I do not bake much. Actually, I hardly bake at all. But I love cakes, cookies, brownies, whatever I can get my hands on. As a kid, my family would make bakery items from box mixes or get something from the many great bakeries in our area. Cake was always served at birthdays, and they were delicious, but I always dreamed about getting a fancy decorated cake. This was before the modern fancy cake movement, where the height of coolness was a cake baked in a Star Wars or other pop culture themed cake pan and then covered in icing to complete the effect. Despite wanting on those, it never happened. That is probably why as an adult, I am so attracted to images of them.

Now, I could have gone for collecting cake pans. I certainly see them all the time while thrifting, but I know that I won’t ever bake one of them and if I tried, it would be very disappointing and the pans would just fill up my cabinets. Luckily I found a compromise. I started collecting Wilton Cake Decorating Yearbooks.

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I like old cake decorating books or articles I find in magazine in general, but these are much more entertaining because they are dedicated to the cakes you make with Wilton equipment. They are filled with birthdays, weddings, school events, holiday parties, and ambitious home bakers trying to make something memorable. Some of the cakes are genuinely beautiful and so many of them are of characters I loved as a kid that even after looking at them dozens of time I can’t help but smile.

Wilton dates back to 1929 and was selling cake decorating tools through catalogs by the late 1950s. In 1964, the company published Cake and Food Decorating Ideas. Wilton says the title became the Yearbook in 1972, and the series continued for another four decades. The 2014 Wilton Yearbook of Cake Decorating was promoted as the fiftieth edition and turned out to be the last.

The yearbooks aren’t really cookbooks. They combined decorating instructions with patterns, supply lists, product numbers, and photographs of finished cakes. A cake that looked impossibly elaborate is broken down into something a home baker could at least imagine attempting. Naturally, there was a Wilton pan or decorating tip involved. Wilton was showing people what could be done with its products, then providing everything needed to recreate the results at home. Each page served as both inspiration and advertising, though it rarely felt like a hard sell. You were being invited to take on a project.

Here you can see some instruction on how to make cake and non-cake snacks for the big game.

Here are the results. Love the giant show and you can see the Pass the Pate mold (a tailgate favorite) and the adorable Take to the Field Cakes. Note that these are all just using the various egg cake molds that you would be using for Easter.

These yearbooks were also an opportunity fro Wilton to sell their Home Study Courses. $15.95 per lesson sent by mail in 1982 is over $50 today. Wilton still offers courses today both in person and you can find courses online. I have seen people post results and its impressive. I wonder if you could learn the same stuff from tutorials posted online?

The books also changed with the times. The colors and decorating styles shifted, as did the characters and occasions that appeared in them. Some of the older wedding cakes look like buildings. Many of the birthday cakes wandered over from the toy aisle, movies or television. The holiday sections are filled with cakes that would make any person’s holiday a little brighter.

Where have I found these? Pretty much everywhere. They are in thrift stores and used book stores that sell magazines. I never bought them when they first came out, but looking at the price tags that some of them still have, I think a lot of people bought them at Kmart.

I have built up a large collection of Wilton yearbooks, and I thought it would be fun to start sharing some of the pages that catch my attention. I am not planning a formal history of the company or a serious examination of cake decorating here. I just wanted to start sharing some photos from them starting with one of my favorite ones, which is from 1982. These will be photos and not scans since I don’t want to damage them anymore than they already are.

First let me start with a character cake. These were why I originally started picking up these Yearbooks and they never fail to please. Here we have Donald Duck and you get a good view of his pan and how the icing is applied to the cake to capture his image. Every year they have new cake pans joining their collection. Still my favorites.

Fake Food are popular. Here are three examples from 1982. They are not hyper-realistic, but I think most people in 1982 would have been happy to get one. I especially like the faux hoagie.

This Taco Tempter is pretty sophisticated for its time. No way I could make this happen even now.

They also have some odd cakes in here. When I first started this one, I thought it was a Barbie cake, but instead its a weird take on a bachelor party classic. At least a classic as I have seen on many sitcom episodes from the 70s and 80s.

Looking through these magazines is probably the closest I will ever come to owning all those character cake pans I see at thrift stores. I can enjoy the finished cakes without finding room for the pans or discovering how badly my own version would turn out. The yearbooks let me have the part I always wanted, which was seeing what the cake was supposed to look like.

I never did get one of those cakes as a kid, but now I have shelves filled with pictures of them. That seems like a pretty good compromise.

The Bad News Bears made more sense to me after I played baseball when I was young. I was put on a T-ball team that seemed to be assembled from the kids nobody else wanted, and we were terrible. We never got great, but we improved and somehow eventually managed to win a few games, and got the award we were dreaming of. That was enough to make us feel like champions. When I later watched the Bears, probably on VHS or cable, I could relate to being part of a team that was bad but still worth playing for.

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On the show, I talk about how The Bad News Bears was made and the people who brought it to the screen. I spend time on Bill Lancaster’s screenplay and Michael Ritchie’s work with the young cast. I also look at the film’s unusual music, its reception, and the other versions that followed it. As usual, I pulled out my local newspapers to see what was happening when the movie opened in 1976.

The Bad News Bears remains one of my favorite sports movies because it understands how strange youth sports can be. The kids behave like kids, the adults frequently make everything worse, and Walter Matthau never tries to make Buttermaker more respectable than he is. The film does not need a conventional victory to make you feel good about the Bears. What they accomplish together is maybe even better.

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Production Notes

• This is the 368th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 19 of Season 18.

• I went through a phase after buying this VHS where I watched it almost every weeked for months. Then I took a pause before coming back.

• The kids use a lot of bad language, which doesn’t go over well with some modern audiences, but its a very important part of the plot.

• The sequels are okay. At least interesting and not bad like some people might say.

• The fact that they made two sequels should give modern audiences and idea of how well-received these were.

• Would love to have seen them go to Cuba.

• The movie understands that the adults can be much worse than the kids.

• I like that Buttermaker is never cleaned up enough to become an inspirational coach. He improves, but he remains Buttermaker. Walter Matthau looks completely at home sitting in a dugout with a beer, even though almost everything about that sentence would be impossible in a family movie now.

• Carmen should be much too grand for a Little League movie, yet the music fits almost perfectly.

• I am glad my own coaches were nothing like Roy Turner. Even as a kid, you knew there were adults who cared far too much about winning.

• I cut out a part where I gave a special callout to Brandon Cruz as Joey Turner. His moment shines brighter every time I rewatch it.

• Growing up, I need several kids who were like Tanner. Foul-mouthed and angry, but they could be great friends.

• See Mikey and Nicky.

• I messed up while talking about the soundtrack especially a part about the 50th anniversary release. It is availble to buy and has been posted and streaming online. Worth checking out if you are fan of the film.

• Would love to be a kid exploring the tunnels under the Astrodome.

• “The Wings of Man”

• Sports movies that are just about winning the big game is boring.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

My first Colorforms kit showed up when I was four or five years old, and I fell for it completely. The pieces were reusable, and the sets were affordable, which mattered a lot in a house where new toys could be kind of rare. This was years before computers and electronics filled every room, so a bag of sticky vinyl shapes felt like something close to magic to me. Of course at the time I never thought much about where they came from, and I decided to dive into their history.

Colorforms began as a bathroom remodel that got out of hand. Harry and Patricia Kislevitz met as art students, and in 1951 they were looking for a way to fix up their bathroom walls without paying for real paint. Several accounts place that bathroom in River Edge, New Jersey, instead of Manhattan. Always happy to see a NJ connection for things I like. A friend who worked with vinyl for pocketbooks gave the couple a few rolls of the thin colored material, and they discovered it stuck to glossy paint without any glue at all.

They cut the vinyl into shapes and covered a wall with a private little mural. Guests who came over wanted to try it too, so the Kislevitzes left out spare vinyl and a pair of scissors for anyone who wanted to add a piece of their own. Harry noticed how much fun people were having with a bathroom wall, and that observation turned into a business plan.

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The couple hand cut and assembled the first sets themselves, somewhere near a thousand of them, and brought the batch to FAO Schwarz in Manhattan. The store agreed to carry it on concept alone, with no guarantee the toy would sell. The stock disappeared almost immediately. Early mail orders went to an address on Hudson Street in the city, but production itself soon settled into a real factory in Norwood, New Jersey, not far from where the Kislevitzes lived.

A 1965 newspaper feature on that Norwood plant makes the whole operation sound very low tech. Workers peeled freshly stamped patterns off the press, and a production manager named Hy Moskowitz checked finished stock before it went out the door. Plant manager Pat Dinitto ran the die cutting unit that turned rolls of cardboard into the familiar Colorform base, while a full assembly line packed pieces for shipment.

Newspaper ads from the era sold the toy on simplicity. One ad from 1953 opens with the line “No need to putter with paint,” then promises 350 separate plastic shapes packed into a five-page spiral bound book, plus one black and one white plastic surfaced board to stick them on. The whole kit ran from three to five dollars depending on size. The basic idea might change, but something remained the same. Reusable plastic shapes that clung to a smooth surface, even as the sets, boards, and packaging changed.

By 1956, Colorforms ads were promoting the toy as seen on Romper Room, a beloved show in our house. The connection included a Willie the Weatherman set that let children dress its cartoon figure for the day’s forecast. I believe Willies original gimmick was that he was made of felt. So this was an all new take on him. A Buffalo ad from that year also shows how quickly the Colorforms line was expanding, with Picture Stix, a Dress Design Kit, Colorform Jr., and other sets selling for between $1 and $1.98.

The first big licensed character to appear on a Colorforms box was Popeye, in 1957, and it opened the door to a licensing strategy the company leaned on for decades. Mickey Mouse followed, then Peanuts, Star Trek, Batman, the Beatles, and eventually properties as far apart as the Three Stooges and Steve Urkel. If a character was popular enough to sell lunchboxes, there was a decent chance it eventually showed up as a Colorforms set too.

In 1959, Colorforms hired graphic designer Paul Rand to create a new trademark and packaging. Rand had begun working with IBM a few years earlier, though many of the corporate logos that would make him famous were still ahead of him. His Colorforms mark used the same simple geometric shapes found in the toy, arranging them into a playful figure that remained closely associated with the brand for decades.

Colorforms occasionally tried to move beyond the flat plastic pieces that had made the company successful. The most ambitious attempt was the Outer Space Men, a group of bendable alien figures created by designer Mel Birnkrant. He conceived them after seeing Mattel’s Major Matt Mason toys and noticing that the astronaut line had no alien opponents. The figures were developed during 1968 and reached Toy Fair the following year, where Colorforms had to introduce a product unlike anything its sales staff normally handled. Birnkrant recalled that many people inside the company resented the extra work required to sell something that did not fit the familiar Colorforms category.

Colorforms made another attempt to expand its place in the toy store in 1974. Its new Color n’ Play sets combined coloring activities with cardboard figures that could be used after they were colored. Birnkrant and Colorforms founder Harry Kislevitz rejected the cheap crayons commonly packed with activity sets and insisted on using genuine Crayola crayons. Birnkrant later believed the product helped awaken Binney and Smith to the possibilities of Crayola branded activity kits. The crayon company introduced a line of its own the following year, although the direct connection rests largely on Birnkrant’s recollection.

Other experiments were less successful. Popeye Puppetforms, also released in 1974, became what Birnkrant described as the worst selling product in Colorforms history. The company normally ordered printed materials for at least 50,000 sets, but only about 4,000 Popeye sets were sold. Roughly ten years later, Birnkrant asked Kislevitz if he could keep one piece of original artwork from the company archive. He chose the Popeye cover. According to Birnkrant, Kislevitz looked at him and replied, “You bastard!” He had apparently wanted it for himself.

By the end of the 1970s, Colorforms needed still more room and moved production into a much bigger factory in Ramsey, New Jersey, bringing Harry Kislevitz’s two sons into the family business. New Jersey stayed the manufacturing home of Colorforms for decades, right up until the company changed hands in the late 1990s.

By 1981, Kenner had turned Strawberry Shortcake into a major toy line built around small scented dolls and their accessories. Colorforms designer Mel Birnkrant later recalled that Kenner would not allow the company to produce a Strawberry Shortcake activity set, even though its reusable plastic pieces did not compete directly with Kenner’s dolls. Colorforms responded by creating Sugar and Spice, a candy themed character line deliberately modeled on Strawberry Shortcake. Kenner objected when it saw the first version at Toy Fair, and Birnkrant redrew the characters overnight before presenting a revised design the following morning.

The Sugar and Spice became successful enough that other toy companies shut out of the Strawberry Shortcake license came to Colorforms wanting to license Sugar and Spice instead. The same standoff with Kenner also kept Colorforms from ever landing an official Star Wars license, a franchise that I think all of us would have loved to see get the Colorforms treatment.

Colorforms found another use for its large collection of character licenses in 1981, when it acquired the rights to make and distribute Shrinky Dinks kits. The company eventually produced more than 50 of them, using properties from television, movies, comics, and other toy lines. Colorforms had not invented Shrinky Dinks, but its licensed kits are still well-remembered by anyone how lived through the eighties.

By 1986, more than 300 million Colorforms sets had reportedly sold since the company’s founding. That was also the year Colorforms moved into home video, releasing playsets bundled with VHS tapes through Scholastic and Lorimar, with titles like Journey to the Magic Jungle and Voyage to Mermaid Island. A newspaper review from that year praised the combination of a physical play board with a story you could watch alongside it, priced at $14.95 per tape and playset.

The format kept shifting with the technology available. By 1994, a company called Gryphon released My First Colorforms Computer Fun Set, a piece of software for home computers running Windows 3.1 that let kids build Colorforms scenes on a screen instead of on cardboard, complete with sound effects and a microphone for recording their own voice into the mix.

Ownership of the company changed hands several times beginning in the late 1990s. Toy Biz bought Colorforms in 1997, followed by University Games the next year. It later passed to Out of the Blue Enterprises in 2014. The following year, the company invited fans to suggest names for the little figure from Paul Rand’s logo and vote on a group of finalists. The character later emerged as Charlie. After 9 Story Media Group acquired Out of the Blue in 2018, it worked with DHX Media to make Charlie the star of the Netflix series Charlie’s Colorforms City, taking Colorforms from a toy advertised on television to a television property in its own right.

Colorforms picked up its share of awards along the way too. The Toy Industry Association named it one of the top ten toys of the century in 2000, and Time magazine included it on a list of the hundred greatest toys of all time in 2011. Patricia Kislevitz’s original hand cut set from 1951 sits today in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a strange but fitting place for something invented to cover up a bathroom wall. PlayMonster now makes Colorforms under license from 9 Story, and marked the toy’s 70th anniversary in 2021 with a special edition set.

None of that history was on my mind when I was four or five years old playing with my first Colorforms set. What I remember is exactly what the Kislevitzes had discovered in a New Jersey bathroom decades earlier. A handful of simple shapes on a shiny surface could hold a kid’s attention for hours, then do it again the next day. Colorforms would pass through new owners and new formats, but the pleasure of arranging those pieces on a board hasn’t changed at all.

I want to start off by saying I don’t know much about soccer or as I think most of the rest of the world calls it football. But with the World Cup back in the United States I thought this would be a nice opportunity to talk about my time working security at the World Cup the first time it was played in America back in 1994. I was very young at the time, but it was great job to get. It might not have taught me much about how soccer is played, but I did finally get an idea of how rabid the fans are.

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On the show, I start by talking about my limited exposure to soccer growing up. I then move on to the 1994 tournament, how it was presented to an American audience, and some of the strange details surrounding it. This will be a little different than other episodes of the Retroist. Most of the episode is about how I got the security job at Giants Stadium, the different assignments I was given, the people I encountered, and what it was like to be close to such a large event without really understanding the sport being played.

The 1994 World Cup was far more successful than many people expected and helped establish professional soccer in the United States. I cannot claim that working there turned me into a fan, but it gave me a much better understanding of what the tournament meant to the people who traveled to see it. It was loud, chaotic, and unlike anything else I had worked before. Also it gave us a solid pinball machine and a great mascot.

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You can support the Retroist by joining my Patreon. Supporters will get member-only shows and audio extras associated with the show. Click the giant button below to check out the Patreon Page.

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If you have a moment, please stop by Apple Podcasts or wherever you might download the show and perhaps give the show a quick rating. It is very much appreciated.

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Production Notes

• This is the 367th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 18 of Season 18.

• I worked every match at Giants Stadium and still could not have told you which teams were expected to win.

• I had so many extra tickets that I could barely give away. That seems impossible now.

• Wish I had brought an autograph book or small camera with me.

• Speaking some German apparently helped me get hired, although I do not remember using it once. I also tried to speak some Norwegian. Europeans are much better at English.

• I gave away most of the World Cup memorabilia I collected because it meant more to people who actually followed soccer.

• Finding Andrés Cantor’s missing briefcase was probably my closest brush with World Cup fame or at least he was a person I knew about before the game. I probably walked by some amazing athletes. I just didn’t know who they were.

• My family lived near Giants Stadium and remembers almost nothing about the tournament beyond the fact that I worked there.

• Security in 1994 was mostly concerned with alcohol, bags, and people trying to get onto the field. It was a very different time.

• The World Cup paid me about twice what I was making at Suncoast, which certainly helped me appreciate it.

• The stamp controversy is such a New Jersey story. Always a bridesmaid.

• Bonus clippings will run a little late this episode, but will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

Before I worked at Suncoast, I worked at two mom and pop video stores in my hometown. That was how I first got paid to spend my time around movies. Those stores did rentals, with return bins, late fees, rewinding, and customers looking for whatever was still on the shelf on a Friday night. They were great places to work, but when a job opened up at Suncoast in my new local mall, I took it. It was still in the video business, which I had come to enjoy, but it payed more.

Suncoast felt different from those rental stores right away. Their business was built around ownership, not borrowing. People were not just looking for something to watch that night. These were videos people wanted to own, collect, and display. Work was a completely different game that involved more customer interaction and a greater ability to recommend movies and tv shows I loved.

Suncoast Motion Picture Company began in Roseville, Minnesota in 1986, though it was not called Suncoast yet. Musicland opened the first store under the name Paramount Pictures, using the studio name through a limited licensing arrangement with Bell and Howell Columbia Paramount Video. The store was still Musicland’s experiment, not a Paramount run chain, and the idea was simple enough. In 1988, Musicland dropped the Paramount Pictures name and rebranded the stores as Suncoast Motion Picture Company.

It was good timing. By the late eighties, the VCR had moved from expensive novelty to living room fixture. They were getting cheaper as were video tapes and people were getting used to the idea that a movie could be something you owned. Rental stores had already changed how people watched movies, but Suncoast leaned into the next step. I think a lot of people now think it was there to replace the local video store. While the audience overlapped, they we not always the same. Owning movies had been around for years, but it was not yet casual for everyone. Suncoast was built for the moment when buying a movie started to feel normal

The choice compared to a local video store could be overwhelming. Even early stores back in the 1980s carried between 6,500 and 7,000 titles. Early shelves were filled with movies aimed squarely at film collectors. But this wasn’t all that stores had. There were special interest videos, shirts, stuffed animals, and other movie collectibles. It was a burgeoning business and the parent company, Musicland was only going to push harder into the business in the 1990s.

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A Corporate Report Minnesota piece said Musicland might open as many video stores as music stores that year, and quoted CEO Jack Eugster saying sales and profitability had exceeded company plans. The same abstract said Musicland expected overall 1990 revenue to be more than 20 percent above the previous year’s 695 million dollars.

That growth showed up in the stores. A 1994 Daily Herald item about a new Suncoast at University Mall in Orem, Utah described a location with more than 8,500 VHS titles, including new releases and classics. It said special interest videos, such as instructional, travel, and sports tapes, made up 20 percent of the selection. The same article mentioned laserdisc, soundtracks, and show tunes on compact disc and cassette.

By the mid nineties, Suncoast was more than a place to buy movies. The tapes and discs were the center of the store, but the merchandise around them was part of the business. That made it broader than a simple video shop, and probably more useful as a mall store.

Having selection was part of the appeal and a core of the business. Suncoast wanted to catch the person who came in for a title, then keep them looking at everything else connected to it. That was a real difference from the rental stores I had worked in before. Those stores were built around what someone wanted to watch that night. Suncoast was more about the deeper feeling of movie fandom and desire to own a film.

I guess this is a good spot to mention price. Suncoast was not cheap. Even with a decent employee discount. But that selection gave the store a reason to exist even when another retailer had a lower price on the biggest release of the week. You went to Suncoast because there was a chance it had the thing you were not finding anywhere else in the mall.

There were ways to get better prices at the store. Customers could reserve movies before release date and be guaranteed the store’s lowest price for that film. We were always pushing pre-orders and that got pretty ordinary as the nineties wore on, but Suncoast really stressed it and incentivized it early. It was great for who customers wanted to plan around a title before it arrived.

Working the floor, you saw that kind of customer all the time. Some people came in to browse and left with nothing. Others knew exactly what they wanted before they walked through the entrance. Those recurring customer were our bread and butter between big releases and holiday seasons. They were usually also the most fun because they loved this stuff too.

Customers might not know this, but their were interesting rules around pricing. In 1996, Billboard Magazine looked at minimum advertised pricing, usually called MAP. These policies were set by the studios and limited how low a retailer could advertise a movie without risking the loss of cooperative advertising money. Specialty chains liked MAP on major new releases because it kept big box stores from advertising the same tape at a price smaller video retailers could not match.

Suncoast’s president Gary Ross wanted those protections to go further. At the time, Suncoast had 414 stores, and Ross argued that MAP helped specialty stores stay in business. He also wanted it applied to more older repriced titles, since a mass retailer could take a tape that had dropped from 19.99 to 9.99 and use it as a giveaway. Other retailers were less convinced. They supported MAP on big releases, but thought stores needed more freedom on older titles where the profit margin was already thin.

That was one of the tensions customers felt without always knowing the reason. Suncoast had selection, but Best Buy, Circuit City, and other large retailers could be cheaper on major releases. If you wanted the big title of the week, a big box store might win on price. If you wanted anime, a cult title, an older catalog release, a box set, or something that was not sitting in a discount bin, Suncoast still had a reason to exist.

The anime side of the store became one of the clearest examples of that. When people share memories of the store nowadays, anime comes up again and again. Things like Dragon Ball Z tapes, imports, and higher priced releases with only a few episodes loom large. These online comments are not hard business data, but they match the way many people remember the store. I personally remember how excited people were for the anime section. Suncoast was expensive, but for some categories it was also where people found things they could not get nearby.

If you have never seen a Suncoast storefront they were easy to recognize. They had a black mirror-like facade and a red neon sign. Later photos from remaining or recently remaining locations show how much that sign still carries the memory of the chain, even when the merchandise mix inside has changed.

The decline came through the same forces that hit a lot of entertainment retail. In December 2000, Best Buy agreed to acquire Musicland for 685 million dollars, gaining more than 1,300 stores under names including Sam Goody, Suncoast, Media Play, and On Cue. In January 2003, Best Buy closed about 110 Musicland division stores, including 90 Sam Goody stores and about 20 Suncoast stores, citing declining prerecorded music sales and slower mall traffic.

A few months later, Best Buy was already out. In June 2003, Sun Capital acquired all of Musicland’s liabilities, including lease obligations, and paid no cash consideration for the stock. That is one of those details that reads like an ending before the ending. Best Buy had paid hundreds of millions for Musicland, then moved it out of the company by having someone else take on the obligations.

Musicland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2006. Oak Point Partners, which later acquired remnant assets from the bankruptcy estate, says Musicland and related entities filed in the Southern District of New York on January 12, 2006. In March 2006, Trans World Entertainment completed the acquisition of substantially all of Musicland’s assets for 104.2 million dollars in cash and 18.1 million dollars in assumed liabilities. Its own press release named Sam Goody, Suncoast Motion Picture Company, On Cue, and MediaPlay.com as Musicland operations.

Suncoast did not disappear all at once. That is part of why its history can be hard to put together. Some stores closed under Best Buy, more closed during the bankruptcy period, and more were folded into or made to resemble FYE stores after Trans World took over. By the time people started taking pictures of surviving Suncoast locations as retail artifacts, the stores were already part old chain, part FYE, and part reminder of how long a mall sign can outlive the retail world that created it.

A Staten Island Advance piece from 2006 about record stores sums up the changes happening well and points to the future. It begins by noting that Tower Records was bankrupt and going out of business, then says that earlier that year Musicland, parent company of Sam Goody, had filed for Chapter 11 and closed Sam Goody and Suncoast stores. The piece frames the problem as customers moving to compact discs first, then iPods and downloads, with browsing replaced by convenience.

Video retail was not identical to record retail, but it followed a similar path. DVDs gave stores like Suncoast a strong final act by making movie collecting more mainstream. They also made the weakness of the mall store harder to ignore. Once customers knew what they wanted, online stores could offer more titles without asking anyone to drive to the mall. Downloads and streaming changed the business again. A store built around browsing physical movies had to survive in a world where more of that browsing was moving to a screen.

The Retrologist by Rolando Pujol

Gushing with nostalgia: Suncoast Motion Picture Company lives on in Texas oil town

About 90 minutes northeast of Houston, in the historic oil-boom town of Beaumont, lies the equivalent – for me anyway – of striking oil…

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3 years ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · Rolando Pujol

A few “Suncoasts” still survive, depending on how you count them. FYE’s current used media buyback page lists Suncoast Jacksonville Mall in North Carolina, while its Ohio list includes FYE Mall at Fairfield Commons in Beavercreek. The Beaumont, Texas store at Parkdale Mall was still being written about as one of the remaining full Suncoast stores in late 2023 and in later retail pieces, but current counts have shifted as locations close one at a time.

What I remember most about Suncoast is not its corporate timeline. It is the feeling of having a job that kept me close to movies after my time in rental stores, but in a different way. At Suncoast, I was not checking tapes in and out. I was helping stock a store built for people who wanted to own movies, talk about them, find them, and sometimes just stand there looking at what was new.

My Suncoast is long gone now. I don’t know what happened to the shelves, the registers, or the display pieces after the store closed. Most mall stores vanish that way. The fixtures are hauled off, the sign comes down, and the space becomes something else.

What stayed with me was the work itself. I had already been around movies in rental stores, but Suncoast was different. For a while, it was THE place built for people who wanted to own movies, talk about them, and wander the shelves longer than they probably planned. For me, that made it a good job, and one I still think about when I see the Suncoast name hanging on somewhere.

Since today is the 4th of July and in most places the beaches are still open, I thought I would revisit, Jaws, with a bonus track. After trying to convince people that Mayor Vaughn wasn’t as bad as people make him out to be, I thought I would talk about someone else in the movie whose actions can also be looked at as villainous.

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On the June 2026 Monthly Update I talk about what’s been going on with the site and podcast, but also some other things going on in my life and some random thoughts I have. They include:

• Atmosfear

• McFeast

• Mr. Mouth

• Action Park

• Jaws and Mayor Vaughn

• Amity the TV Series?

• XTeink (Tiny E-ink Tablet)

• Progress City Primer

• The Burger King

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Lode Runner was a big game in the 1980s, but it still feels like it gets left out of the larger conversation in retro gaming. People talk about Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and plenty of other early classics, but Lode Runner belongs in that group too. It was simple to understand, hard to master, and built around rules that made sense the more y…

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My cousins had two games that never stayed on the shelf for long. One was Hungry Hungry Hippos, which everyone has heard of. The other was Mr. Mouth, which people remember less, if they remember it at all. We would rotate between them on the floor of their basement, and the noise level was about the same no matter which one we picked. We all played to win. The version of Mr. Mouth we played was the yellow head version, not the frog that came later. I didn’t think about it then, but both games had Japanese routes into the American toy market and reached kids in the United States within two years of each other. One became a household name. The other did okay. Eventually changing its face and becoming a part of an interesting court case involving Pac-Man.

Mr. Mouth was developed by Tomy Kogyo Co., Ltd. in Japan. The inventor named on the US patent is Takao Matsumoto. A Japanese priority date of July 4, 1975 appears in the patent record, and Tomy filed for US protection on June 23, 1976. The patent number is US4109914A, titled “Game structure employing a revolving target,” and it was granted on August 29, 1978. The mechanism it describes is the game in miniature, with a rotating receptacle, an opening and closing lid, and spring operated launchers that players use to send disks toward the moving target. Inside the same patent, a non patent citation reads “Mr. Mouth, TV, Tomy 1976 Catalog, p. 15,” which ties the patent directly to the product Tomy was already selling that year.

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Tomy was not a small operation by 1976. The company had been founded in Tokyo in 1924 by Eiichiro Tomiyama. Initially making tin toys, it had been exporting to the United States since the early 1950s when a B-29 Bomber friction toy became one of their first major international sellers. By the mid-1970s, Tomy was expanding into many overseas markets, exporting toys through department stores like Sears and under its own name through a new American distribution company. That same decade, the company developed a new specialty in hand-held skill-based toys. At first they were mechanical but they would increasingly turn towards electronics like so many other companies. Mr. Mouth fit right into that period. It was a battery powered mechanical game from a company that was becoming known for small toys with a lot of action built into them.

The game itself is easy to understand. It ran on a single C battery. A yellow head sat at the center of an X shaped plastic base and rotated, opening and closing its mouth as it turned. Four players, one at each arm of the X, used spring loaded hands to flip plastic chips toward the opening. The chips were color coded, ten per player in red, blue, green, and yellow. The first player to land all ten chips in the mouth won. It was basically tiddlywinks with a moving target, but that moving target is what made the game work. You were not just flipping a chip. You were waiting for the mouth to come around, open up, and give you the shot.

During the Christmas season of 1976, Mr. Mouth was already showing up in stores nationwide. A Ventura County Star advertisement from November 25 placed it among seven top toys, priced at $10.97, alongside Barbie, a deluxe pinball set, and a CB radio combo. A letter to Santa published in the Vacaville Reporter on December 5, 1976 listed Mr. Mouth alongside Stretch Armstrong, Connect Four, Jaws, and Monopoly and this was not an isolated letter. Up in Canada, the Waterloo Region Record in Kitchener, Ontario that same month listed Mr. Mouth among top sellers at a local department store, in an article noting that parents were steering away from gimmicks toward quality.

By the following Christmas it had not faded. A Garden City Telegram story from December 21, 1977, headlined “All I Want for Christmas Is Mr. Mouth,” described it as the most asked for game among several players at a local store. The piece ran on the front page. So popular, and still selling for about ten dollars. It was a solid game and had a steady presence on shelves. A few years later though, the Mr. Mouth story would take an interesting turn.

In 1982, Mr. Mouth was part of a copyright fight that had almost nothing to do with tabletop toys. The case was Midway Mfg. Co. v. Bandai-America, Inc., decided by the US District Court for the District of New Jersey on July 22, 1982. Midway was suing Bandai over handheld games it alleged infringed on its Pac-Man and Galaxian copyrights. Bandai, looking for prior art that might undercut Pac-Man’s originality, pointed to three things it claimed were precursors to the Pac-Man character, a Sega arcade game called Head-On, a Japanese cartoon ghost called Kyutaro, and Tomy’s mechanical Mr. Mouth. The court rejected the first two handily. Mr. Mouth received more careful treatment.

The court described Mr. Mouth as a yellow plastic mouth that opened and closed while the toy rotated and players flipped pieces into it. Then it added the strange part, saying the game was “apparently called Pac Man in the Japanese tongue.” That does not prove the Japanese box said Pac Man, but it does show that the name was part of the legal record. The court did not say Pac Man copied Mr. Mouth. It only said the resemblance was close enough that the question could continue in the case. The ruling also noted that Tomy had given Midway any rights it might have claimed to the Pac Man name and to what the court called “Tomy’s mechanical game of the same name.”

That language is the closest primary evidence I have found that the original Japanese version of Mr. Mouth may have had a connection to the Pac Man name before Pac Man existed as a video game. It is not the same as finding the original Japanese box or catalog listing, but it is a court record tying Tomy, Mr. Mouth, and the Pac Man name together.

Pac-Man, originally titled Puck Man in Japan, was released in 1980 by Namco. The character was a simple yellow figure with a V-shaped aperture that opened and closed like a mouth, and the name derived from the Japanese onomatopoeia “paku-paku,” describing the sound of chomping. The patent for Mr. Mouth’s mechanism had been filed in Japan in July 1975, five years before Pac-Man appeared in any arcade. Whether the designers at Namco knew the Tomy game, or whether two separate designers arrived at similar yellow chomping shapes from different directions, is not something the court resolved. What the court found was that the question was legitimate enough to put before a jury. The case was ultimately settled before a verdict, so no jury ever answered it.

The version I knew was the yellow head, but that is not the version many people remember now. By 1987, the game had a new publisher and a new face. Milton Bradley released its own version that year, and Tomy released a companion edition simultaneously. The yellow chomping head was gone. In its place was a green frog. The chips became plastic flies. The spring loaded hands remained, the X shaped base remained, and the rotating motorized center remained, but the thing you were feeding had changed entirely. The mechanism was still what Matsumoto had patented in 1976, but the theme had been rebuilt around it.

I guess the redesign made sense. A frog eating flies is easier to understand than a yellow head eating plastic chips. Children can accept both, but the former’s theme is understood before the box is even opened. Why the change? By the time Milton Bradley took on the game, the toy market around it had been saturated. A mechanical skill game still had plenty to offer, but the frog gave Mr. Mouth a refresh and I think they hoped it would make it stand out more to a new generation.

The frog version lasted a while. A 1999 Milton Bradley reissue appeared, keeping the same basic design. Tomy eventually reclaimed the game and currently sells it in the frog format under its games line. The product description on their site reads “catapulting insects has never been so much fun,” a sentence that would not have made any sense in 1976, when the thing being catapulted was a small plastic disc and the thing eating it was an abstract yellow face. The current version still runs on the same basic principle Takao Matsumoto filed for protection in 1975.

BoardGameGeek lists ten versions of Mr. Mouth across its publishing history, under names that include Greedy Green Frog, Rod Hull’s Emu Game, and Shrek Bug Bounce, the last of which was a licensed tie-in to the DreamWorks animated film. Each version put a new face on the same basic game. The emu version was sold in the United Kingdom. The Shrek version replaced the frog with an ogre. Underneath all these was still a rotating target, a set of spring loaded launchers, and the judgment call of when to flip.

Mr. Mouth never became a cultural landmark the way Hungry Hungry Hippos did. It has had a longer life than most toys from 1976 manage and it's been an interesting one. It changed when the market required it, found a clearer form as a frog, and is still available. The patent for the mechanism expired in 1996 after the standard twenty year term. So the game has already outlasted the legal protection for its own invention.

The frog version is not the one I knew at my cousin’s house. To me, Mr. Mouth was still the yellow head in the middle of the floor, turning in circles while we tried to flip chips into its mouth. I did not know about the patent, the Japanese name question, the Pac Man court record, or the frog version that would replace it later when I played it. I just knew it was fun, odd, and harder than it looked, which was enough to keep us playing.

I begin this podcast episode by talking about my own trips to Action Park. I was so excited to go as a kid when I visited and got to go because it was close to where my uncle lived in Northern New Jersey. My mother was not a big fan of amusement parks unless they were connected to Disney, and she had started reading enough about Action Park to be worried. My uncle did not have the same concerns, so he took me there and I had a great time. I rode what I could, brought home brochures, talked about it all summer, and assumed I would keep going back. That didn’t happen.

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Then I talk about how Action Park came to be. The story starts with Gene Mulvihill, Great Gorge, Vernon Valley, and the problem of what a ski resort is supposed to do when the weather gets warm. The Alpine Slide came first, and from there the place kept growing into something much larger. Action Park was built around participation, which meant you were not simply strapped into a ride and moved along. You had some control, or at least the feeling of control, and that was a big part of what made the park so exciting.

Of course, that same idea also made the place dangerous. In the episode, I get into the rides people still talk about, including the Alpine Slide and the Cannonball Loop. I also spend time on the wave pool, Motor World, and some of the other attractions that helped make Action Park feel less like a normal amusement park and more like its own strange world. Looking back now, it is much easier to see how quickly excitement could turn into something else.

The darker part of the Action Park story is impossible to avoid. I talk about the deaths and injuries connected to the park, along with the lawsuits and insurance problems that followed it for years. Some of what happened there is shocking even if you already know the general reputation. The park has become famous as a place that probably should not have been allowed to operate the way it did, and there is plenty of truth in that version of the story.

But I did not want this episode to be only about the worst things that happened there. For a lot of kids from New Jersey and the surrounding area, Action Park was a summer trip people talked about afterward. It was a place that felt enormous, especially if you were young enough to believe you could eventually get to everything. The danger is part of the story, but so is the memory of wanting to go back.

That is what makes Action Park such a strange subject for me. The stories about the park are real, and some are worse than I understood when I was young. At the same time, my own connection to the place is still tied to being a kid who thought he had found the most exciting park in New Jersey. My last trip there had already happened before I knew it, which may be part of why the place stayed so large in my mind. Action Park does not fit neatly into one version of itself, and that is why it still feels worth talking about.

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Production Notes

• This is the 366th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 17 of Season 18.

• All my trips to Action Park came through my uncle who lived nearby. My mother had read enough to be worried, but I only knew it as this huge park in New Jersey that sounded more exciting than anything I was used to.

• Action Park was one of those places that was too big to finish in a day. That was part of the appeal. You went home thinking about what you had done, but also about everything you still wanted to try next time.

• I brought home brochures from Action Park because I wanted my friends to understand what I had been talking about all summer. That feels very much like being a kid before the internet, when a pamphlet from a place was proof that your story was real.

• My mother never sat me down and explained why she did not want me going back to Action Park. She had seen the headlines, and I think she knew more than she wanted to tell me. At the time, I just thought a return trip had been postponed.

• Gene Mulvihill is such a strange central figure for this story because Action Park really does feel like an extension of his personality. It was ambitious, stubborn, reckless, and somehow persuasive enough to keep going long after most places would have been stopped.

• I like that the whole thing started as a practical ski resort problem. You have lifts, hills, trails, and a lot of months with no snow. The answer most people would have found was probably modest. Action Park was not modest.

• The Alpine Slide is the perfect beginning for Action Park because it explains the whole idea in one ride. You were going downhill on a little cart with a brake, and the difference between fun and trouble depended partly on you.

• Action Park sold the feeling of control or that was the marketing. That was the hook. The park made you feel like you were not just a passenger, even when the amount of control you actually had was questionable.

• There is a version of Action Park that sounds almost impossible now, because so many of the rides depended on trust. Trust the equipment, trust the teenager running the ride, trust the person behind you not to crash into you, and trust yourself to know when you had gone far enough.

• The Cannonball Loop is the attraction that almost feels like a joke someone made after hearing about Action Park. Then you find out it was real, people tested it, and for years it sat there like a monument to the park’s entire way of thinking.

• The wave pool may be the scariest thing in the episode because it does not sound ridiculous at first. A wave pool feels normal until you understand how crowded it could get, how strong the waves were, and how often lifeguards were pulling people out. Luckily I survived it.

• Motor World is the part of Action Park that I wish I had experienced more fully. As a kid, the idea of driving tanks, cars, and other little vehicles around a separate section of the park sounded almost too good to be true.

• One of the strangest parts of the Action Park story is that the bad headlines did not immediately stop people from going. The park kept drawing huge crowds, which says a lot about the time, the area, and how differently people processed risk.

• The insurance story changes the way I look at Action Park. Ride accidents are terrible enough, but the idea of creating a fake safety net around the park makes the whole thing feel much darker.

• I do not think Action Park can be explained only through the documentaries and horror stories. Those stories are true, but they leave out the ordinary summer memory of going there and spending the ride home thinking about when you could return.

• For people from New Jersey and the surrounding area, Action Park became a shared reference. Even if you only went once, you understood why people kept talking about it. The place had a reputation even before it became a legend.

• The closing of Action Park feels strange because as a kid I assumed it was permanent. Places like that seemed too large to go away. Then one day you realize the version you knew, or thought you would get back to, is already gone.

• What makes Action Park interesting to me is that both versions of the story are true. It was dangerous in ways that should not be brushed aside, but it was also a place that gave a lot of kids memories they still talk about decades later.

• Bonus clippings can be found over on Patreon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

My mom loved tell me about food that didn’t exist anymore. I was a fast food kid from a fast food family, so I always wanted the details. What was it. Where did she have it. Why did it go away. The McFeast came up more than once in these talks, and for a long time it was mysterious since my mom was light on the details. All I know is that it was a sandwich from before I was born that some people remembered fondly, but didn’t catch on.

It turns out the McFeast had a longer and stranger life than I expected. The sandwich started as a quiet experiment in Montana, became a genuine weapon in the burger wars of the late 1970s, and lingered in pockets of Texas into the 1980s before more or less vanishing from the United States. Except it never actually disappeared. The McFeast moved to the other side of the world, where it has been showing up and getting pulled off menus again for almost forty years.

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In November of 1975, the Billings Gazette ran a short piece under the headline “McDonalds test sandwich here.” Billings, Montana was one of the spots chosen to try out a new “giant sized McFeast,” a deluxe hamburger with mayonnaise and tomatoes packed into a yellow styrofoam box. According to Milo Richards, a company supervisor overseeing the local franchises, the sandwich was sold nowhere else in the world but the three Billings locations. The article noted that twenty two owner operators from McDonald’s restaurants in New York had flown out on a private company jet just to see how the McFeast was doing. One local owner put it bluntly. “They want it, but they aren’t going to get it,” he said, explaining that new products got tested for years before they made it onto national menus.

That same article mentioned something else being tested in the Midwest at the time, a new item called McDonald’s chicken. It would be years before that became Chicken McNuggets, but it is a reminder that McDonald’s was running a lot of these little experiments at once, and most people only ever heard about the ones that worked.

The McFeast kept moving through test markets over the next year. By the spring of 1976, it had reached Irving, Texas. An ad in the Irving Daily News from April of that year promised that your first McFeast will be delicious, paired with a free quart of sugar free 7 Up. The copy described it as everything you want in a hamburger sandwich, with a big juicy man sized beef patty, crisp lettuce, fresh tomatoes, pickles, onions, mustard, and creamy mayonnaise, all on a fresh roll like you get in a bakery. The offer only ran for two days at two specific Irving locations.

People who worked at McDonald’s around this time remember it well. Former employees from Minneapolis, San Diego, and the Bakersfield area have described a quarter pound patty served on a kaiser roll, loaded with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, and pickles, and one person who tried it as a kid in the late 1970s nicknamed it the McMess because of how much fell out of the sandwich with every bite. Reflecting on it years later, that same person said it seemed like McDonald’s was testing out their version of the Whopper to compete with Burger King. A Minneapolis worker from the 1976 to 1977 school year remembered it the same way, calling it “essentially a Whopper, but the Kaiser roll made it better.”

That comparison was not just a customer’s guess. By January of 1978, McDonald’s locations in Eau Claire, Wisconsin were running newspaper ads with a guy in a hard hat holding the sandwich like a trophy, under the line you’re gonna love our new McFeast a lot. The tagline that ran through this whole era was simple. McFeast. It’s a lot to love. By the fall of that year, the comparison to Burger King’s flagship sandwich became official. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis ran a Wall Street Journal piece in April of 1978 with the headline Burger King declares war to head off Big Mac attack. Buried in that story was the detail that McDonald’s counterattack was already being mapped out. To complement its Big Mac, the company was testing in more than 400 stores a Whopperlike sandwich called the McFeast, loaded with lettuce and tomato slices and nicknamed the Whopper Stopper inside the company.

The nickname traveled. A Toronto Star feature from July of 1978 profiled George Cohon, the head of McDonald’s restaurants in Canada, and used the same phrase. The article described a lettuce and tomato concoction being tried in test markets, called the McFeast, and noted that at what the piece called Hamburger Central, it was known as the Whopper Stopper. Cohon would not say much about it directly, though he did admit the company was experimenting with onion rings around the same time, as if the McFeast was just one of several things being thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

McDonald’s would return to some of this same territory in the 1990s with the Arch Deluxe, another quarter pound burger with lettuce, tomato, a different bun, and its own sauce. But the Arch Deluxe was trying to be the grown up McDonald’s burger. The McFeast seems more straightforward, like McDonald’s taking a swing at the Whopper with the pieces it already knew how to use

Back in the United States, the McFeast was still rolling out city by city. A reader question in the Abilene Reporter News from September of 1978 explained why a new arrival in town had not been able to find a McFeast at the local McDonald’s. The paper’s answer was that the sandwich was still in the experimental stages, approved for only three test markets, and that the reader happened to have moved from one of them. To get a McFeast at that point, the answer said, you had to go to the Dallas Fort Worth area. The same answer described the McFeast as a little bigger than a Quarter Pounder, with lettuce, tomatoes, mustard, mayonnaise, and onions.

By 1980, the McFeast was still hanging on in parts of Texas, even as it was fading elsewhere. The Orange Leader ran a full page ad in October of that year showing an enormous illustrated McFeast and offering a month of weekly coupon deals at McDonald’s locations across the Golden Triangle area near the Louisiana border. Buy one McFeast and get another free, or get a large fry or a Dr Pepper thrown in, depending on the week. The ad called it nothing like the goodness of a McFeast, with tomato, lettuce, and one hundred percent pure beef.

And yet, somewhere in this same stretch of years, McDonald’s corporate had quietly decided the experiment had not worked. The clearest evidence comes from October of 1983, in the Rockford Register Star. The story was actually about a different failed product, a breakfast product called the McCrescent (coming soon) that was being pulled from test markets around Rockford, Illinois. In the course of explaining that decision, the local operations manager for McDonald’s, Eric Miller, ran down a short list of other items the company had tried and dropped in that area, including a steak sandwich and, before that, the McFeast, which he described as a quarter pounder on a sesame seed bun with lettuce and tomatoes. Miller also pointed out that this kind of pullback was not unusual, since McDonald’s tested plenty of products regionally before deciding whether they were worth keeping. In the same breath, he mentioned that Chicken McNuggets, the descendant of that mysterious McDonald’s chicken from the 1975 Billings article, had become one of the company’s most successful products.

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A year before that, in May of 1982, an Atlanta Constitution piece about the launch of the McRib made the McFeast’s fate even more explicit, if a little unkind. The story quoted a local McDonald’s franchise group president expressing confidence that the McRib would sell well, unlike what the article called the doomed McFeast of the late 1970s. By the time high schoolers in Archdale, North Carolina ran a burger preference survey for their school paper in January of 1985, the McFeast was still familiar enough as a name to include as one of the options, alongside the Whopper, Wendy’s Triple, and Burger King’s Big Deluxe, even though it was gone from menus by then. That is often how these things go. The name outlives the product by a few years in the public memory before it fades for good.

So that is roughly the McFeast’s North American story. It started as a quiet test in Montana in 1975, then crawled through Texas, Minnesota, California, Wisconsin, and Canada over the next several years. For a while it had a starring role in the burger wars of the late 1970s as McDonald’s answer to the Whopper. Then it died a fairly ordinary corporate death by the early 1980s, confirmed almost as an afterthought in a newspaper story about a completely different sandwich.

But the McFeast was not done. It just moved.

By the early 1980s, the McFeast had landed in Australia, where it would go on to have a much longer and more complicated career than it ever had in the United States. A Sydney Morning Herald restaurant column from November of 1982 described ordering a McFeast at a McDonald’s near Central Station in Sydney. The reviewer called it the nearest thing to a traditional Australian hamburger, since it contained tomato, though they found it bland and not hot enough. For the record, it contained a slice of tomato, two pickles, tomato sauce, lettuce, a meat patty, and cheese, all stacked between two pieces of a toasted sesame seed bun.

From there, the Australian version took on a life of its own, eventually becoming known as the McFeast Deluxe, with a sauce blend built around mustard, ketchup, and the chain’s McChicken sauce. According to a 2024 retrospective from the food site Mashed, this version stuck around through the 1980s and 1990s before being discontinued. It returned in a slightly revised form in 2009, vanished again, came back in 2011 for another limited run, and was pulled in 2021. As of May 2023, the McFeast was on the menu once more, although still only for a limited time. That 2023 return was covered by delicious.com.au, which framed it as the resurrection of a cult favorite. The writer described the McFeast as having been quietly removed from the menu in 2021 without warning, leaving what she called a hamburger shaped hole, and noted that McDonald’s marked the comeback with a lunch deal pairing the McFeast with small fries and a small soft drink for $5.95, available daily between half past eleven in the morning and half past two in the afternoon.

Australia also flirted with a homegrown variation called the McOz, built around the distinctly Australian addition of beetroot, alongside lettuce, tomato, onion, cheddar, ketchup, and mustard. According to the food history site Australian Food Timeline, the McOz was discontinued in 2008, briefly reintroduced in 2011, and then revived again in 2018 as part of a five dollar lunch deal, but it never became a permanent fixture and was eventually replaced on the regular menu by the McFeast.

The McFeast name became enough of a fixture in Australian pop culture that a television personality borrowed it. The comedian Libbi Gorr created a character called Elle McFeast for the ABC series Live and Sweaty in the early 1990s, later hosting her own talk show under the same name. It is a strange kind of immortality for a hamburger, getting turned into a parody of a brash Australian celebrity persona, but it suggests the McFeast had genuinely worked its way into the culture there in a way it never managed in the United States.

The McFeast also crossed into South Africa, though in a different form (so more in name). The South African version, as described by Mashed, uses two beef patties instead of one, includes onions but not pickles, and is topped with McChicken sauce alongside something called braai sauce, a tomato based condiment flavored with brown sugar, mustard, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, and peach chutney. Braai is the Afrikaans word for barbecue, and the sauce is apparently common enough in South Africa that the McDonald’s menu there does not bother explaining what it is.

Versions of this same sandwich, sometimes built on slightly different recipes, have also turned up under other names entirely. In Sweden, a McFeast has reportedly been on the menu since the middle of the 1980s, built around a quarter pound patty, lettuce, a modified mayonnaise, onion, and tomato, without ketchup. Much of continental Europe got a similar burger under the name Big Tasty. In Canada it became the Big Xtra, or the McXtra in Quebec. Mexico and Latin America got something called the McNifica. New Zealand had its own version for a while called the Mega Feast. It is the same basic idea, a bigger beef patty dressed up with lettuce, tomato, and a distinctive sauce, repackaged under a different name for each market, the way a touring band might play the same set under a different name in every country.

Which brings us back to my mom, and to the question of why any of this matters. The McFeast was never the Big Mac. It never got its own jingle that stuck around for decades, and most Americans under fifty have probably never heard of it. But for a few years in the late 1970s, it was McDonald’s best answer to a real competitive threat, tested carefully, advertised aggressively, and then quietly shelved when it did not catch on the way the company hoped. That alone would make it a forgotten footnote, the kind of thing that shows up in old newspaper ads, vintage commercials, and nowhere else.

Instead, the McFeast kept going, just somewhere else. It became a beloved, repeatedly resurrected fixture in Australia, the subject of online petitions and nostalgic articles every time it disappeared again. It became a quietly persistent menu item across parts of Europe, Africa, and Latin America under names most Americans would not recognize. The sandwich my mom remembered from somewhere in the 1970s never really went away. It just went international.

Below is a cleaned up transcription of this Jaws Bonus Track for those who prefer to read. Make sure to check out the Retroist Jaws Podcast. (I did a whole series).

Every summer I watch Jaws again, and every summer something different seems to move forward in the movie. Sometimes it is the pace of it or the way Amity feels like a real place before the s…

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My grandmother loved Raisin Bran. That was the cereal she preferred, and if you were in her kitchen, that was the cereal she was going to offer you. But I knew there was a box of Product 19 somewhere in that kitchen, because I had seen it. I thought it tasted better than Raisin Bran and that meant breakfast usually turned into a small negotiation. How long could I hold out before she gave up on pushing the Raisin Bran and reached for the other box. Most mornings when I was with her, I won.

Why would I fight for it? Product 19 was not a fun cereal, exactly. But I liked the taste and to me it was a lot better than what I was being offered. Yes, the box looked serious, and the name made it sound more like something from a lab than something you ate for breakfast. But that may have been part of the appeal.

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Kellogg’s began rolling out Product 19 in the spring of 1966, starting along the Pacific Coast. A small press item in the Tacoma News Tribune that April described it as “crisp, bubbly flakes blended from 4 nutritious grains” and said the unusual name was “selected by Kellogg’s in keeping with the uniqueness of its newest ready-to-eat cereal.”

That was Kellogg’s public explanation, or at least the one that made it into newspapers, and it does not really explain much. The more familiar story is that Product 19 was the nineteenth product Kellogg’s had in development around that time. MrBreakfast gives that version, saying it was the nineteenth product Kellogg’s began developing in 1966. That date can’t be right since it was being sold early that year. Another version says it was the nineteenth formulation of the cereal itself before Kellogg’s landed on the one it wanted to sell.

I have not found Kellogg’s confirming any of those versions directly. What can be confirmed is that the company was already using the Product 19 name in commerce by March 15, 1966, and filed the trademark that May. So the name almost certainly came out of Kellogg’s development process, but the exact meaning remains a little fuzzy. For a cereal called Product 19, that seems about right. It sounded official, but somehow explained almost nothing.

What is not in dispute is why Kellogg’s built it. General Mills had launched Total in 1961, billing it as the first cereal to deliver 100% of the minimum daily vitamin requirements in a single serving. Their most famous advertising showed towers of competing cereal bowls stacked comically high, making the point that you would need an absurd number of the other guy’s product to match a single bowl of theirs.

Kellogg’s had Special K, but that was not quite the right answer to what Total was selling. So they started developing something that could go head to head with it. Product 19 was that something. Flakes made from corn, oats, wheat, and rice, fortified to deliver 100 percent of the officially established daily adult requirement for vitamins and iron in a single one ounce serving. The original slogan made the pitch very clear. “Instant Nutrition. New cereal food created especially for working mothers, otherwise busy mothers and everybody in a hurry.”

The cereal itself followed that same idea. It was not built around a cartoon animal or a prize in the box, and it was not trying very hard to make breakfast feel like a treat. Product 19 was selling usefulness. The early boxes and ads leaned into that, with charts, nutrition claims, and blocks of copy that made the whole thing feel almost medicinal. Red and white, plain, and very sure of itself. This was “the Common Sense Cereal.”

By early January 1967 you could find it at Safeway for 29 cents a box, bundled in a grocery circular alongside Lucerne milk and cottage cheese. No fanfare. Just there on the page the way sensible things are.

Then the summer of 1970 happened.

In July of that year, a consumer advocate named Robert Choate testified before the Senate Consumer Subcommittee and presented a nutritional ranking of 60 major breakfast cereals. Two thirds of the cereals he evaluated ranked below 100 on a scale that went to 700. Popular brands across the board landed in that lower tier. He told the committee that many of them “fatten but do little to prevent malnutrition.” Ranked best were General Mills’ Total and Kellogg’s Product 19.

Stores could not keep it on the shelf. In Portland, one grocery buyer told the local newspaper that Product 19 sales had jumped 50% on both 8 and 12-ounce sizes the week the story broke. He was moving 130 cases a week and could have sold more. Kellogg’s, he said, was struggling to keep up with production. He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that Product 19 “wasn’t a big seller before.” In Rochester, the Times-Union reported similar scenes. Entire store stocks gone in three hours.

It was a strange and very American moment. A cereal that had spent three or four years being overlooked became briefly famous because someone in Washington confirmed what it had been saying on the box all along. One store’s nutrition expert, quoted in the Portland coverage, offered a useful note of skepticism amid the excitement. The actual nutritional value of cereal, he said, “consists of what is put into it by the diner, such as cream, or bananas, or strawberries.” He was not wrong. But the rush was already on.

The advertising Kellogg’s ran through those years leaned on credibility rather than personality. The first commercials in 1967 featured Peter Marshall, then the host of Hollywood Squares, jogging around a large cereal box in grey sweats. Earnest and a little stiff, but it set a tone. By the early 1970s they had found a better fit in Tom Harmon. Harmon won the Heisman Trophy in 1940 at the University of Michigan, flew combat missions in World War II, and was a well-known sports broadcaster by the time Kellogg’s put him in front of a camera for Product 19. He was in his fifties during the campaign and still looked the part. He presented the cereal as part of how he stayed active, which was exactly the kind of pitch that worked on a certain kind of adult in the early 1970s.

A 1972 commercial brought in Tom’s son Mark, then quarterbacking at UCLA, for what was reportedly one of his first television appearances. Father and son, a bowl of cereal between them. Mark Harmon eventually spent twenty years on NCIS. It is one of the stranger footnotes in Product 19’s history.

By 1977 the advertising had moved toward something more suburban and lightly comic. The “Vitamins that taste too good to forget” campaign was warmer than anything involving the Harmons. By 1983, print ads running in papers across the country were calling it “the new Kellogg’s Product 19,” describing it as “flaky, bumpy, crispy, crunchy vitamins,” which is actually a pretty good description if you ever ate the stuff. The word “new” suggested a reformulation somewhere along the way, though Kellogg’s was never specific about what changed.

Through all of it, the box stayed red and white and Product 19 never really tried to become something else. Kellogg’s could adjust the pitch around it, but the cereal kept the same basic personality. It was plain, serious, and useful, which was not the worst place for a breakfast cereal to be. Not every cereal needed a mascot or a gimmick. Product 19 seemed perfectly fine being Product 19.

When Kellogg Canada launched Product 19 in January 1972, it did so quietly at first. A notice in The Globe and Mail reported that advertising would not begin until mid February, so the company could give stores time to get the cereal on shelves. Kellogg also had a small advantage going in. Research before the launch found that many Canadian consumers already knew the name, thanks to American advertising that had drifted north. The Canadian campaign was handled by Leo Burnett Co. of Canada, part of the same agency network long tied to Kellogg. That connection gives the launch a nice footnote. Years later, a future Kellogg CEO told the Battle Creek Enquirer that his first brand assignment at Leo Burnett had been Product 19.

The decline of the brand came slowly enough that it almost did not register as a decline. By the 2010s, Kellogg’s had quietly pulled back distribution. In 2014, a fan posted on the company’s official product forums pleading that the cereal not be pulled. A company representative responded that Product 19 had moved to limited distribution. Facebook groups with names like “Bring Back Kellogg’s Product 19” appeared around the same time. People posted photos of the last boxes they found in stores, the way you photograph something you sense you will not see again.

In November 2016, Kellogg’s made it official. The statement read in part, “We are sorry to announce that Kellogg’s Product 19 cereal has been discontinued. Unfortunately, sales of this cereal were not strong enough to support continued production.” Nearly fifty years on shelves. The comments on MrBreakfast.com filled in steadily after that. One person wrote that his mother had always called it “19s.” Another said Kellogg’s did not need twenty-five flavors of Special K. It needed Product 19. Someone else had been eating it for twenty years and had gotten their granddaughter hooked on it too.

Total, the cereal Product 19 spent nearly five decades chasing, is still on shelves.

My grandmother is gone now and Product 19 is gone too, so I suppose it makes sense that those mornings come back to me more often than I would have expected. She liked Raisin Bran and usually tried to steer me toward it. I knew there was another box in the kitchen, and most mornings, I held out for that one instead. Product 19 was not a cereal anyone was supposed to get sentimental about. It had no mascot, no prize, and not much of a personality beyond the strange name on the box. But it tasted good to me. I remember getting the bowl I wanted. I remember being happy with it in front of me.

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On the May 2026 Monthly Update I talk about what’s been going on with the site and podcast, but also some other things going on in my life and some random thoughts I have. They include:

• Weatherstar 4000

• Dune Board Game

• McDonald’s Leaps and Bounds

• Peak McDonald’s in Print

• Go Ape for a Day

• Game Genie Podcast

• Perfect Strangers Podcast

• Perfect Strangers Bonus Video

• …

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Turbo Teen only lasted thirteen episodes, but it has managed to hang around in a way that a lot of short lived Saturday morning cartoons did not. Some of that is because of the premise. It is a show about a teenager who turns into a car. What could be better!

I watched Turbo Teen as a kid, and at the time it didn’t seem bizarre. It felt like a Saturday m…

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I only played Atmosfear once, at a friend’s house, and I liked it while but also felt like I had arrived a little late. I was old enough to issues with the game, but not so old that I could ignore what the game was trying to do. The Gatekeeper shouting from the television, the clock running, everyone getting a little louder as the tape kept going, it was a great setup. If I had played it at twelve, that would have been perfect. I would have been nervous, excited, and completely sold on it.

Atmosfear had its roots in a game called Nightmare, released in Australia in September 1991 by a production company called A Couple ‘A Cowboys. The company was founded in 1983 by two television producers, Brett Clements and Phillip Tanner, who had met the previous year. They spent two years developing and testing Nightmare before taking a pilot to Village Roadshow, Australia’s largest video distributor at the time. Village Roadshow signed a marketing and distribution agreement within 24 hours and soon the game launched with advertising on television and movie theaters.

The VCR board game was not a new idea in 1991. Parker Brothers had released the Clue VCR Mystery Game in 1985, which sold nearly 500,000 copies and briefly landed on the Billboard videocassette charts, becoming the fourth best-selling video title of that year in the United States. Over the next decade, board game companies would release a variety of VCR games that included adaptations of existing games as well as games original to the format. Most of them used the tape passively, as a kind of theatrical backdrop. Nightmare used it differently. The tape ran continuously during play, counting down from sixty minutes, and an on-screen character would interrupt the game at irregular intervals to punish, reward, or mock the players. The tape wasn’t just there for atmosphere, but it did add a lot. That was mainly because of this guy.

That character was the Gatekeeper, played by Wenanty Nosul. Nosul was born in 1949 in the Byelorussian SSR and came to Poland as a child. He spent 1979 to 1995 in Australia, where he studied acting at the Sydney Acting School. The Gatekeeper’s character, as Brett Clements conceived him, was based on the cemetery gatekeepers of the 17th and 18th centuries, people who literally guarded graveyards from grave robbers. What Nosul brought to that concept was a controlled malice, a performance that balanced genuine menace with just enough absurdity to keep the whole thing from curdling. He called you a maggot. He banished you to the Black Hole. He sighed, audibly, when he was forced to release a player he would rather keep trapped. If you played the game as a kid, this is what you remember about the game.

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Nightmare sold two million copies by the Christmas period of 1993. Three expansion packs followed, each hosted by a different character from the game’s roster of monsters. Baron Samedi the zombie hosted Nightmare II in 1992. Anne de Chantraine the witch hosted Nightmare III in 1993. Countess Elizabeth Bathory the vampire hosted Nightmare IV in 1994. A fourth expansion, featuring Khufu the mummy, was announced and then cancelled. The reason was a problem with the format itself.

Because VHS is linear, the Gatekeeper’s interruptions were always identical. Every game of Nightmare played out the same sequence of events at the same times. Once you had played it a few times, you knew what was coming. The tension that made the first few sessions electric gradually flattened out. Sales began to decline, and Clements and Tanner went back to work on something larger.

What they built would be called Atmosfear: The Harbingers, which was released in 1995. The name change from Nightmare was already in use in Europe, where a trademark conflict with an existing product had forced the rename. The Harbingers was a complete redesign rather than an expansion. Clements and Tanner brought in J.W. Spear and Sons, the British game publisher that had distributed Nightmare and done extensive market research on its reception, as a development partner. Spear wanted input into how the new game was built, which they had not had with the original. By the time The Harbingers reached stores, development costs had reached approximately six million dollars.

The board itself was a significant upgrade. Six two-sided hexagonal provinces fit together around a central hub, and since the provinces could be assembled in any order, the physical layout of the game could change from session to session. Each province was ruled by one of six Harbingers: Gevaudan the werewolf, Hellin the poltergeist, Khufu the mummy, Baron Samedi the zombie, Anne de Chantraine the witch, and Elizabeth Bathory the vampire. All of them except Hellin were drawn from history or mythology. Hellin was the one character Brett Clements created entirely from scratch, conceived as a childlike figure whose fury escalated when she did not get her way.

Players started each game as Numb Skulls and had to land exactly on a Harbinger’s headstone to transform and begin collecting the six differently colored Keystones needed to win. If you failed to reach a headstone within the first ten minutes, you became a Soul Ranger instead, one of the skeletal scavengers who couldn’t collect Keystones by landing on them but could steal them from other players. Clements had originally designed the Soul Rangers as a punishment, something players would dread becoming. He found out quickly that many players preferred it.

Mattel launched The Harbingers with a marketing campaign that included spots on MTV, cross-promotions with soft drink brands, and a website, which was notably the first website any Mattel product had ever had. The game sold above industry predictions in Australia and reached the top ten best-selling games in both the United States and the United Kingdom within months of its release. The US retail price was $34.99. In Britain, copies went for £27.99 each. It was a genuine commercial hit on two continents.

Scary game for kids? You can guess what happened next. In November 1996, the Independent Television Commission in the United Kingdom received 21 complaints that a TV commercial for Atmosfear was too frightening to air during children’s programming. Eight of those complaints specifically mentioned that their children had been scared by it. The ITC ruled the commercial could no longer run in children’s time slots.

There was also a SNES game that almost happened. Beam Software, an Australian developer responsible for titles including Shadowrun and Radical Rex, developed a prototype of an Atmosfear game for the Super Nintendo. Rather than adapting the board game, they turned it into a platformer in which the Gatekeeper would randomly interrupt gameplay at the level, much as he did on the tape. The game was mentioned in magazines in late 1993 and in 1994 but was never formally previewed or reviewed. A prototype dated July 12, 1994 exists. The game was cancelled for reasons that have never been publicly explained.

The franchise shifted formats in 2004 when A Couple ‘A Cowboys released Atmosfear: The Gatekeeper on DVD. The DVD format solved the replayability problem that had eventually eroded Nightmare’s appeal. Unlike the linear storytelling format dictated by videotape, the larger size of DVD allowed for more than 300 storylines and responses from the Gatekeeper. So rarely does a game truly plays the same way twice.

The game sold 60,000 copies in its first six months and eventually reached 600,000 worldwide. A sequel, Khufu the Mummy, followed in 2006. The DVD Gatekeeper was played by David Whitney, and the general consensus among longtime fans was that the performance, whatever its merits, was not the same thing as Nosul. With a game driven by one featured performer, they make all the difference.

The DVD version also lost something physical. The original Harbingers board had bone-colored plastic pieces that matched the game’s aesthetic. The DVD edition updated them to a more boring plastic, and the board provinces were redesigned. People who had played the original found the revision noticeably flatter and cheaper seeming.

An app version launched in 2019, licensed by Creata IP and released first in Australia, Spain, and Portugal. It used a smartphone or tablet in place of the disc, with a new Gatekeeper played by Jacek Koman. In 2021, a 30th anniversary edition launched on Kickstarter, raising AU $491,581 from 3,884 backers against a goal of AU $90,000. That edition replaced the tape with streamed video, added new cards, redesigned the playing pieces, included a Baron Samedi expansion, and came with a graphic novel called The Lore of the Other Side, which explored the Gatekeeper’s origins. Rewards began shipping to backers in January 2023.

Nosul, who had returned to Poland after the Atmosfear productions concluded in the mid 1990s, went on to appear in European film and television productions including Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He is now in his mid seventies. In the context of his overall career, the Gatekeeper is a footnote. For a large number of people who grew up in Australia, the UK, and North America in the early 1990s, it is the role they know him for. A man on a tape, barking orders from a television, somehow became the part of the game that lasted longest.

During the first season of Perfect Strangers, there is a short scene in the opening credits where Larry gets into his car and says goodbye to his family. Everyone is waving and smiling, and then there is this guy on the far right in sunglasses, giving Larry a …

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I begin this podcast episode by talking about the strange timing of television in our lives. Sometimes a show arrives at just the right moment, and for a while it feels like part of your weekly routine. Then you get older, your habits change, and without really deciding to, you stop watching. Years later, you come back to it and realize there was a whole stretch of the story you never saw. Perfect Strangers was one of those shows for me.

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Then I talk about Perfect Strangers, including its creation, the people in front of and behind the camera, its place as one of the anchors of ABC’s TGIF lineup, and the full run of the series from its mid eighties debut through its final season in the early nineties. I also talk about how the show changed over time, how Balki and Larry grew from mismatched roommates into family, and how Perfect Strangers helped lead to one of television’s most successful spinoffs, Family Matters.

Perfect Strangers worked because Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn Baker were so right together. The show could be very broad, and sometimes very silly, but their chemistry kept it grounded. Balki and Larry were funny because they were opposites, but the show lasted because you believed they cared about each other. That friendship gave all the physical comedy, misunderstandings, and catchphrases something warm to hang onto.

Metagirl is also back this week with a Top 5 list of the best episodes of Perfect Strangers. If you watched the show years ago, it is a nice reminder of why people loved it. If you never really watched it, it might give you a good place to start.

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You can support the Retroist by joining my Patreon. Supporters will get member-only shows and audio extras associated with the show. Click the giant button below to check out the Patreon Page.

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If you have a moment, please stop by Apple Podcasts or wherever you might download the show and perhaps give the show a quick rating. It is very much appreciated.

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Production Notes

• This is the 365th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 16 of Season 18.

• Perfect Strangers is one of those shows I was very excited about when it started, and then somehow I just stopped watching it. I did not turn against it. I did not get tired of it. Life just changed and it fell out of my routine.

• I think that happened to a lot of shows for me around the end of the 80s. I was still watching television, but I was also working more, seeing friends more, renting movies more, and suddenly the shows I liked were not automatic anymore.

• Coming back to Perfect Strangers years later was a strange experience, because the early episodes felt familiar, but the later seasons felt like new television from the past.

• The thing that surprised me most when watching the full run is how much the show changes while still feeling like itself. It starts as a very simple odd couple show, then slowly becomes a workplace show, a friendship show, a relationship show, and eventually a family show.

• Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn Baker really make the whole thing work. The writing is often funny, but the show lives or dies on whether you believe in Balki and Larry together, and I do.

• I always remembered the catchphrases, but watching the show again reminded me how much physical comedy they were doing. Some of those bits are closer to stage routines than normal sitcom scenes.

• The Dance of Joy is one of those things that could have been unbearably annoying if the performers were not so committed to it. Instead, it feels like something the show earned.

• I like that Balki is not usually the fool in the show. He misunderstands America, but he is often the one who sees a situation more clearly than Larry does.

• Larry is a great sitcom character because he is not just uptight. He is a great combo anxious and ambitious.

• Perfect Strangers helped make TGIF feel like TGIF. It was not just another show inside the block. It moved to be its initial anchor.

• The spinoff connection to Family Matters is still funny to me. One elevator operator at a fictional newspaper leads, eventually, to Steve Urkel becoming one of the biggest sitcom characters of the 90s. I should eventually do a Family Matters podcast.

• I wish Perfect Strangers and Family Matters had crossed over properly. It feels like the sort of thing TGIF should have done, especially since the two shows were so closely connected.

• The ending of Perfect Strangers is odd. It does get a final episode, but it also sort of disappears. For a show that ran eight seasons, it deserved a more public goodbye.

• The final scene with the cast taking a bow is sweet, especially when you remember that these actors had spent years doing very physical comedy in front of live audiences.

• The baby name Robespierre is one of the strangest choices in any family sitcom. I am not sure how many TGIF viewers were expecting a French Revolution reference.

• The theme song is still hard to skip. It is one of those TV themes that does a lot of emotional work before the episode even starts.

• There is a version of this show that never becomes Perfect Strangers. Different title, different names, different actor opposite Bronson Pinchot, maybe no Dance of Joy, maybe no catchphrase. It is always interesting how much television history can turn on a few changes.

• I did not do a Perfect Strangers tour when I lived near Chicago, and now I regret that a little. I could have at least looked for some of the locations from the opening credits.

• Metagirl is back with a Top 5 list this week, which is especially useful for a show like this. Eight seasons can be a lot to take on, and sometimes a good episode list is the easiest way back in.

• Bonus clippings can be found over on Patreon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

Planet of the Apes was already a successful film series by 1973, but Fox found a new way to sell it. Instead of treating the first five movies as separate releases, they turned them into an event. One ticket. One theater. One very long day. On Tuesday, June 12, 1973, the Warfield Theater in San Francisco ran all five Planet of the Apes films back to back, one day before Battle for the Planet of the Apes opened to the public. The marquee read “Go Ape for a Day.” Two thousand, two hundred people formed a block long line for a dollar ticket. The complete showing ran nine hours, longer than a back to back pairing of epics Ben Hur and Gone With the Wind. James Sutton, district manager for National General Theaters, watched the crowd pour in and said, “We ought to sell a lot of hot dogs.”

The theater sold four thousand of them.

The San Francisco Chronicle found Kris Lewellen and Lane Lees, both thirteen, who had gotten out of bed at 7am to be first in line. A seventeen year old told the paper he had already seen the first four films four times each and did not think that was unusual. Eva Paz had seen the first film eleven times and was near the front. She explained simply that she loved it. One person in line mentioned that the films would not be on television until 1978, which was reason enough to come.

The San Francisco Examiner ran a follow up piece the next day titled “The Funny Things Humans Do for Apes.” It noted that more than 90 percent of the audience had stayed through all nine hours, and that a second full showing was held that same evening. Bob Wilkins, host of KTVU’s Creature Features, had given away 500 free tickets after receiving 5,300 requests. Writer Michele Lomax compared the fan culture forming around the films to the Star Trek phenomenon and noted that there was already a French magazine dedicated entirely to the franchise.

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Marathons spread to San Diego, Sacramento, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. At the Embassy Theatre in New York, the event was repeated twice more during the second week alone. In Los Angeles, Fox staged a promotional stunt outside the Hollywood Cinema and the Beverly Theatre, where costumed figures carried picket signs reading “Apes Opt for Equal Opportunity” and “No Watergate in Simian Society.” In June of 1973, that one did not need much explanation.

By mid July, the format had reached suburban New Jersey and Long Island. Ads for drive ins and indoor theaters show the same pattern, all day Apes programming, extra dates, and crowds large enough that some locations had to add more screenings. The marathon was no longer just a San Francisco stunt. It had become a repeatable event.

What happened the following year was more organized. Fox vice president Ben Barron told the Los Angeles Times in June 1974 that the 1973 events had been “basically a publicity stunt” and that “the idiots were waiting in line all day to see the films.” However he meant it, Fox had clearly learned something from the turnout. The studio had not just sold tickets. It had found a format.

The five films were being presented as a numbered sequence, known around the Fox lot as Apes 1 through 5. Three hundred licensed products were in preparation. The CBS television series starring Roddy McDowall was set to premiere that September. The slogan tying it all together was “Go Ape for a Day.” The theatrical marathons had started as a stunt, but by 1974 they were part of a much larger push.

A 1974 Daily News ad shows Toys R Us offering 1,500 free movie tickets through a drawing during in store appearances by Cornelius, Geoffrey, Gigi, and Baby Gee at New Jersey and Long Island locations (see you in Paramus). Individual theater ads from the period show how the format spread and changed from market to market. A Mountain View, California ad from November 1974 advertised all five films from 9am to 5pm at two dollars a seat, with free color Apes photos and an actual Planet of the Apes makeup demonstration thrown in. A Roanoke, Virginia listing from June 1974 shows only three films under the Go Ape for a Day banner. A Waco, Texas ad from July 1974 runs all five films with individual start times, the last beginning at 9:15pm.

Not every market ran all five. Not every version looked the same. Local exhibitors took the idea and adapted it to what they could manage.

The newspaper coverage captures the scale of the promotion, but the memory of the marathons survived in a different place. Decades later, people were still turning up in blog comments and message boards to say they had been there.

John Busser, writing on the Space 1970 blog in 2012, remembered going to the Parma theater, which originally had more than a thousand seats. It was packed for the first film. By the time Battle for the Planet of the Apes started, there were maybe thirty people left. He was one of them.

Other memories follow the same pattern. Someone who went to the Times Square showings remembered two full cycles in one day, the first from 10am to 6pm and a second from 6pm to 2am. He walked out into Times Square after 2am and still had an hour commute home on the 7 train. Another account describes a family piling into a station wagon for a dusk to dawn drive in showing. The dad and the twelve year old stayed awake for all of it. The seven year old did not.

That is the part the ads cannot really capture. The campaign was built around a simple dare, could you sit through all five Planet of the Apes movies in one day. For the people who did it, the endurance became part of the memory.

The theatrical marathons had a second life almost immediately on television. In September 1973, CBS bought the broadcast rights to the first three Planet of the Apes films for one million dollars and aired them in prime time (guess it wasn’t 1978). The result was a 33.6 Nielsen rating and a 57 percent audience share, the highest ratings recorded for a science fiction broadcast up to that point, and the number one spot for the week. CBS ran the films again in its Friday Night Movie slot.

Those numbers, together with the theatrical turnout, helped convince the network to move forward with a weekly series. The CBS live action Planet of the Apes series premiered on September 13, 1974, and ran fourteen episodes before cancellation. Why? Well, it had the bad luck of going up against Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man on NBC.

The Go Ape format stayed useful on television well past the series. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, stations began programming Go Ape weeks, running the five films on consecutive nights. Those blocks drew well enough that ten episodes of the 1974 TV series were repackaged as five two hour films, giving stations more Apes material to run.

New prologue and epilogue segments were filmed with Roddy McDowall returning as an older Galen, looking back on the adventures of Virdon and Burke. Those segments gave the series a little more closure than it had received during its original run, including an explanation that the two astronauts had found their computer in another city and disappeared into space. The wraparounds do not appear to have been included on the later DVD release. So we still can look forward to maybe getting that one day.

Of all the licensing that followed the Go Ape push, the Mego toy line may have the best origin story. Marty Abrams, president of Mego Corporation, had never seen a Planet of the Apes film until his son Kenny brought him to one of the 1973 marathons. According to the Mego Museum, Abrams spent much of the day watching the audience. The turnout told him there was something there beyond another science fiction movie series.

The next morning, Abrams contacted Fox about the toy rights. Mego outbid rival toy company AHI and introduced its Planet of the Apes line at Toy Fair in February 1974. It was Mego’s first movie based toy line, and it became one of the company’s biggest successes. The marathons had shown Fox that the series could still draw a crowd. They also showed Mego that kids might want to take that world home.

The 1974 CBS series failed to hold an older audience and was gone within a season. The animated Return to the Planet of the Apes followed on NBC in 1975. The Go Ape television weeks kept the films visible through the early 1980s, but without new theatrical entries, the momentum eventually ran out. The franchise went quiet for a while.

That all changed when Tim Burton’s 2001 remake brought people back briefly, and the Caesar trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011 gave the property a real revival. Each time a new entry arrives, someone programs a marathon somewhere, whether in a revival theater or at home. The five original films still run in order, from afternoon into night.

The original Go Ape Days belonged to an era when wanting to see all five films meant giving up most of a day in a theater. In 1973, the five Apes films were still recent, but most people had seen them one at a time. The marathon changed that. For nine hours, the films became one long strange story, with the world ending, starting over, and then ending again.

Fox had found more than a way to sell older movies. It had found a way to make Planet of the Apes an event. The idea spread from city to city, moved onto television, and helped feed the licensing push that followed. For the people who sat through it, though, the appeal was simple. They spent a day in a theater, watched all five Apes movies, and could say they made it to the end.

In 1976, the McDonald’s on La Tijera Boulevard in Los Angeles celebrated its twentieth anniversary with this newspaper insert. The restaurant had opened in 1956, which places it very early in McDonald’s history. Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois on April 15, 1955, and McDonald’s says the company was still in its first big wav…

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