THE NEW BAZOOKA JOE.(The Talk of the Town)

Last fall, a couple of candy men took a lunchtime stroll around South Street Seaport. The younger of the two was Paul Cherrie, a confectioner who had recently tripled the sales of Dubble Bubble and sold the company to Tootsie Roll Industries for a hundred and ninety-seven million dollars. The older man was Arthur Shorin, the chairman of Topps, which in 1947 created the iconic bubble gum Bazooka. "I am a bubble-gum maven," Cherrie said recently. "You can't help but be in awe of Mr. Shorin. There's only a few of him left."

They were wandering through the Seaport, eating hot dogs, when Shorin turned to Cherrie and said, "You know how good this thing could be." Cherrie knew that he was talking about Bazooka. Once Topps's prize product, the brand had lost its cachet. Cherrie responded, "Mr. Shorin, not only do I know it but I have been coveting this brand my whole career. Nobody understands the power of Bazooka better than I do."

Shorin hired Cherrie as managing director of the Topps Company and authorized him to make over the gum's mascot, Bazooka Joe. As Cherrie saw it, Bazooka's chief problem was the fact that the tiny comics that come wrapped around the gum weren't funny to anyone born after 1962. Example:

Jane says to Joe: "I made this cake myself, Joe!"

Joe: "Jane, this cake tastes awful!"

Jane: "Oh, yeah! Smarty! The cookbook says it's delicious!"

"We had passed from being quaint, cozy humor to being your grandpa's joke," Cherrie, a forty-three-year-old Canadian with a penchant for bright-colored shirts, said recently in the Topps boardroom, on Whitehall Street. A big part of the problem was Joe. "He was a little dweeb," Cherrie said.