Remember those? The thin pretzel sticks made in the blue and red box? I sure do. You could make a meal of those things without poisoning yourself, which could be partly why Nabisco stopped making them (whenever that was).

Every time I witness the barkeep fill the snack bowls with them in "Lady In Waiting" (where Columbo conveniently bumps into Hamilton), it tempts an empty desire for a taste of the past.

They were the best commercial pretzel product ever produced until they just flat-out disappeared to be replaced by the very worst. I'll never make sense of the reasoning, but I can certainly understand the why companies do that.

The first time I saw the bartender pour those pretzels into the bowl from that dark blue box with tall thin white letters from the past.. My my.. it launched me right back to 1974 in a time machine.

Another case of this is in Double Exposure when Keppel and Columbo are at the supermarket, they stop in front of the massive cigarette display. All those brands and box designs are so familiar. Shows you how powerful the cig companies are at advertising. I'm not even a smoker, and even still, each one of those boxes I recognize from the 70s like it was yesterday.

I looked into that. They were the very best pretzels ever produced and found out that "lagging sales" was the excuse Nabisco cited for discontinuing them. Of course, I don't believe for a single second that it was the real reason for dropping such a wildly popular snack food.