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School's back, and bewildered parents are bracing themselves for their latest crash course in kid culture. Blinking sneakers. Twinkly Radio Disney idols. Imported action-hero games with rules more esoteric than "The Da Vinci Code." It's a full-time job just trying to keep up.

Only the youngest of our children are still under the cultural sway of their parents, which might explain the lunch box. Fifty years after the brown paper bag was rendered hopelessly uncool, the most popular lunch box characters remain instantly familiar to parents of any age: Barbie and Spider- Man.

Batman still sells, too, and Superman and G.I. Joe. And many revival franchises are equally familiar to those of us who grew up in the 1970s: Scooby-Doo, Hot Wheels, Wonder Woman, the Brady Bunch.

Of course, kids have newer favorites of their own, such as Kim Possible, the new Saturday morning superstar, whose soft insulated lunch box comes equipped with a cell phone holder. You've got your Power Rangers and your Powerpuff Girls. And, as every parent of small boys will attest, both Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine have powerful holds of their own on the developing imagination.

As a Pavlovian prompt, the lunch box may be the most direct route back to any postwar childhood. The market for collector's items and vintage-style re- creations, with embossed likenesses of the Beatles or the Peanuts gang, is thriving.

Jack Epstein has been selling lunch boxes to kids and adults alike at his Noe Valley shop, Chocolate Covered Sweets and Gifts, since the mid-'90s, when lunch box nostalgia was picking up steam. He says he routinely indulges customers' memories, pulling out a collector's price guide and showing them pictures of their old lunch boxes when they start reminiscing.

"I'll find the picture," he says, "and they'll get all verklempt."

In addition to a full line of kid-friendly lunch boxes, Chocolate Covered stocks such big-kid designs as "The Osbournes," Cheech and Chong and punk group the Misfits. The owner's personal favorite? The "Jaws" box, with Bruce the Shark hurtling toward his lunch.

"It's not for your 3-year-old," says Epstein, "but neither is the Bettie Page, obviously."

The concept of the lunch box is a product of the 19th century, when workers took metal pails to their factory jobs. As commercial baked goods became available, cookies were often sold in decorative tins. The tobacco industry recognized the popularity of the tins and began selling its products in reusable metal containers.

By the 1930s, manufacturers had identified a market for lunch pails for schoolchildren. Mickey Mouse appeared on a lunch box as early as 1935.

But it was Hopalong Cassidy who kicked off the real era of the lunch box, selling 600,000 copies of a decal-covered box in 1950. Roy Rogers was said to be jealous; three years later, he and Dale Evans had their own box, produced by a rival company, and the lunch box wars were on.

"They hated our guts and we hated theirs," an employee of a top manufacturer once recalled. The major companies fought bitterly over new properties, not always with the best of instincts. One passed on both Barbie and Peanuts, while a competitor declined the rights to Batman.

Between 1950 and 1970, 120 million lunch boxes were sold. By the '80s, however, the industry was imperiled. Parents and teachers complained that the metal boxes were being used as weapons in schoolyard fights. In Florida, the box was banned.

Collectors call the period beginning in the mid-'80s the "dark ages." If that's the case, then we're now in a lunch box renaissance, with the collectors' market inspiring a new wave of products at Target and Toys "R" Us.

Epstein says lunch boxes are throwbacks in more ways than one. Little boys in his store often choose the action-packed Powerpuff Girls, he says.

"And their mothers will not let them buy it. They're not ready to break those barriers."

Keep looking, they say.

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