Among my strange hobbies, there is one brought from my childhood that haunts me obsessively. I can’t even call it purely nostalgic. As the mass of nostalgic affairs after some memories dissipate – an indulgent smile, a slight sadness, some associative rows. But with Turbo it is somehow different for me.
But first I have to tell very young readers what Turbo is. If your first association with this word is with Turkish chewing gum and pictures with cars, you can skip this paragraph. So, in 80’s – 90’s, Turkish Kent company produced different chewing gums along with other food products and it coincided in some strange way with the shortage and the resulting greedy-guts behavior in the socialist camp countries. That’s why one of the series of chewing gums with automobile inserts (wrappers) got to all sorts of Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and the former USSR and became not only popular, but also surpassed the popularity in the homeland. However, in Turkey too there is nostalgia for Turbo and references to this brand will definitely be found in all kinds of digests, such as “top 100 nostalgic things from childhood”. Gum was first brought by “speculators” (early form of self-employment in USSR) and semi-legally in all sorts of retail outlets (for example, I remember a table near the department store in Baku). And quite expensive. However, I will stop price disputes here at once, because it is a very controversial and debatable topic and it is not correct to compare the price of bread and milk of that time and today with imported, not always legal goods. But for sure the margins of gummies were quite high.
Later Turbo and dozens of other chewing gums, mostly Turkish from Kent, Ulker, Bifa, Dandy, Baycan, etc., flooded into “commercial” stores, stalls, tents. Here are some names from those years that you might remember too – Lazer, Final, Bombibom, CinCin, Minti, ??psevdi (aka Love is…), OtoMoto. I, like almost everyone else, was a fan of Turbo and twice collected liners (the first collection was stolen in my school), but the years went by, adulthood, foreign cars began to drive on our roads, gum became quite cheap and cars were not so attractive anymore.
But in adulthood I became interested in Turbo again, and thanks to the Internet not only saw all the missing pictures, including the legendary first series 1-50, which did not come to our country, but also read a lot of interesting things on the subject. Fortunately my hobby remained rather passive – I didn’t start collecting pictures again, buying rare unopened gum at auctions, etc. My nostalgia is limited to posting on my blog photoshopped cars that I find interesting, sometimes accompanied by historical comments. Some of them could never be portraited on original Turbo even if they were quite old, some were and linked to the pictures of Turkish wrappers.
Wandering around the internet you can realize that there are a lot of people passionate about Turbo, but as I think everyone has their own references and passions for this media fetish, not like me.