fact checking in land of poison toadstools

[Anne Frasier]

I'm doing some final fact checking, and I thought the board game Candy Land had a Land of Poison Toadstools, but online images show no mushrooms or toadstools. So have they changed the board and removed the shrooms, or am I thinking of another board game? Chutes and Ladders? Something else?

[D. C. Hawkins]

Wow, "Land of Poison Toadstools" sounds pretty scary for a pre-schol game. We recently moved ant the only pre-scholl gave that survived was Uncle Wiggly and it is not in that gane. I asked my wife, the trivia Queen, and she does not remember that in any of the games we had when our daughter was young. She is not totally infallible but I usually ask her before I Google. BTW, I did not find anything helpful on Google for "Land of Poison Toadstools" or 'Toadstools children's games'.

[D. C. Hawkins]

I love a research challenge. I have been bouncing around the internet and not finding much. I do have a possible clue (lower case since we are talking about games). I found that the Smurfs lived in a mushroom village and that the little blue creatures stared in a number of board games. No definite hits, but maybe this will jog a memory.

[Anne Frasier]

it's definitely not smurfs. i'm working on a memoir, and this is what i remember:

as a little kid i secretly ate a mushroom that was later declared poisonous. I didn't tell anybody I'd eaten it, because I was afraid I'd get in trouble. To get my mind off my imminent death, i went to a friend's house. she pulled out a board game, and my game piece ended up on something that was like the land of poison mushrooms or toadstools or something like that. i thought it was candy land, but now i'm thinking it probably wasn't.

i might have to just call it a board game and let it go as that. and it may have been some game that was only around a few years.

[D. C. Hawkins]

Intense memory. Sorry I couldn't be more help. Our collective memories are from our daughter's preschool days and she will be 21 this summer. I hope you nail it down (and post the results).

[Anne Frasier]

ah-ha!

the board has gone through 4 different designs, and the original 1940s board had shrooms. i found an image. i can see the toadstools, but i'm still not sure if it's called land of poison toadstools. don't know where i got that.

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[D. C. Hawkins]

I still have not found any references to mushrooms. At the risk of playing arm chair psychiatrist, is it possible that your experience caused you to see the gum drop mountains as toadstools? Even if not, it could make a terrifying fictional twist.

[Anne Frasier]

haha! you could be right. yeah, i wish i had a better image to post. looks like mushrooms or toadstools to me -- top center, just to the left of the candy land logo. but maybe i'm still seeing toadstools instead of gumdrop mountain. :D and maybe the board image isn't showing up. how did candy land become so sinister. pretty funny.

[Anne Frasier]

no, but i used my easy bake oven to dry pot. kidding! although i've heard they're good for that.

[Anne Frasier]

sigh. i loved super mario bros. yeah, maybe i'm confusing some games.

[L. A. Starks]

Haven't played CandyLand with my kids for a few years, but last time I did, no, there was no Land of Poison Toadstools. If there's a big-box store like WalMart or Target or ToysRUs near you, it would be easy to find the game that does.

[Batya Deene]

You can always email the corporate consumer relations people at Hasbro and ask them. If they don't know, someone there will---at least you'll get a definitive answer as to whether or not it was ever CandyLand.

Mushrooms are usually divided into three categories: safe, poisonous, and fatal. The poisonous category includes many that are hallucinogenic, not really "poisonous." Mushrooms are really easy to misidentify. Toadstools themselves are a subdivision of mushrooms; all toadstools are mushrooms, not all mushrooms are toadstools.

At least that's how I remember it all. From the early '70s. When I did some research and we were all curious.

---Batya Deene

[Anne Frasier]

Batya, that's an excellent idea. Thanks! And thanks for the mushrooms/toadstool info. I thought they were two different things -- i didn't realize all toadstools were mushrooms. I also thought all toadstools were poisonous, but maybe I'm wrong about that too.