy during my single-digit years was probably the Toot Sweet.



One can tell by the strange, Victorian-broadside-meets-psychedelia packaging and the orange-and-purple color scheme that Mattel released it in the late sixties, shortly after the Summer of Love and roughly concurrent with the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “Toot Sweets” is the name of a musical number within the film, in which Sally Ann Howe waltzes around in a long Edwardian skirt whilst playing melodies through a candy cane with holes in it. Mattel, desperately searching for something to sell while slapping From the Movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! on the front, abandoned the candy cane idea and decided to introduce kiddies into the wonders of injection mold manufacturing.

And I loved it.

The basic idea behind the Toot Sweet is to make whistles out of Tootsie Rolls. The Toot Sweet machine itself is fairly simple, consisting of a sturdy base, a lever that retracts a plunger, and a screw-on-top to hold various molds included with the toy.



To make a whistle required two miniature Tootsie Rolls, which would have to be warmed and rolled thin in order to fit into the machine’s narrow bore. Once inside, one would pick a mold for half a whistle, fasten it on the top, and then very gently push down on the lever in order to force the candy into the mold. When the top was unscrewed, viola! Half a whistle.




When you’d made two halves, all you’d have to do would be to press them together to complete your edible musical instrument.



As my mother could have attested, and my cat Fred, who was hanging this morning around to leave cat hairs all over the candy and who went running when I blew through the slightly crushed glob of Tootsie Roll, the whistles actually work. They emit a loud and shrieking toot that, while not perhaps as melodious as what Truly Scrumptious produced in the movie, is probably more delicious than any ol’ candy cane.

But the fun of the Toot Sweet doesn’t stop there. Oh no. The machine came with other molds with which you were supposed to decorate your whistles, by affixing them to the whistle’s butt.



So if you really wanted to personalize your sticky, spitty whistle by giving it a skull, a fish, a teddy bear, a mouse, a scary clown, or a child molester in a trench coat, you could!



Trust me. When you’re six and your father is a sugar freak who keeps a never-ending supply of miniature Tootsie Rolls in the house, the Toot Sweet was the delicious gift that kept on giving.