Your Children Will Never Experience “PUNCHBUG!”

Not that your kids are missing much.  When I was a little boy my sister would shriek “PUNCHBUG!” and then smack me.

Usually we were on the back seat of Dad’s massive Chrysler.  The Volkswagen Beetle was a strangely exotic part of culture.  Featured in movies, adored by hippies and a cheap second car in many driveways.  Spotting one became a children’s game because they were so common on highways 50 years ago.

It was also noisy, cold in winter and a death trap in many accidents.  Adolf Hitler promoted the Beetle as a car for everyman but war sidelined production.  In order to revive the Post-War German economy Beetles got shipped by the millions to North America.

Then it vanished from American roads almost totally because of safety concerns.  The revised Beetle briefly had a renaissance on American highways but now the odd little cars are being phased out of production.  A lot of backseat fights will never materialize.  Maybe kids can take up mumblety-peg.