This weekend I was watching Friday the 13th the Series on Comet TV and afterwards I started looking at the stuff I had put together when I was doing the podcast I did a few years ago. One thing I meant to share at the time, but forgot about was an article from issue 80 of Fangoria magazine that ran after the first season. Its a fun article because it c…

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Back to the Future didn’t feel like a property that I expected to be turned into a cartoon, at least not to me at the time. By the time the animated series arrived, my interest in Saturday morning television was already starting to slip. I had not entirely left it behind, but I was no longer meeting it with the same excitement I had a few years earlier. That made this show an interesting one for me, because it landed right in that moment when a longtime habit was beginning to feel more like something I was outgrowing.

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On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk about that stretch of time when Saturday morning cartoons were still part of the routine, but not quite the center of it anymore. I was still watching, still checking in, still curious when something tied to a movie or character I liked showed up on the schedule. But it was different. The feeling had changed. Back to the Future The Animated Series came along right in that space, where I still wanted one more visit with Marty and Doc. Even if the form it took was one I was slowly beginning to leave behind.

From there I get into the show itself, how it tried to carry the spirit of the films into a television format, and how it fit into that later period of Saturday morning programming. It was not trying to recreate the movies beat for beat. It was finding another way to keep the characters moving, with bigger concepts, broader comedy, and stories that could send the series anywhere each week. I also talk about the people behind it, the strange balancing act of turning a successful film trilogy into a cartoon, and the way the series now feels tied not just to Back to the Future, but to the last years when Saturday morning still had a real hold on popular culture.

What makes the show worth talking about now is not just that it extended a movie series people already loved. It also caught a very specific moment, both for the franchise and for the audience. For me, it arrived just as my own relationship with cartoons was changing, which gives it a feeling I probably would not have noticed otherwise. It was familiar, but also a sign that things were moving on. That makes the series more interesting to look back on, because it is not only about keeping Back to the Future alive a little longer. It is also about one of those points where childhood interests do not vanish all at once, but begin to loosen their grip.

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Production Notes

• This is the 362nd episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 12 of Season 18.

• I watched Saturday Morning Cartoons regularly for another year or so after this. By the mid 90s.

• Yes, I was watching Saturday Morning Cartoons much longer than most.

• Marty is still a big part of the story, but the emphasis they put on the Brown family is definitely important. That bugged me more back when the show came out.

• I don’t watch the show much anymore so it was fun to revisit it.

• I think one more episode in the BTTF coverage. It will most likely be a Supporter Episode.

• 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.

I was the right age for Atari Computer Camp. I had been reading about computers in every magazine I could get my hands on, playing games whenever I could get near a machine, and trying to understand a technology that felt like it was going to change everything. When the ads for the camps started showing up, something in them clicked. This was a place where you could actually learn how the machine worked. Not just play with them, but make them do something.

I pleaded with my mom to go and I couldn’t believe it when she actually called them to get information. The price came back and that was the end of that.

It was somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,600 for a month, which at that point in our household would have been better spent on too many other things. My mother also had reservations about sleep-away camps in general, which was its own separate obstacle. So we made a different call that summer, one that turned out fine. We got a Commodore 64. I spent that summer and several more sitting in front of it, learning things my own way, on my own schedule.

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In retrospect there is something almost funny about it. I am the kind of person who gets loyal to things, and had I spent a summer immersed in Atari machines, who knows where that leads. Maybe I end up on a different path entirely, never making it from my VIC-20 to the Commodore 128, never becoming the person I turned out to be. I am genuinely fine with how things went. But I still think getting one of the camp t-shirts would have been incredible.

Despite my childhood want to go to one, I didn’t know too much about the camps themselves. What I learned was that they were ambitious, and for the kids who went, they appear to have been genuinely memorable.

The idea of a computer camp did not originate with Atari. In 1977, a physics and engineering professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut named Dr. Michael Zabinski did something no one had done before. He coined the phrase “computer camps” and founded National Computer Camps. It was the first of its kind in the country. Zabinski had been watching computers reshape how people worked and thought, and he believed children needed a structured place to engage with them beyond the arcade and the living room.

His first session was a day program for about fifty kids, run out of a junior high school in Orange, Connecticut. It worked well enough that he kept it going. Over the following decades, NCC would introduce thousands of students ages 8 to 18 to coding, robotics, and computer science. The High Point Enterprise reported in 1983 that Zabinski’s original inspiration came partly from summer institutes he conducted for the National Science Foundation, where he taught teachers how to bring computers into their classrooms. The camp format, he realized, was ideal for reaching students the same way.

Atari took that idea and scaled it up. In March of 1982, the company announced it would sponsor the first computer summer camp run by a major home computer manufacturer. Three locations opened that summer: East Stroudsburg State College in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, the Asheville School in North Carolina, and the University of California, San Diego. A fourth site at Lakeland College in Wisconsin was on the original plans but never came together.

The person who built the educational side of the program was Bob Kahn, Director of Special Projects at Atari from 1982 to 1984. Kahn developed the curriculum, hired the instructors, and assembled the equipment and software libraries that campers would use. He described his goal like this, Atari wanted students to have a romance with the computers. The overall program was overseen by Linda S. (Gordon) Brownstein, Atari’s Vice President of Special Projects. For the actual camp operations, Atari partnered with a company called Specialty Camps Corporation, and together they formed the subsidiary Atari Special Projects, Inc., operating out of 40 East 34th Street in New York (so close to where I was).

The first summer worked better than expected. By 1983 Atari had expanded to seven locations, adding New England at the Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield, Massachusetts; Chesapeake at Oldfields School in Glencoe, Maryland; Smokey Mountains at the University of North Carolina at Asheville; Midwest at the Shattuck School in Faribault, Minnesota; and Old West at the Athenian School in Danville, California. The Antic magazine reporter who visited Old West in August 1983 noted that demand at the Poconos site had doubled from one year to the next, with 160 kids seeking spots where 80 had come the year before. There were plans to add three more locations in 1984, bringing the total to ten.

The camps were genuinely designed to feel like traditional summer camps. The 1983 brochure describes gymnasiums, pools, tennis courts, playing fields, arts and crafts facilities, campfires, barbecues, and guest speakers. The activity grid across all seven sites covered swimming, tennis, soccer, softball, volleyball, basketball, aerobics, drama, hiking, and electronics workshops. The Midwest camp at Shattuck had a private lakefront with water skiing and a nine-hole golf course. Old West sat adjacent to Mount Diablo State Park. New England offered horseback riding at a slight additional charge and had access to a pottery studio with a kiln. The Pacific camp at the University of San Diego promised field trips to Sea World, the San Diego Zoo, and Pacific Ocean beaches. These were not stripped-down computer labs parked on a college campus. Atari was selling the full camp experience, just with keyboards.

The computer instruction itself took up roughly four to four and a half hours of each day, split into two formal sessions with free time in the evenings when at least two of the three computer rooms stayed open. Students could use that time to play games or keep working on their programs. That Antic reporter visiting Old West observed that newer campers tended to spend their free time on games initially, but by the second week most of them had shifted toward programming. Instructor Jim Brown gave each new arrival a short questionnaire to gauge their level so classes could be matched to ability. Beginners started from scratch. Advanced students were handed spec sheets and deadlines the way a working programmer might receive them.

The machines in those classrooms were Atari 400s and 800s, and each site had three rooms equipped with twelve systems each. At maximum enrollment there were two students per computer. The curriculum covered BASIC, LOGO, and PILOT programming languages, along with modules in assembly language, machine architecture, word processing, graphics, and more. Guest speakers came once a week, usually game designers or programmers. The week before Antic visited Old West, Chris Crawford, who wrote Atari’s Eastern Front, had come to talk about his work. The day they arrived, the designer of Donkey Kong was scheduled. The campers also took a field trip to see Tron, which was fitting since some of the film’s sound effects had been created using an Atari 800.

In the summer of 1982, Atari commissioned a documentary film about the camps. They hired filmmakers Bob Elfstrom and Lucy Hilmer of Robert Elfstrom Productions to shoot it at the University of California, San Diego campus. Three versions were created: a 26-minute version, an 18-minute version, and a 3-minute trailer. The film was released in 1983 under the title The Magic Room. It is an unguarded and often moving portrait of kids at the beginning of something, learning to make machines do what they asked. One camper named Enrique put it this way on camera: “I tell the computer what to do, and that comes from me, from inside, I think it comes. What’s up on the screen, it’s me.”

Head instructor Richard Pugh offered a prediction at the end of the film that holds up: “I think that, if they look back upon this summer, 10, 20, 30 years from now, they’re not going to remember all the commands, perhaps. Maybe this is the last time they even see a computer. But I bet you they never forget what they programmed.”

The longer version of the film circulated for years online. The 18-minute version was a substantially different edit, featuring more intimate perspectives on certain campers and entire scenes not in the longer cut. It was unclear for years whether it still existed. In August 2021, it was released publicly for the first time after the original tape was discovered and digitized.

The camps made the papers constantly from 1982 through 1984, and most of those articles had the same two preoccupations. The first was the price.

The original two-week session cost $890. Four weeks was $1,690. The full eight weeks came to $2,950 in 1982, rising slightly to around $2,990 by 1983 and 1984. The Morning Union out of Springfield, Massachusetts listed the 1984 New England prices as $990, $1,790, and $2,990. By any comparison, the number was hard to absorb. The Boston Globe noted that the monthly rate exceeded what a month at Harvard cost for tuition, room, and board. A local computer workshop in Elkhart, Indiana ran an ad in 1984 marketing itself as a four-week program similar to Atari Computer Camp but significantly cheaper. The camps had become the expensive benchmark that other programs positioned themselves against.

The second thing the press kept returning to was the girls at camp.

Atari made a deliberate effort to attract female campers and was very open about it. Linda Gordon told reporters that she visited girls schools regularly and found that when girls did not have to compete with boys, they were enthusiastic about computers. She called computer literacy the fourth R. She was also candid about her disappointment that more parents had not pushed their daughters toward computers the way they pushed their sons. The Chicago Tribune reported that girls had made up only about five percent of campers in 1982 but rose to fifteen percent by 1983. At the Asheville camp in its first summer, a visitor from the Winston-Salem Journal noted there were 37 boys and just 4 girls enrolled. The 1982 film features a female instructor, and Atari placed girls prominently in its advertising materials. The broader stereotype of the male computer whiz was already forming and proving hard to break. The percentage of women majoring in computer science peaked in 1984 and then dropped significantly.

By May 1982, the camps had become culturally visible enough that they appeared in Henry Martin’s syndicated newspaper cartoon strip Good News, Bad News. The punchline had a mother mentioning that her kids were off to a fat camp, a magic camp, and an Atari computer camp. That sort of secondary mention shows just how much the camps had spread through society.

The camps ran through the summer of 1984. That same year, Atari was sold by its parent company Warner Communications to Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, as the company absorbed the full force of the video game industry collapse that had been building since 1982. Atari was one of the companies most affected by the crash. By mid-1983 the company had lost significant revenue, was forced to lay off a large portion of its workforce, and moved manufacturing overseas. The camps, which had been an ambitious educational project from a company in expansion mode, did not survive. The Strong National Museum of Play’s records confirms the camps ran from 1982 to 1984, and that the decline of the video game industry was a factor in their end.

The camps were not really about producing a new generation of programmers (although they did). They were about putting kids in a room with machines that most of the world still found intimidating and letting them discover that the machines would do what they asked. That was not a small thing in 1982, and it is easier to forget now because computers no longer seem mysterious.

For three summers, Atari gave kids a chance to spend real time with computers right at the moment those machines were starting to move from curiosity to necessity. Then the company collapsed, the camps ended, and what remains is mostly what people held onto, brochures, clippings, a little film, and the memories that still surface online from people who were lucky enough to go.

I never got there. I got a Commodore 64 instead and I turned out fine. But I have spent enough time looking through what survives to understand what I missed, and I think it was something worth missing properly.

I still think the t shirt would have been great.

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On the March 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:

• Back to the Future Part II

• Back to the Future Part III

• Time for another Back to the Future Cartoon?

• Joysticks (Retroist After Dark)

• Timely Soundtracks in Movies

• Singles Inco…

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My sister had a real talent for finding something about you and shining a spotlight on it. When we were kids, she decided that my laugh sounded exactly like Muttley. Not kind of like Muttley, but for a long time, exactly like Muttley. That wheezing, gasping, barely contained snicker that the cartoon dog did whenever Dick Dastardly fell out of a plane or got bonked on the head. She would demonstrate, doing her best impression of my laugh back at me, which was nothing like Muttley. This of course made here crack up. Now I had been in her crosshairs before and realized I had two choices. I could be embarrassed, or embrace it. I chose to embrace it, partly because I already loved Muttley, and partly because she wasn’t wrong.

I had been watching Muttley since I first started became addicted to Saturday morning cartoons. He was easy to love a dog with sense of humor and perfect comic timing. He just watched, waited, and when the moment arrived, he laughed. There was something deeply satisfying about that. Muttley was, depending on your perspective, either the worst sidekick in cartoon history or the best. I always thought he was the best.

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Muttley was created by Iwao Takamoto, one of the most important character designers in the history of American animation. Takamoto had an unusual path to that job. He learned to draw while incarcerated at the Manzanar internment camp during World War II, where an older artist took him under his wing. After the war he went to work at Disney, then moved to Hanna-Barbera, where he became the go-to designer for some of the studio’s most recognizable characters, including Scooby-Doo and Muttley.

Muttley first appeared in September 1968, in the premiere of Wacky Races on CBS. The show was inspired by the 1965 comedy film The Great Race, and Muttley was modeled on Max Meen, the henchman played in that film by Peter Falk. His partner Dick Dastardly was the cartoon equivalent of Professor Fate, the villain Jack Lemmon played in the same movie (more about Falk later). Wacky Races was a co-production between Hanna-Barbera and Heatter-Quigley Productions, a partnership that would have consequences for the character’s future.

As his name suggests, Muttley is a mixed breed. In a Wacky Races episode called “Dash to Delaware,” he is specifically identified as a mix of bloodhound, pointer, Airedale, and hunting dog. In the original series he wore only a collar. This would change in futured appearances. His primary job in the serious was to antagonize Dick Dastardly by snickering and occasionally muttering barely audible complaints about Dastardly under his breath. Things that sounded approximately like “snazza frazza rashin’ fashin’ Rick Rastardly.” It wasn’t a lot, but this dog had charisma and quickly became a fan favorite.

One of the things that made him unique was the voice and that laugh. The laugh did not begin with Muttley. It began with Don Messick, and Messick had been using versions of it for years before the character existed.

Messick was born in Buffalo in 1926 and raised in Baltimore, where he started doing radio at fifteen. He wanted to be a ventriloquist, which turned out to be good training for a career that would require him to produce an extraordinary range of sounds. By the time he arrived at Hanna-Barbera, he had already found the wheezing snicker and deployed it for a string of minor characters including a mischievous dog in Huckleberry Hound, a troublemaker named Snuggles in Quick Draw McGraw, and a character called Griswold in Top Cat. I like to think that each time he used it, the laugh got a little more refined, a little more specific. All leading up to the character who would own it.

When Muttley arrived, Messick finally had a character whose entire personality was wrapped up in this voice. The laugh wasn’t just a laugh, it was at the core of how Muttley would communicate. Muttley’s simple sounds conveyed a character who knew exactly how absurd the situation was and seemed to enjoy it.

Messick also voiced nearly everyone else in Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (which I will talk about next), including the inventor Klunk, whose dialogue consisted entirely of mechanical noises and sound effects, and the pilot Zilly. He was doing most of the show by himself, with Paul Winchell handling Dick Dastardly and the General.

Messick stayed with the character until 1991, when a series of strokes sadly ended his career. He passed away in 1997. That laugh, though, kept going. Billy West, one of the most accomplished voice actors of his generation, took over the role and has continued it into the 2020s, including in the 2020 film Scoob!, which also used archival recordings of Messick for certain moments.

Wacky Races ended its original run in January 1969. By then, Fred Silverman, who oversaw children’s programming at CBS, had seen enough to know that Dick Dastardly and Muttley were the show’s breakout stars. He asked Hanna-Barbera to build a spinoff around them. The result premiered on September 13, 1969: Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines.

The title was a play on the 1965 British film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. The original working title had simply been “Stop That Pigeon,” which was also the name of the show’s theme song. On the show, Dick Dastardly commands the Vulture Squadron, a team of incompetent World War I-era aviators whose mission is to intercept a carrier pigeon named Yankee Doodle Pigeon before he can deliver his messages. They fail every single time. The pigeon wins. Dastardly rages. Muttley laughs.

The show’s connection to actual history was not accidental. Carrier pigeons were a an important part of World War I, used to carry messages when other communication lines were cut. The most famous American example was Cher Ami, who saved nearly 200 soldiers in 1918 by delivering a message despite being shot. Yankee Doodle Pigeon, painted red, white, and blue, was clearly a tribute to this heroic bird.

In the spinoff, Muttley picked up two important new traits. He could fly by spinning his tail like a helicopter. This is a skill that came in useful whenever Dastardly was in freefall and needed to be caught, which was often. He also became obsessed with medals. Before doing anything Dastardly asked of him, Muttley would demand a medal. Dastardly would either promise one and that would make Muttley very happy. Through his desire to be seen as a hero (with medals), we get a glimpse of how Muttley wants to be seen.

This is confirmed in each episode, which also included a segment called “Magnificent Muttley.” In them, Muttley daydreamed about himself as the hero of various adventures, with Dastardly cast as the villain. These segments appear to be a reference to the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and they gave Muttley something rare for a cartoon character of the time, a fantasy life. I am fascinated that Muttley wasn’t satisfied with his life. That he wanted better, but the most effective way he could express this was through daydreaming. It makes him very relatable.

What made people love Muttley was not his competence. It was the thing a letter writer to the Kalamazoo Gazette identified in April 1970, pushing back against a neighbor who had complained about the show. The writer, a man named John Eastman, called himself “a sporadically intelligent adult” and made the case plainly: Muttley “chuckles up his sleeve when Dastardly invariably fails.” Eastman gets Muttley and understand that Muttley is a rare character, one that is self-aware. He is on the wrong side and he knows it, and every time the wrong side loses, he lets you know he knew it all along.

He is the one character on the show that the audience can properly identify with, his laugh is our laugh. When things go wrong for ol’ Dastardly and Muttley laughs, it almost functions as a laugh track, letting little kids know that what’s happening is something we should all be enjoying.

The show ran 17 episodes on CBS from September 1969 through January 1970, then moved into syndication from 1976 to 1982. That is where a whole new generation found it. William Hanna, in a September 1969 interview, noted that Hanna-Barbera programming was being seen in dozens of countries around the world. Dastardly and Muttley was part of that reach. In Japan, where Hanna-Barbera cartoons had been popular since the early 1960s, the show aired under a different set of names. Muttley became Ken-Ken. Dick Dastardly became “Sukaikido Buraku Maō,” which translates roughly as The Skykid, Black Devil. Dastardly’s Japanese voice actor was Chikao Otsuka, father of Akio Otsuka, who would go on to voice Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video game series.

When Hayao Miyazaki made Howl’s Moving Castle in 2004, one of its characters, an adorable dog named Heen who could fly, was described by critics as having “the Muttley cough.” Whether that was an intentional tribute or simply a sign of how completely that sound had been absorbed into the shared vocabulary of animation, it is difficult to say. But the reference was immediately understood.

In 1976, Hanna-Barbera introduced a new character named Mumbly. To anyone who had watched Wacky Races or Flying Machines, the resemblance to Muttley was impossible to miss. The same look, a similar grumbling mumble, same Don Messick voice. But Mumbly was not Muttley.

The reason for the distinction came down to ownership. Wacky Races had been co-produced with Heatter-Quigley Productions, which meant the characters from that show, including Dastardly and Muttley, were jointly owned. When Hanna-Barbera wanted to use a similar dog character in new programming, they created a new one. Mumbly, in his original 1976 ABC series The Mumbly Cartoon Show, was a good guy, a detective in a trench coat who worked alongside a human partner named Chief Schnooker to catch criminals.

Now here is something interesting. Mumbly was a rumpled, mumbling, seemingly slow detective in a trench coat who turns out to be sharper than he looks. Sound familiar? Peter Falk had been playing Columbo since 1968. The parallel was not subtle. So Muttley had begun as a cartoon version of Peter Falk’s character Max Meen from The Great Race, and his near-twin Mumbly was modeled, at least in part, on Falk’s most famous role. Falk essentially helped to define both characters!

Mumbly’s detective series was not a ratings success and lasted only one season. He then resurfaced in Laff-A-Lympics in 1977, this time repositioned as a villain on the “Really Rottens” team, filling the role that Muttley could not fill because of the ownership issue. He was accompanied by a character called the Dread Baron, who strongly resembled Dick Dastardly. It was the same relationship, with different names. Its a shame, nothing against Mumbly, but it should have all been Muttley all along.

Muttley kept showing up. He appeared in Yogi’s Treasure Hunt in 1985, in Wake, Rattle, and Roll and the Fender Bender 500 segments in 1990 and 1991, in a teenage version in Yo Yogi!, and as a voice cameo in Duck Dodgers. The 2020 film Scoob! brought him back again. Each time, the character required almost no reintroduction. The laugh was enough.

What Muttley seems to understand is that the most interesting place in any story is usually not at the center of it, but just off to the side, watching it unfold. The hero is busy being heroic. The villain is busy with another bad plan. Muttley is there taking it all in, and finding the whole thing funny. He is not exactly cynical. He just sees the absurdity more clearly than anyone else around him. The plan is ridiculous. The chaos is inevitable. The pigeon is probably getting through. Muttley knows it, and he cannot help laughing.

That is part of what makes the laugh so memorable. It is not cruel, and it is not dismissive. It sounds like someone who already knows how this is going to go, and takes real pleasure in the gap between what people want to happen and what actually happens. Muttley is not outside the story, but he is never fully trapped inside its logic either. He is close enough to be part of the action, but far enough away to recognize how silly it all is.

My sister was not making some deeper observation when she said my laugh sounded like his. She just thought it was funny. But I was glad to hear it, because Muttley was my favorite character, and for a little while it felt like I shared something with him.

I grew out of the laugh, but not my affection for Muttley. If anything, I may like him more now. The laugh itself was a small thing, and it did not last, but for a little while it gave me a connection to a character I already loved. I am still glad I had that.

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Joysticks (or Joy Sticks) was never one of the big “video game” movies. It did not arrive with the reputation of Tron or WarGames, and even at the time it probably felt a little cheap and a little thrown together. But for kids who were completely locked in on video games, that almost did not matter. If it had cabinets in it, if it had an arcade, if it l…

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Back to the Future Part III had a different job to do. Part II had ended on a cliffhanger and sent everybody out of the theater with their heads spinning, but the third film had to bring everything back down to earth, or maybe more accurately, out to the Old West. It was ending a story people had gotten very attached to and it had to do that without losing the sense of fun and invention that made the series feel special in the first place. We didn’t go to the future with flying cars and flat screens. This time it was dust, horses, locomotives, and a version of the past that felt just as exciting.

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On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I start with a memory from my time working at the mall. I spent a lot of lunched at the bookstore, where I kept running into a fan of the film who loved talking about where the series could go next. He was especially taken with the train at the end. He had no shortage of ideas about the sequels that could have followed if that machine had carried Doc and his family into one more adventure after another. These conversation say a lot about how Part III left people feeling. Even though it was the end, it still made us want to keep the story going.

From there I get into the movie itself, its release, and why it worked for people then and still holds up now. Part III does not try to top Part II by getting more tangled with time travel nonsense. Instead, it gets simpler, warmer, and more character driven. It gives Marty a chance to face something in himself, and it gives Doc a story that is not just about invention or danger, but about love, risk, and finally building a life outside his invention. It also has a very different look, taking Hill Valley and peeling it back into something rougher and more mythic.

I also talk about the cast, the making of the film, the music, and the way Part III completes the trilogy with a lot more confidence than it sometimes gets credit for. The first movie may be the cleanest and Part II may be the complex, but Part III has its own place because it knows how to end things well. It turns the series into something bigger than a time travel gimmick. By the end, it feels like a story about growing up, letting go, and deciding that the future is not something you chase, but something you make.

Support the Show

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.

Support the Retroist on Patreon

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.

Maybe I will release this Podcast on Cassette? Join Patreon for a chance to get a mixtape.

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Production Notes

• This is the 361st episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 10 of Season 18.

• The story you hear in this episode was originally included in my first recording of my Back to the Future Podcast. I think it makes a lot more sense as part of the 3rd film discussion.

• I like that this movie lets the series breathe a little. Part II is fun, but it is doing a lot. Part III feels more relaxed and confident. The old west setting, which is so familiar, probably helps with that.

• I always enjoy when a movie gives Christopher Lloyd more to do than just be frantic. This one lets Doc Brown feel like a real person.

• I like that Hill Valley is still becoming Hill Valley in this one. You are seeing the place before it turns into the town everyone knows. This feels like conformation hat they are treating it like a character.

• Thomas F. Wilson really gets to have fun here. Buford Tannen is such a good variation on the Tannen problem.

• Mary Steenburgen was a great addition. Clara does not feel like she wandered in from another movie. She fits right into this world.

• The train sequence is one of the best endings in the trilogy. The pacing is perfect. It big, practical, and loud. A perfect way to wrap the adventure.

• I like that the movie does not try to top Part II by being more complicated. It gets stronger by getting clearer.

• Last movie, but I ain’t done yet.

• 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.

I first saw the Panasonic Dynamite 8 in a catalog, probably sitting on the carpet of our living room with a pen, which was how I communicated the things I wanted for Christmas to my Mom. I circled it. I may have circled it more than once. It looked like a toy, which was exactly the point, and exactly why it never made it under the tree. My mom was a sensible person, with a limited budget. If you wanted music, you got something that looked like it played music. A little yellow box that looked like it could blow up a building was not that

I eventually forgot about it, the way you forget about most things you wanted badly as a kid. Then, a few years ago, after patiently trying to find an affordable one in good condition, I bought one online. Before I talk about it, lets talk a littler bit about the technology

The story of the Dynamite 8 begins with the 8-track format itself, which had a somewhat unlikely origin. The technology was developed in the 1960s by a consortium that included RCA Records, Lear Jet, and the Ford Motor Company. Bill Lear, best known for his work in aviation, developed the 8 track as an improvement on the earlier 4 track cartridge system. The goal was something more practical for consumers, specifically something you could play in a car without handling reels of tape. In 1966, Ford became the first automaker to offer the new Stereo 8 format across its entire model lineup, and the format took off from there.

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By the early 1970s, 8-track players were a fixture in American cars and living rooms. The tapes were chunky durable plastic bricks and you could find them everywhere. What the format never managed to shake was a fidelity problem. The sound was not great. Track changes happened mid-song, the tape hiss was real, and the whole experience was more convenience than quality. It was music you could take with you, and for a lot of people, that was enough.

By 1974, though, the 8-track format was aging. Cassette tapes were getting better and more widely available. The format needed something. What it got from Panasonic was one of the more imaginative product designs of the decade.

The Panasonic Dynamite 8, model RQ-830S, looked exactly like what its name suggested. The body was a squat, rounded square. The face was dominated by a large circular speaker grille with a track indicator. And rising from the top, on a thin metal stem, was a T-shaped plunger handle. The whole thing resembled a cartoon detonator, which was entirely deliberate. Panasonic’s own advertising made the comparison explicit: “It looks like a detonator. And sounds like dynamite.”

The plunger was not just decorative. Pushing it down changed the track and you would hear a different song. It was the only way to do it on this machine. Unlike other players on the market, the Dynamite 8 did not switch tracks automatically. You had to detonate it yourself. There was no headphone jack, no tone control, and it played in mono through its single 3-inch full-range dynamic speaker. It ran on batteries or AC current, and Panasonic sold an optional car adapter as well, model RP-913.

What it lacked in features it made up for in personality. The Dynamite 8 came in three colors at launch: Detonator Red, Bomb Blue, and Explosion Yellow. Panasonic was fully committed to the bit. Later versions added white and black to the lineup, and a clear version also appeared at some point in the production run. The color-coded, pyrotechnic naming was not an accident. This was a product aimed squarely at kids, teenagers and playful adults, and Panasonic’s marketing treated it as such from the beginning.

Advertising from the period leaned into the detonator concept. One consumer magazine ad opened with “Ka-boom!” and walked readers through the experience in the language of an explosion: “Slide in the tape. Out booms the music from an explosive-sounding dynamic speaker. Then push the plunger to change your channel and change your tune.” Another ad headline read “Sound Explosion.” A third said simply “Have a Blast.” The retail price held steady at $39.95 for most of the product’s life, with sales periodically dropping it into the high twenties. That was a real price for a kid’s item in the mid-1970s, roughly equivalent to $240 today, but the ads kept running, and the thing kept selling.

The retail price at launch of $39.95 in 1974 was consistent across newspaper ads from Sarasota to Santa Barbara through 1979, with promotional prices occasionally dipping to $28.88 or $29.95. For a device with this few features, that price held up remarkably well for five years. It was a testament to the attractiveness of the form rather than the quality of the audio itself.

To really move units, Panasonic went looking for a spokesperson, and they found the perfect one. Jimmie Walker was then starring as James “J.J.” Evans Jr. on Good Times, the Norman Lear sitcom that ran on CBS from 1974 to 1979. Walker’s character had a catchphrase that the writers leaned on heavily: “Dy-no-mite!” It was everywhere, the kind of phrase that got on t-shirts and into playgrounds and that every kid in America could do a passable impression of. Panasonic saw the connection immediately.

The resulting campaign was a marketer’s dream. A dealer-facing ad from around 1975 laid it out plainly for retailers: “When Jimmie Walker says ‘Dyn-o-mite,’ kids all over America listen.” Panasonic promised Walker would promote the Dynamite 8 on network and local TV, on radio, in magazines, and at point of sale. The ad copy called him “Kid Dyn-o-mite himself” and listed the publications where the campaign would run: Seventeen, Hot Rod, Senior Scholastic, and Motor Trend. There was a full in-store display package: wall banners, posters, streamers, window spots, counter cards. Panasonic even mentioned a singing group called, of all things, “The Dynamite 8,” tied to the promotion.

Walker’s television spots became a genuine part of the product’s identity. In one version he addressed the camera as “My fellow music lovers!” before walking through the features of the Dynamite 8 and the companion Take-N-Tape cassette player Panasonic had introduced. The campaign’s final notable push came during the 1979 holiday season, when the tagline became “put a little dy-no-mite under the tree.”

It worked. The Dynamite 8 became a genuine pop culture sensation, the kind of thing that showed up in Christmas wish lists and bedroom photographs and that a certain generation remembers with the specific warmth reserved for things that were cool.

The Dynamite 8 was not only a North American phenomenon. In Japan, Panasonic’s parent company Matsushita sold consumer electronics domestically under the National brand name, which it used until retiring it in 2008 in favor of a unified Panasonic identity. The same basic platform that became the Dynamite 8 in the US appeared in Japan as the National RQ-8, and it was adapted for something that was just beginning to find its audience there: karaoke.

The National RQ-8 came bundled with a dynamic microphone, instruction sheets, and catalogs for karaoke 8-track tapes. The box art showed the unit with the number “1” on the bull’s-eye indicator, and the product was positioned as a home karaoke system at a time when karaoke was still a novelty outside of bars and clubs. Karaoke emerged as a commercial product in Japan around the turn of the 1970s, and Daisuke Inoue is often credited with popularizing it in 1971 with a machine that played backing tracks for people to sing along to, though some later accounts credit Shigeichi Negishi with an earlier karaoke machine in 1967. The RQ-8 brought that same idea into the home in a package that was portable, colorful, and cheap enough to be a reasonable purchase. It is a strange and delightful that in its own home market this same-looking device could be used as a portable karaoke machine.

The The Panasonic Dynamite 8 I picked up was in reasonable shape, cosmetically. Functionally it needed work. The belt had degraded, which is the most common failure point on these machines after decades of storage. Replacing it is not a complicated job, but you need to know what you’re doing, and I had a useful guide: the YouTube channel Techmoan, run by British tech enthusiast Mat Taylor, who has made a long and well-regarded series of videos on obsolete audio formats and the machines that played them. His coverage of vintage portables like the Dynamite 8 has sent more than a few people down the same rabbit hole I fell into. A new belt, a replacement speaker, and the thing was playing again.

I think mine turned out pretty well. Here are some photos of it before I cleaned it up and nice photo of it all cleaned up.

And here is a video of Dynamite playing a K-Tel collection

Here’s the thing though. The Dynamite 8 sounds like what it is. It’s a mono device with a small speaker, playing a format that was never known for fidelity, on tape that is at least forty years old. If you upgrade the speaker, as I did, you will get a noticeable improvement. But you are not going to be bowled over. The warmth that people associate with analog formats, the quality that vinyl enthusiasts talk about, is not what you are getting here. What you are getting is something that sounds like the 1970s, which is its own thing entirely.

What strikes you more than the sound is the object itself. Holding the Dynamite 8, you understand immediately why kids wanted it. It has a confidence in style and form that modern devices have almost entirely given up on. It is solid, colorful, and hard to look away from. The plunger on top is genuinely satisfying to push. The track indicator is easy to read. For an audio player that reads almost as a toy, it has a presence that most consumer electronics never achieve. It looks exactly like what it was designed to look like, and that is rarer than it sounds.

The 8-track format faded quickly once cassettes became dominant in the late 1970s. Cassette tapes were smaller, sounded better, and did not interrupt songs at arbitrary intervals to change tracks. The Dynamite 8 continued appearing in newspaper sale ads into 1979, still at its stubborn $39.95 retail price, but the window was closing. The format that had ridden into American life on the back of the Ford Motor Company was being pushed out by a wave of Sony Walkmans.

The Dynamite 8 itself though, was never really about the format anyway. It was about the idea that a piece of audio equipment could be fun, could be designed with a sense of humor, could look like something other than a serious black rectangle. That idea did not survive the 1970s in any commercially meaningful way. Portable audio became about miniaturization and sound quality, and the personality got engineered out. The Walkman was a revolution, but you would never describe it as playful.

Today, working examples of the Dynamite 8 are not as easy to find as you might expect. Refurbished models in good condition have sold for several hundred dollars, and even Jimmie Walker print ads have their own market among collectors. There is a dedicated community of people who restore and collect them, and the repair information is out there if you go looking.

The one sitting on my shelf still plays. I put a tape in now and then, push the plunger, and listen to something that sounds that takes me back. It is not the sound I was hoping for as a kid circling it in a catalog. But the object is exactly what I imagined it would be. Sometimes that is enough.

By the time O’Boises reached the Acme Market in my town in 1988, I was ready for them. I had already been hearing about these extra crunchy Keebler chips, and I was the kind of kid who did not need much convincing when Keebler put out something new. I bought a bag, opened it, and knew right away this was not the same experience as a standard potato chip. O’Boises had a thicker crunch, a different look, and enough novelty to make a real impression.

O’Boises were a manufactured potato snack chip, which put them in the same technical category as Pringles rather than say a bag of Lay’s. They were made from a dough of potato material that was shaped and cooked instead of sliced from a whole potato. What came out of that process was a chip with noticeable thickness, a light airy interior full of small bubbles, and a crunch that was louder and more satisfying than a standard thin chip. Contemporary reviewers (and me) noted that they were thicker than expected, less oily than most chips, and especially good for dipping because they did not break apart easily. That thickness also meant fewer broken chips in the bag.

A 1988 consumer panel review in the Jacksonville Journal tested the Original flavor and found the response split but enthusiastic on texture. Several panelists specifically compared them to Pringles in terms of how they were built. One called them the closest thing to Pringles she had found. Another said the crunch and freshness were the selling point. A third noted they were less salty than most chips, which was either a virtue or a problem depending on who you asked.

The technology behind O’Boises came from Miles Willard and his Idaho Falls firm, Miles Willard Technologies. Willard had spent years at the USDA before founding his own company, and he had become one of the primary figures in fabricated potato snacks. His portfolio included Tato Skins, Hula Hoops in the United Kingdom, Ripplin’s, and Chachos, among others. The specific construction used for O’Boises was a dual-sheeted process, meaning two thin potato layers were pressed together before cooking. That gave the chip its internal air pockets, its distinctive texture, and a notably stronger potato flavor than a single-sheet crisp would have delivered. The Bluffton, Indiana plant where O’Boises were eventually produced was described years later, when the brand changed hands, as the only facility in the country with that dual-sheeted capability.

Keebler introduced O’Boises in early 1988. A Chicago Tribune marketing column from February 26, 1988 reported that O’Boises and Suncheros, Keebler’s new tortilla chip, were both set to begin appearing in selected markets in mid-March, with national distribution to follow within a few months. The column confirmed that the O’Boises name was a direct reference to Boise, Idaho’s capital, and that the chips were manufactured from one hundred percent Idaho potatoes. The connection to Idaho potato country was not incidental. People’s association with Idaho was strong and the names made for a playful reference.

The Boise area introduction came on March 3, 1988. By March 9, a Hersh’s Markets circular in Allentown, Pennsylvania was already listing O’Boises Original Potato Chips as new at 89 cents for a 6.5-ounce bag. National rollout happened fast. The launch flavors were Original and Sour Cream and Onion. A Cheddar variety appeared in grocery advertising by 1993, and some store circulars also list a Barbecue option at various points. The Original was the baseline, and the Sour Cream and Onion became the one most people cite when they remember the brand.

O’Boises weren’t just a modest success. They were one of the most successful snack launches of the decade.

In their first year on the market, O’Boises and Suncheros together generated roughly one hundred million dollars in combined sales, according to Keebler’s own public relations statements cited in Prepared Foods in 1989. O’Boises was the bigger performer of the two. By May of 1989, a Chicago Tribune marketing column noted that O’Boises had done such strong business with grocery chains that retailers were unusually receptive to whatever Keebler brought them next. The column described O’Boises specifically as the product that had proven Keebler could move salty snacks the way it moved cookies.

By late 1988, Keebler’s total snack food sales, including Tato Skins, O’Boises, and Suncheros, had reached about two hundred million dollars annually after less than three years in the market, according to Crain’s Chicago Business. The company held roughly five percent of the total salty snack market, which was worth about four billion dollars a year at the time. A 1991 market share breakdown in the Orlando Sentinel still put Keebler at five percent, listing O’Boises alongside Ripplin’s and Tato Skins as its main brands. For context, Frito Lay held forty two percent and Borden held nine, which shows how much ground Keebler had managed to gain in a business it had entered from scratch only about eight years earlier. O’Boises was one of the clearest signs that the company’s push into salty snacks was working.

The sales figure that gets cited most often in later years comes from a 2009 Inventure Group earnings call, when CEO Terry McDaniel mentioned having been told O’Boises was a three hundred million dollar brand at its peak. He flagged that as secondhand information rather than confirmed fact. What is documented is that the Keebler Salty Snacks division as a whole reported about one hundred ninety-two million dollars in total sales in 1995, the year the division went up for sale.

The pricing trail from newspaper advertising tells a useful story about how the brand moved through its run. The 89 cent entry price in March 1988 was for a 6.5-ounce bag. By October 1991, the same size was still priced at 99 cents in some markets. A December 1991 ad introduced a family size of 14.5 ounces at $1.99, which suggests Keebler was confident enough in the brand by then to expand the format. A 1992 coupon offered buy-one-get-one-free on O’Boises at a retail value of $1.59 per bag. By 1993, sale pricing had dropped to 74 cents for 6 ounces. By 1998, after the brand had changed hands, a Pharos-Tribune circular listed a 6-ounce bag for 79 cents, which suggests the product was still moving but not at a premium.

Keebler was not operating in a quiet corner of the market. Frito-Lay was the dominant force in salty snacks throughout this period, and the competition was described repeatedly in trade coverage as intense. By March 1991, Keebler CEO Thomas Garvin was publicly declaring the company’s ambition to become the number two salty snack maker in the country, a position it was not yet holding despite the success of O’Boises and its companion brands.

The pressure from Frito-Lay was relentless and expensive. Anheuser-Busch’s Eagle Snacks had also entered the market aggressively, which compressed margins across the board. When the Eagle division was abruptly shut down in February 1996, it left a significant void, but by that point Keebler had already been moving toward exiting salty snacks entirely. Industry analysts in June 1995 attributed Keebler’s retreat to the difficulty of competing against Frito-Lay’s scale.

Also, a bigger trend was happening for the company. Keebler’s British parent, United Biscuits Holdings, had been selling off divisions through the mid-nineties. The cookie and cracker business was sold to Flowers Industries and the Invus Group. The salty snacks division, including the O’Boises and Ripplin’s brand names, the Haltom City, Texas factory, and a plant in Oxford, Pennsylvania, was put up for sale in mid-1995. The Haltom City facility had been a $25 million, 145,000-square-foot plant that began operations in 1987, the year before O’Boises launched. By late November 1995, workers were being sent home as the sale process played out.

The O’Boises line was ultimately sold. By 1997 Keebler had divested it. The brand and production technology passed through several hands before landing with Poore Brothers, which later became Inventure Foods, operating out of the Bluffton, Indiana facility.

A 1998 Capital Press article on Miles Willard Technologies noted that Wabash Foods in Bluffton, Indiana was trying to restart production at a former Keebler plant. In hindsight, that looks like an early sign that the O’Boises process and the plant built around it still had value. The line eventually passed through Poore Brothers and then Inventure, which was preparing a relaunch by early 2009 and still emphasizing the product’s unusual construction and the role of the Bluffton facility.

Whether that relaunch ever turned into a full scale return is less clear. But O’Boises were not just a paper plan. A December 3, 2009 ad in The LaFollette Press shows Terry’s Classic O’Boises back on sale in 8 ounce bags as part of a buy one get one free promotion. That is enough to show the brand made it back onto store shelves, even if the long term reach of the comeback is harder to measure. I could only find one other mention in 2010 and nothing after that.

A lot of late eighties snacks are remembered because of when we ate them, and there is nothing wrong with that. But O’Boises stuck with me for another reason. They really did stand out. The crunch was thicker and louder, the potato flavor came through more clearly, and the shape held together better than most chips in the snack aisle. The sales suggest plenty of other people noticed too. O’Boises moved in serious volume, earned national shelf space, and helped show that Keebler could do more than cookies and crackers. Even after Keebler left the brand behind, someone else saw enough value in it to bring it back. That is probably why it still lingers in memory. Not just because of the logo or the commercials, but because the chip itself was good enough to be remembered.

Back to the Future Part II had a lot to live up to. The first movie was already huge, and by the time the sequel showed up people were ready to see Marty and Doc again. This was not just another follow up. It felt like an event. Audiences had been waiting to find out what happened next, and the movie gave them a future full of flying cars, weird gadgets, and, most importantly to a lot of us, hoverboards.

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On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk about Back to the Future Part II, starting with the fact that my friends and I really believed hoverboards were real. Or at least that they had been real for a minute and adults had ruined it for everybody. It did not help that Robert Zemeckis was willing to play along. When you are a kid, that kind of thing gets in your head fast, and this movie knew exactly how to make that future feel real enough to believe.

From there I get into the movie itself, its release, and why it hit people the way it did. Part II did not just try to do the first movie again. It went bigger, more complex, and a little darker. You got the shiny future, the nightmare version of 1985, and that great trick where the movie loops back into the first film from a different angle.

I also talk about the cast, the making of the sequel, the music, and how this became one of those movies people kept revisiting. Even if the first film is the one most people call perfect, Part II is one that really fired up your imagination and I believe might have been more influential to other filmmakers.

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Production Notes

• This is the 360th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 9 of Season 18.

• I can tell I have more patience for this movie now than I did when I was younger. I used to hold it against the first film too much. Now I give it more credit for trying to do something bigger.

• I spent a lot of time on the production history, maybe because with this movie it really does change how you see the finished thing.

• I kept circling back to how complicated Part II is, and I think that is probably why I like talking about it now more than I did years ago.

• The Crispin Glover situation is fascinating and a little uncomfortable. It is one of those behind the scenes stories that changes the whole feel of the movie once you know about it.

• I probably could have gone even longer on the future predictions. That is one of those subjects where you start with the hoverboard but they also got flat screens, video calls, and a few other things right

• We got the fake hoverboard name, but not the actual hoverboard anyone wanted.

• I spent a while on the soundtrack, and I still think the score was the right way to go, even if part of me wanted some giant 1989 pop tie in album just to see what that would have looked like.

• This movie is darker and more mechanical than the first one, and I still think that is true, but I am less bothered by it than I used to be.

• I keep coming back to the idea that Part II works better for me now because it is a little messy. It is not as clean as the first film, but it has more strange corners to poke around in.

• I could probably come back and do more with the music, the merch, or just the whole late 1989 backdrop around the release. This turned out to be one of those movies where every section feels like it could open into another episode.

• 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.

There is a certain kind of loss that comes not from forgetting something, but from having it taken away before you were ready. The AKAI VS-303U that sat in my family’s living room was like that for me. I was a kid when it arrived, and I had no framework for appreciating it more deeply. It was the VCR we happened to get and the one that changed everything.

Then one day it was gone. Donated, discarded, lost to the slow disappearance that eventually claims most electronics once their first owners move on. I eventually got a VCR of my own and moved on. I did not think much about that first machine again. Then for a while it was all I could think about.

It started while I was working on a Retroist podcast about VCRs. The VS-303U began pulling at me again. I mention it in my opening story and while recording it I started to realize that I couldn’t remember the name and model of the VCR. There was clearly something I needed to figure out. What I didn’t expect was how long it would take to track one down, or how much I would learn once I finally did.

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To understand why that particular VCR stuck with me, it helps to know where it came from. AKAI was not just another electronics brand in the early 1980s. The company had already spent decades building its reputation around one thing, tape.

Formally known as AKAI Electric Company Ltd., the firm was founded in Tokyo in 1929 and spent much of the twentieth century establishing itself as a serious name in audio equipment. Outside Japan the brand was especially associated with tape recorders. Reel to reel machines, cassette decks, and the company’s distinctive GX glass and crystal ferrite heads gave AKAI a reputation for durability and precision. By the time home video began to take shape, AKAI was already a trusted name among audio enthusiasts. When the company turned its attention to VCRs in the early 1980s, it brought that engineering mentality with it. It also brought something else, a desire to prove that it could innovate in a field that was quickly becoming crowded.

One of AKAI’s most important early contributions came in 1982 with the VS-2, the first VCR to feature an on screen display interface. Akai called it the Interactive Monitor System (IMS). Instead of forcing users to interpret blinking lights or cryptic front panel indicators, the machine could place programming and status information directly on the television screen. Timer settings, counters, and instructions appeared in plain language. The VS-303U, released in 1985, arrived as a consumer friendly descendant of that idea.

Here is a commercial for the VS-3, where you can hear the pitch for IMD and see it in action.

I have no idea how my family got this machine. It seemed high end for us. By the time the VS-303U appeared, the VCR market itself was changing quickly. When VHS machines first arrived in the late 1970s they were expensive appliances, often selling for between one thousand and fourteen hundred dollars. Ownership was limited largely to early adopters and well off households. Prices began to fall during the early 1980s, but the machines were still significant purchases. In 1980 a typical VCR might cost anywhere from seven hundred to fourteen hundred dollars depending on brand and features. By the middle of the decade competition was pushing those numbers downward.

The VS-303U entered that environment with a list price of around $349. That placed it near the middle of a market that had suddenly become very crowded. By the mid 1980s the format war between VHS and Betamax had effectively been decided, and manufacturers were now competing primarily on price and features rather than format. Korean manufacturers had begun producing lower priced models. Japanese companies were cutting prices to maintain their positions. Retailers were running aggressive promotions to move inventory.

The numbers reflected this surge in volume. Industry estimates suggested that about eleven and a half million VCRs would be sold in the United States in 1985 alone, roughly fifty percent more than the previous year. Demand was exploding. By the middle of the decade the VCR was rapidly shifting from a luxury appliance into a mainstream household device.

Newspaper advertisements show how quickly the price of the VS-303U shifted as the market evolved. A December 1985 ad in The Record in NJ advertised the same model for $329. A January 1986 circular from Roses department stores showed it at $347.88. So not much changed, but by December 1987 a listing in the San Francisco Chronicle placed the price at $219.95.

This pattern was typical for consumer electronics of the era. New models launched as premium products, then rapidly dropped in price as competition intensified and manufacturing scaled up. Families that waited a year or two could often buy the same machine at a fraction of its original cost. My own family probably picked up the VS-303U somewhere along that downward slope.

What separated the VS-303U from many competing machines was not simply its price or its specifications. It was the way the machine helped the person using it. Many VCRs of the mid 1980s were notoriously difficult to program. Setting up a timer recording often required consulting the manual, pressing a series of buttons in the correct order, and hoping nothing went wrong. A mistake could send the entire process back to the beginning. As one Rogersound Labs advertisement from 1986 memorably put it, you could easily find yourself “back around the whole cycle.”

The Interactive Monitor System changed all that by putting those instructions directly on the television screen. Selecting a channel, entering the date, choosing the start and stop times, and saving the entry all appeared as prompts. If you made a mistake, you simply moved back through the menu and corrected it. Instead of memorizing button sequences, you followed instructions. It was something we take for granted now, but it felt cutting edge at the time.

The service manual reveals how elaborate the system actually was. The IMS interface displayed prompts such as “SELECT TIME” and “IF OK MEMORIZE,” with letters corresponding to specific buttons on the front panel or the remote control. The machine supported a four event timer that could be programmed well in advance. A built in sixteen year calendar accounted for leap years. Battery backup preserved the settings during power outages. Inside a machine less than four inches tall was a small but capable piece of consumer hardware.

That design philosophy extended beyond the front panel and onto the remote control. The RC-V603 remote included thirty two separate functions, unusually extensive for a mid 1980s VCR. It allowed users to perform nearly every task available on the front panel without leaving the couch. Transport controls were joined by counter reset, return to zero, fine tuning, adjustable tracking, and timer programming functions. The remote also included an auto mute feature that inserted several seconds of blank audio during recording, a useful tool when editing between segments.

At a time when some competing machines shipped with wired remotes or basic playback controls, the VS-303U allowed the entire programming process to take place from across the room. Which was amazing and the IMS menus worked exactly the same way whether you were using the front panel or the remote. The remote itself is worth a moment of attention. It was longer than many remotes and on the thin side. It also had tactile rubber buttons that made it enjoyable to use.

The service manual also hints at how much engineering went into the machine. The VS-303U was labeled as a three speed unit, though it actually recorded in only two speeds, Standard Play and Long Play. With longer tapes, those modes could push recording time close to eight hours. The three speed label likely carried over from related models that supported additional recording modes.

AKAI emphasized quiet operation in its advertising, and the internal design helps explain why. The transport used a microcomputer controlled direct drive system paired with a dedicated servo board. This configuration reduced the mechanical noise associated with belt driven transports that were common in cheaper machines. The tape path itself was designed with durability in mind. During fast forward and rewind operations the tape disengaged from the video head drum, reducing wear on both the tape and the heads. Not every machine in the lower price tiers took that precaution.

One of the most distinctive, but simple features, was the Tape View System. A small illuminated window in the cassette compartment allowed users to see the reels of the tape turning inside the cassette. Pressing the Tape View button activated the light, which shut off automatically during playback.

It was a small touch, but a memorable one.

The machine also included a physical guide block that prevented users from inserting a second cassette while one was already loaded. It was a simple mechanical solution to a problem that apparently occurred often enough to justify the design.

Around the back of the unit were the standard connections for the time. Composite video input and output, audio input and output, VHF and UHF antenna connections, and an RF output with a channel three or four selector switch. The unit itself was manufactured in Japan.

Many of us remember what it was like to get a VCR. Suddenly there were movies at the video store that we could bring home and my family could record television while we were out. The television was no longer a schedule you simply followed. It became something you could bend around your own time. These are memories we have in common from the device in all its forms.

But what I remember most about the VS-303U is the experience of it. The glow of the display in the living room. The soft mechanical whir as the tape threaded itself around the head drum. The moment the IMS screen appeared with its prompts, telling you what to do next. The confusion as my sisters and mom tried to figure it all out and how heroic I felt when I took the time to understand it all by studying the manual.

Looking back, the machine was doing something very little consumer electronics of the time bothered to attempt. It was making itself understandable, simple enough that a kid (me) could figure it out.

Decades later, when I started trying to find another VS-303U, I discovered the machine had settled into a strange kind of obscurity. It was not rare enough to command serious collector attention, but not common enough to appear regularly in the usual places. When one did surface it was often untested, incomplete, or priced weirdly high for reasons I couldn’t really understand.

That meant doing some research.

The service manual on the Internet Archive turned out to be essential. The complete document covers operating instructions, service procedures, schematics, and a full parts list. It also explains how the machine was designed to function and what tends to fail after decades of sitting in basements or garages. Some examples? The IMS display system relies on a character generator circuit that can degrade in specific ways. Rubber components in the tape transport eventually harden or break down with age. Armed with that information, I had a better sense of what to look for and what warning signs to watch for when a unit finally appeared.

When I eventually got my hands on a working VS-303U, the first thing I did was press the clock button. The IMS screen appeared exactly as the manual said it would. The display asked me to select the time. I followed the prompts, just as someone would have done forty years earlier. The machine responded without hesitation.

It worked.

For reasons that are difficult to explain, that small moment felt comforting. Like reuniting with a long lost friend after many years.

The VS-303U was not the rarest VCR ever built, and it was not the most elaborate machine of its time. What it represented instead was a particular way of thinking about consumer technology. The machine should help you use it.

At the core of that was that Interactive Monitor System. Within a few years, systems like it would appear across the industry. Once people experienced a machine that showed them what to do, there was little reason to return to the old blinking displays and cryptic controls.

The VS-303U is the machine that introduced my family to home video. The first trip to the video store (the very one I would work at a few years later). The illuminated window showing the reels turning (so cool). The feeling that the television in the living room had suddenly become a little more exciting than it had been the day before.

Decades later I ended up making a podcast about VCRs because of it. While I may have researched, recorded, and released that episode over the course of a week, the story behind it started much earlier in a living room in New Jersey. With a machine that properly showed you what it was doing and treated you like a human, not a robot.

Forty years later, that still sounds like a pretty good idea.

Growing up, the Yankees were not exactly welcome in my family's house, even though we lived so close to New York City. My family had been New York Giants fans, and when the team moved to San Francisco they shifted their loyalty to the Mets. Rooting for the Yankees was viewed as a personal failing and said something suspect about your character. Like maybe you thought you were better than everyone else.

And yet, sometime in the early 1980s, I found myself genuinely excited about something with Yankee Reggie Jackson’s name on it. The Reggie Bar slipped past my carefully maintained anti Yankee defenses, and I didn’t even feel guilty. There was something about the hype, the nerve of naming a candy bar after yourself, and the fact that it was actually good, that made it hard to resist. Even for a kid who was supposed to be rooting against everything that wrapper represented.

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The origin story for the bar is great. Reggie Jackson, then still with the Oakland Athletics, once remarked to reporters, “If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.” It was the kind of thing only someone with a high opinion of their own greatness (and media savvy) would say out loud. Jackson signed with the Yankees after the 1976 season for 2.96 million dollars over five years, and the candy wheels started spinning almost immediately. Curtiss Candy Company, a division of Standard Brands and the maker of Baby Ruth and Butterfinger reached out and suggested they do exactly that.

What followed involved plenty of anticipation before a single bar hit a shelf. AP correspondent Hugh A. Mulligan, writing his “Mulligan’s Stew” column in November 1977, described the development process in mock secretive terms, claiming the bar contained everything from marshmallow to rum butter. The ingredient list was a joke. Mulligan was having some fun. But the column ran in papers across the country and helped build national curiosity for a candy that did not yet exist in stores (or did it).

The bar’s actual composition was far more straightforward. At its core, it was just a repackaged Wayne Bun. Which is a delicious round disc of caramel and peanuts coated in milk chocolate that had been made at the Wayne Candy Company plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana since the 1920s. Curtiss acquired Wayne Candies through Standard Brands in 1973 and, a few years later saw an opportunity to give the old formula a new identity. They put Jackson’s image on a bright orange wrapper with REGGIE in bold blue letters and placed collector baseball cards inside each package. The bar sold for a quarter.

The official unveiling took place in February 1978 at the Plaza Hotel in New York, with club owner George Steinbrenner on hand and Jackson biting into the bar for the cameras. He admitted the commercials made him nervous, but he was characteristically unbothered about release. “This is serious, big business,” he told reporters. “It’s corporate planes and meetings and millions of dollars. It’s not going to spend all this money on a joke.” The bar was introduced in five cities, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These were identifies as markets where candy sold best. In other places, distribution lagged while machinery was still being tooled up, and local distributors were warned not to count on receiving stock immediately.

The thing about the Reggie Bar is that it didn’t need perfect day one distribution. It just needed Reggie doing his thing on Opening Day.

It was April 13, 1978 at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were raising their championship banner, saluting Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, and welcoming 44,667 fans who had each been handed a free Reggie Bar at the gate. The team had started the season 1 and 4 on the road, so the crowd was ready for something to celebrate. In the bottom of the first inning, Jackson took a couple of balls from the Chicago White Sox before sending a three run home run into the right center seats. The crowd exploded. Then, in one of those great live sports moments, fans began throwing their Reggie Bars onto the field. Hundreds of orange wrapped candy bars sailed through the air. The game stopped for several minutes while the grounds crew cleared them away. It made national news. That image did more for the Reggie Bar than any commercial.

Jackson later admitted that when fans threw the bars onto the field in 1978, he briefly worried that they didn’t like how they tasted. What he came to quickly understand was that the moment wasn’t really about flavor. It was a celebration of prowess.

When they did run commercials they showed Jackson hitting his three World Series home runs before turning to the camera to taste the candy. They worked. But candy raining down on Yankee Stadium was the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. Standard Brands’ public relations team later acknowledged that sales were meeting expectations in the initial markets, though specific numbers were not released. Jackson would later say the bar generated 11 million dollars in the New York area alone during its first year.

The bar expanded to additional cities through 1978 and into 1979. In Baltimore, where Jackson had once played briefly, it was reported to be doing surprisingly well. For a few years, the Reggie Bar was a real presence in ballparks, supermarkets, and candy stores across the country.

Then the pieces that had assembled it began to shift. Jackson signed with the California Angels after the 1980 season. Standard Brands merged with Nabisco in July 1981, becoming Nabisco Brands Inc. The Wayne Candy plant in Fort Wayne, the only facility producing Reggie Bars, was slated for closure that October. There was discussion of moving production, but it never materialized. A sizable inventory remained in warehouses for a time. Then it ran out. The bar was gone.

The first comeback attempt came in 1993, just in time for Jackson’s Hall of Fame induction. Clark Candy Company, operating out of the same Fort Wayne plant under new ownership, revived the Reggie Bar with a modified recipe that replaced the caramel center with peanut butter. It retailed for over 50 cents and returned briefly to shelves following Jackson’s induction and the retirement of his number 44 by the Yankees. The revival didn’t last.

The most recent return began in 2021. Crystal Westergard, a Canadian physiotherapist who had previously revived the discontinued Cuban Lunch bar, became interested in the Reggie Bar after seeing a television segment about it. Curtiss was long gone, and Jackson retained his likeness rights, which made a licensing deal possible.

Working with a chocolate manufacturer, Westergard developed prototypes and sought Jackson’s feedback. He wanted more peanuts. She insisted the caramel be gooey and amber colored, the way it appeared in the old commercials. Around six thousand bars were produced in the first 2023 run. Within a year, the candy was available in roughly two thousand locations nationwide and online. You can still buy them today!

Back in my family’s house, where rooting for the Yankees wasn’t acceptable, I didn’t know anything about mergers or Indiana factories. All I knew was that this man had hit three home runs in a single World Series game, that fans had showered him with candy, and that the bar with his name on it was everywhere. Reggie was bigger than life. You could dislike the Yankees all you wanted. The Reggie Bar didn’t care. It was loud, unsubtle, and surprisingly good. Just like the man himself.

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On the February 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:

• Back to the Future Revisited

• Laverne & Shirley

• My 50s theme (not expected)

• Back to the Future taking longer than I expected. Part 2 is up next and will be followed by P…

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Episode Also Available on Patreon

Laverne & Shirley was a big hit in its day and for a while it felt like it was always on somewhere. Over time it has slipped a bit out of the regular conversation, which is strange considering how huge it once was. So on today’s show I want to spend some time with it, and try to remind people why it connected in the first place and why it still works.

I …

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My mother swore it existed. There was a sit-down restaurant (maybe somewhere near the Jersey Shore) that sold Mister Softee ice cream alongside hamburgers and steaks. Not just a truck with a walk-up window, but an actual building with tables and booths where families could have dinner and end with that signature swirl of soft serve. She mentioned it so casually, as if everyone remembered these places, but when I pressed her for details, the specifics dissolved like ice cream on a hot summer day. Where was it exactly? What was it called? When did it close?

By the time I got curious enough to start searching, whatever restaurant she remembered had long since vanished. No one else I asked seemed to know what I was talking about. It became one of those family mysteries, tantalizing precisely because it couldn’t be verified, made more special by its elusiveness. If Mister Softee restaurants had existed, they had disappeared so completely that they felt almost mythical. Which, of course, made me want to learn more about them and confirm they were real.

Turns out, my mother was right.

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The Snack House Dream

In 1964, something unusual appeared in the pages of New Jersey newspapers. An advertisement announced the grand opening of “The first Mister Softee Snack House” on Route 30 in Magnolia, complete with a photograph of a handsome mid-century building with a peaked roofline and those iconic Mister Softee signs out front. The tagline promised “a fun-filled new adventure in eating.”

Brothers William and James Conway had founded Mister Softee in Philadelphia just eight years earlier. They were pioneers in the concept of soft-serve ice cream sold from specially designed trucks. Their innovation was transforming the soft-serve machine (which had been confined to stationary soda fountains and diners) into something that could roll through neighborhoods, bringing treats directly to customers. By the early 1960s, Mister Softee trucks had become a familiar sight across the Northeast, their distinctive jingle announcing the arrival of creamy vanilla and chocolate swirls. They were a highlight of my summer growing up.

But trucks, it seems, were only part of the vision. At some point in the mid-1960s, the Conway brothers decided to expand into brick-and-mortar restaurants. The franchise brochure for the “Mister Softee Snack House” laid out an ambitious pitch: franchisees could open “Quick Service Drive-In Restaurants” that would serve not just ice cream but a full menu of food. The business model promised high profit margins, approximately 70% on soft ice cream and 60% on food items. A mobile franchise cost $2,500 in 1967, while a restaurant franchise would be ten times that amount.

The Magnolia location (that first Snack House, which might be the one my mother remembered) offered all the classic Mister Softee treats plus “an all-star cast of the most delectable characters in the history of snack-ery,” according to the December 1964 advertisement. The star of the show was “Mister Beef,” described as “four-and-a-half ounces of choice ground beef (100 per cent beef) broiled over a glowing fire of seasoned hickory charcoal and served on a big, toasted ‘n buttered bun.” They also advertised fish fry specials on Wednesdays and Fridays and a barbecue beef sandwich for 55 cents.

The menu reflected that curious mid-century confidence that a single restaurant could be all things to all people: ice cream parlor, burger joint, and fish fry rolled into one cheerful package.

Enter Jimbll’s

By 1967, something had changed. The same Route 30 location in Magnolia began advertising under a different name: “Jimbll’s,” proudly mentioning food was from the famous Jimbll’s Kitchen. The apostrophe suggested a possessive, but who or what was Jimbll? It’s an odd name, but the concept was clear. Jimbll’s was positioned as a family restaurant with moderate prices. They would offer everything from Mister Softee ice cream to steak dinners. An article in The Cincinnati Post from March 1968 explains that “Jimbll’s is the name of the venture, taken from James and Bill Conway, the two brothers who founded the New Jersey-based soft ice cream franchising firm 14 years ago.” So the mystery resolves itself in the most obvious way: Jimbll = Jim + Bill, the Conway brothers themselves.

The evolution from “Snack House” to “Jimbll’s” seems to have been part of a broader franchising push. By 1968, Jimbll’s locations had expanded well beyond New Jersey, with restaurants opening in Cincinnati (Fairfax), Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Glassboro, New Jersey.

Not a lot of info exists about the chain, but its did get a mention in a 2006 article. They state, “at one point, Mr. Softee branched off into a small chain of ice cream restaurants called Jimbll’s, three of which were in South Jersey.” A member of the Conway family, reminiscing about childhood trips, recalled, “We would often go there and have dinner. Their deal was gigantic sundaes called Tummy Busters.” So my mother’s hazy memory was likely of one of these South Jersey locations, where families could settle in for a real meal and cap it off with an absurdly oversized ice cream creation.

The menu had grown more ambitious. Jimbll’s featured “charcoal sirloin steaks,” “Big Jim Beef” sandwiches (described as “sliced roast beef piled high on a toasted bun”), fried chicken, seafood platters, and shore dinners. The Cincinnati location’s steak platters ranged from $1.50 to $2.19, while dinners from appetizer to dessert cost between $1.85 and $2.35. And yes, dessert was still Mister Softee ice cream. Multiple flavors and “a couple of dozen styles from plain dishes to the $2.25 Tummy Buster that consists of everything in the shop piled on half a gallon of ice cream.”

A 1969 advertisement for the Wilkes-Barre location emphasized the casual, come-as-you-are atmosphere: “Although the outside of Jimbll’s gives the impression that you have to get ‘dressed up’ to go there, this is not the case... part of the ‘charm’ of Jimbll’s is that it’s the come-as-you-are place to eat.” They served full dinners from $2.20, and children’s meals for $1.75. It was affordable family dining with the added draw of legitimate Mister Softee treats for dessert.

As the Jimbll’s brand developed, they introduced a mascot character (a cheerful figure in a striped vest and bow tie, styled like the Mister Softee mascot but distinct to the restaurant concept) that appeared prominently in their advertising by 1969.

Each location seems to have adapted slightly to its market, although this could just be discrepancy in their approach to adverting. Some locations emphasized take-out service. While others had contests, giveaways, two-for-one offers, and special prices for kids .

The Curious Case of Larry’s Dawg House

While Jimbll’s appears to have been the primary restaurant brand, newspaper records point to at least one additional Conway connected venture. In Lancaster, Ohio, a restaurant called Larry’s Dawg House appears in 1977 coverage, described as serving soft ice cream and sandwiches. That same year, local reporting noted that a former gas station at the corner of Eastwood and East Main Street was being converted into Larry’s Dawg House, which would “serve soft ice cream and sandwiches.”

A 1982 lawsuit filing further clarifies the connection. Mister Softee, Inc., based in Runnemede, New Jersey, and Larry’s Dawg House, Inc., based in Athens, Ohio, jointly sued a Carroll, Ohio man over unpaid rent on the property. The suit identified James Conway, co founder of Mister Softee, as a partner with Larry Young of Athens in the ownership of Larry’s Dawg House.

Beyond these records, little documentation has surfaced about the concept. What is clear from the available newspaper and court filings is that Conway was directly involved in the venture, and that Mister Softee, Inc. was formally tied to it in legal proceedings in the early 1980s.

Why the Restaurants Faded

What’s striking about this history is how thoroughly it’s been forgotten. If you search online for Mister Softee, you’ll find endless coverage of the trucks (their distinctive jingle, their role in American nostalgia, their surprising persistence into the 21st century). But the restaurants? They’ve all but vanished from the record outside of a few social media mentions.

The economics probably explain why. As I mentioned earlier, according to the franchise documentation from the 1960s, a restaurant franchise cost $25,000 compared to just $2,500 for a mobile unit. Restaurants required buildings, leases, full kitchens, more staff, and longer operating hours. They were competing not just with other family restaurants but with the emerging fast-food giants (McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken) whose streamlined operations and aggressive expansion were redefining casual dining.

Meanwhile, the Mister Softee trucks were thriving. Mobile, low-overhead, perfectly suited to seasonal operation, they could go where the customers were. At the company’s peak in the late 1960s, there were over 1,000 trucks operating across 15 states. The trucks were the business. These restaurants were an experiment.

By the late 1970s, the Jimbll’s name disappears from newspaper advertisements and business directories. The last references I can find are from around 1978. The Larry’s Dawg House venture would continue until the early 1980s, but Jimbll’s as a brand might have already been gone. So, no grand closing announcements and no retrospectives that I can find. The buildings were just repurposed, the signs taken down and the concept quietly shelved. Unlike the Mister Softee trucks, which remain part of the cultural landscape, these restaurants left almost no trace.

One last thing, while I was not able to find a complete menu. I was able to put together my own based on various ads I found online. It turned out pretty good.

History Repeating?

Here’s where the story gets interesting. After more than fifty years, Mister Softee is trying the brick-and-mortar experiment again. But this time, they’re being smarter about it.

In 2015, franchisee Jeff Hiller, who had driven a Mister Softee truck in the late 1980s, opened a standalone Mister Softee store in Old Town Camarillo, California. It was one of the earliest modern attempts to give the brand a permanent home again. Unlike the ambitious Jimbll’s restaurants of the 1960s with their steaks and shore dinners, this location stayed focused on what Mister Softee has always done best, soft serve ice cream. Cones, sundaes, shakes, banana boats. No charcoal grilled hamburgers, no fish fries. Just ice cream.

That West Coast storefront was not alone for long. In late 2023, two former employees from the Camarillo shop opened a second California location in Santa Barbara⁸. These were independent franchise efforts, not a large national campaign, but they showed that a permanent shop built around soft serve could work.

Back on the East Coast, the company has more recently begun expanding storefronts in its traditional Northeast territory. In March 2025, a brick and mortar shop opened in East Islip, New York, described in local coverage as the first of its kind on Long Island. Additional locations have since opened or been announced in the region. The marketing frames this as an expansion into storefronts across the Tri State area, with no mention of the restaurant ventures of the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s worth noting the timing. The truck fleet has shrunk considerably. At the company’s peak in the 1960s, over 2,000 trucks operated across 38 states. Today, there are around 625 trucks in 21 states. Rising costs, competition, and changing neighborhoods are making the mobile model harder to sustain. A permanent storefront starts to make more sense when you can’t rely on trucks alone.

So Mister Softee is returning to stationary locations, but with a crucial difference. In the 1960s, they tried to become something they weren’t. In 2025, they’re doubling down on what they’ve always been. They are the Mister Softee brand, just in a building instead of a truck.

Conclusion

The Mister Softee restaurants show how far the Conway brothers were willing to stretch their brand beyond the trucks that made them famous. In the mid 1960s, they put their name on full service locations that served steaks, seafood platters, and fried chicken alongside soft serve. It was a larger bet, with higher startup costs and permanent buildings instead of seasonal routes. Other chains had already proven that ice cream and comfort food could anchor a restaurant business, so the idea was not outlandish. Still, it is striking to think of the Mister Softee brand associated with a sirloin steak instead of an ice cream sundae.

Sadly the gamble didn’t pay off. The trucks were too good at what they did, delivering exactly what people wanted from Mister Softee, ice cream. The restaurants tried to be something more, but they couldn’t carry over their success.

The modern storefronts suggest that maybe, just maybe, there was a good idea buried in the Jimbll’s experiment. But it took fifty years and a complete rethinking of what a Mister Softee location could be to find it. No steaks, no seafood dinners, no Mister Beef. Just soft-serve ice cream, the way it was always meant to be.

Still, for a brief period in the late 1960s, you could walk into a Jimbll’s on a Friday night, order a shore dinner or a sirloin steak, and finish with a Tummy Buster sundae. And my mother, wherever she was, remembers it happened. That’s good enough for me.

If anyone reading this has photos of a Jimbll’s interior, an original menu, or memories of eating there, I’d love to hear from you. These places may be gone, but their stories deserve to be remembered.

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I don’t know if you knew this, but Back to the Future is kind of a big deal. Its known as a big hit, but that wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Robert Zemeckis was not yet a household name, and while Michael J. Fox was a TV star, translating that to movie stardom was far from guaranteed. Many studios had already passed on the project, and time travel comedies weren’t exactly in demand. But sometimes a movie arrives at exactly the right moment, and this was one of those times. It became one of the highest-grossing films of the year and launched one of the most cherished franchises Hollywood has ever produced.

On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk all about Back to the Future. I start off talking about what its like returning to your hometown after some time has passed. There’s something genuinely disorienting about walking streets you know by heart but finding them subtly wrong. The layout is familiar but the details have shifted. You catch yourself navigating toward a store that closed a decade ago, or slowing down in front of a building that used to mean something. Your feet are in the present but your memory keeps insisting otherwise. It’s about as close to time travel as most of us are ever going to get.

From there I dig into the film itself, starting with how Bob Gale cooked up the idea after stumbling across his father’s old high school yearbook. Seeing it, he wondered whether the two of them would have even gotten along back then. It’s a surprisingly simple premise for a story that became so sprawling. After that I cover the development, the casting situation that saw Eric Stoltz replaced by Fox after weeks of actual filming, the production, the release, and the reception. Which was pretty positive.

The music deserves its own podcast. Alan Silvestri’s score is one of those rare things that makes you feel the emotion of a scene before the actors do anything. And then there’s Huey Lewis and the News, whose contribution to the soundtrack sent “The Power of Love” to number one and functioned almost like an advertisement for the movie playing on every radio station in the country. The two things fed each other in a way that felt effortless but was almost certainly not.

For a while there, the film was a mania. It wasn’t just a movie people saw and enjoyed. It was something they returned to at the theaters, then on home video, then on television. Each new viewing of it reminded people why they loved it in the first place. On this episode I try to trace how that happened.

I first covered the movie on a podcast way back in 2011. This is a re-recorded version that has new material and better equipment. It is also the start of a larger visit to the franchise. I hope you enjoy it.

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Production Notes

• This is the 359th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 8 of Season 18.

• Not only is this album one of my top 5, but the soundtrack and the score are also in that grouping.

• Longish episode, but it was actually much longer. I needed to separate that stuff because I will be re-using it in upcoming episodes.

• I might revisit the movie in a few bonus tracks on Patreon.

• I had a more details look at the soundtrack, but without playing all the songs I don’t think it works.

• Was able to keep the retro audio small. I had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to play, but will save it for the future.

• The format of this episode is a bit of a hybrid. I wanted it to bridge my older format and newer format.

• The older version of the show will be disappearing.

• Still amazed we haven’t seen a reboot attempt. Its going to happen eventually, but I don’t want it to. Hold!

• 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.

In May of 1984, something changed in Birmingham, Alabama that would ripple through supermarket aisles across America. Shoppers in the Magic City became the first in the nation to see massive plastic bottles of Pepsi towering over the then familiar two-liters. They held 101 ounces of soda, an amount so large it seemed almost absurd. These were three-liter bottles and they arrived with a promise printed right on the packaging. You would get more soda for your money. For families throwing parties or just trying to stretch a dollar (like mine), it was an offer too good to pass up.

If you were buying groceries in the mid-eighties, you probably remember the moment these soda-filled titans showed up. They were impossible to miss. Taller than a two-liter but not quite as unwieldy as you might expect, the three-liter bottle became a fixture at public events and family dinners. For a few years, they were everywhere. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, they started to fade. But the story of how they got here in the first place is a tale of innovation, fierce competition, and an Alabama bottler who was willing to take a chance. So where does this all start?

The path to the three-liter bottle began decades earlier with a much more impactful innovation, plastic itself. Before the 1970s, soda came in glass bottles or cans. Glass was heavy, breakable, and very expensive to ship. Cans were convenient but came in small sizes. The soda industry needed something lighter, cheaper, and capable of holding more liquid without shattering if you dropped it.

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Enter Nathaniel Wyeth, an engineer at DuPont who came from one of America’s most famous artistic families. While his brother Andrew Wyeth was painting masterpieces, Nathaniel was solving a different kind of problem. In 1967, he wondered why plastic was not used for carbonated beverages. The answer he got was simple. They would explode. Carbonation creates pressure, and the plastic bottles of the day couldn’t handle it.

Wyeth was not convinced. He went to a store, bought a plastic detergent bottle, emptied it out, filled it with ginger ale, and put it in his refrigerator. By the next morning, the bottle had swollen so much it was wedged between the shelves. But instead of giving up, Wyeth saw potential. He began experimenting with different plastics, eventually settling on polyethylene terephthalate, better known as PET. The key was a process called biaxial orientation, which aligned the plastic molecules in two dimensions, making the material strong enough to withstand carbonation without deforming. He received a patent for the technology in 1973.

Pepsi was the first to take advantage of Wyeth’s invention. In 1970, they introduced the two-liter bottle. It was not an instant hit. For years, Pepsi had to convince consumers that buying soda in bulk made sense. A commercial from around 1978 featured a teacher explaining the economic benefits of the two-liter to skeptical students. Slowly, the format caught on. By the early eighties, two-liter bottles were standard in American homes. They were cheaper per ounce than smaller bottles, easier to store than six-packs, and resealable. This meant the soda would not go flat as quickly.

The larger size would eventually gain acceptance. Larger size, because of selling on value had a history. Pepsi had built its reputation on offering more drink for less money. During the Great Depression, when Coca-Cola was selling soda in small 6.5-ounce bottles, Pepsi offered 12 ounces for the same price. Their jingle made it clear, “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that’s a lot!” It worked. Customers appreciated the value and Pepsi carved out a loyal customer base by being the affordable choice.

By the early 1980s, Pepsi was still chasing Coca-Cola in overall market share, but it had pulled ahead in the take-home market, which included supermarkets. The cola wars were in full swing. Pepsi’s “Pepsi Challenge” blind taste tests had rattled Coca-Cola, and both companies were looking for any edge they could find. Packaging was one of those edges.

That is where Birmingham comes in. The city had been a testing ground for Coca-Cola the year before when they introduced Diet Coke with the artificial sweetener NutraSweet. Now it was Pepsi’s turn. Buffalo Rock Company, the local Pepsi bottler, had a long history of innovation. Founded in 1901 as a grocery business, Buffalo Rock had shifted to beverage bottling in the 1920s with its own ginger ale. In 1951, James C. Lee Jr, known as Jimmy, took over the company and secured the Pepsi franchise for Birmingham. He expanded aggressively, buying up Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew rights and building one of the most advanced bottling plants in the country.

Lee had a track record of bold packaging moves. In 1967, Buffalo Rock became the first company in the industry to market a 10-ounce non-returnable bottle with an easy-open spin-top. That innovation set the stage for what came next. In 1984, working closely with Pepsi headquarters in New York, Lee helped bring the three-liter bottle to market. Birmingham was chosen as the test site, and on May 14, 1984, the first three-liter bottles of Pepsi hit store shelves.

The marketing pitch was simple. For about the same price you would pay for a four-pack of 16-ounce bottles, you could get 101 ounces of Pepsi in one convenient container. The bottle itself was designed to be manageable. It was only about an inch taller and a half-inch wider than a two-liter. It also had a larger opening to make pouring easier. Research had shown that the three-liter bottle would have a longer shelf life than the two-liter because of its larger volume-to-surface-area ratio, which meant it would stay carbonated longer. Which in my experience wasn’t true.

Pepsi executives were optimistic. Roger Enrico, president of Pepsi-Cola USA, credited Buffalo Rock chairman Jimmy Lee Jr. as the driving force behind the introduction. In announcing the Birmingham test, Enrico said Lee had turned back the clock, allowing consumers to buy soft drinks at roughly the same price per ounce they paid a decade earlier. Jim Reddinger, a vice president at Buffalo Rock, compared the three-liter bottle to the economy-sized containers of detergent and other goods that had become common in supermarkets. He called it revolutionary.

It was a real value and the test was considered a success. By September, Pepsi was ready to roll out the three-liter nationally. An article in USA Today on September 17, 1984, noted that Coca-Cola USA said it would follow Pepsi’s lead and introduce three-liter bottles across the country. The 101.4-ounce bottles were expected to be in 60 percent of the country by the end of the year. Coca-Cola’s first three-liter bottle was sold on September 1, 1984, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Barbara Langlinais bought it at Broome’s Market, and Coca-Cola officials were there with cameras to mark the occasion. It was billed as the first three-liter Coke sold anywhere in the world.

From there, the bottles spread quickly. By late 1984, both Pepsi and Coke were running ads and offering coupons to promote the new size. Coke called theirs “The Thirstbuster,” tying it to the blockbuster movie Ghostbusters. The bottle even featured prominently in a promotional campaign that included tie-ins with the film in 37 countries. Ray Parker Jr., who sang the Ghostbusters theme, appeared in Coke commercials singing assorted new lyrics to the tune, “When you come in first with a real big thirst, who you gonna call? Thirst Buster.”

Pepsi countered with its own ads, emphasizing value and economy. One ad declared it the most economical way to enjoy Pepsi, with coupons offering 40 cents off. The bottles were available for all the major Pepsi products including: Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Pepsi Free, and Diet Pepsi Free. Other smaller brands of soda also got in on the action. My family frequently picked up the 3-liter of RC Cola.

For a time, the three-liter bottle worked exactly as intended. It delivered value, scale, and a sense of abundance that consumers at the time wanted. But it never replaced the two-liter as the default. Three liters was simply a lot of soda (maybe too much) for most households. If it was not finished quickly, and despite the claims, it went flat. Refrigerator space was another problem, especially in smaller kitchens. And while the price per ounce was lower, the higher shelf price could still slow a purchase.

By the early 1990s, the size began to retreat. It didn’t vanish overnight, but it stopped being heavily advertised. Some bottlers dropped it entirely. Others kept it around as a regional or occasional offering. At the same time, the industry’s priorities were shifting. The focus moved away from bulk and toward portability. The 20-ounce single-serve bottle, designed for convenience and cup holders (maybe we just need bigger ones), fit changing habits far better than any oversized take-home package.

Packaging innovation didn’t stop, but it pointed in a different direction. Smaller bottles, more flavors, and more individual choices replaced the push for sheer volume. Still, the three-liter bottle left its mark. It showed how far plastic packaging had come since the days of glass and cans. It proved that consumers would embrace larger formats when the value made sense. And it gave Buffalo Rock Company a place in soda history as the bottler willing to test the idea in Birmingham, before anyone knew how it would play out.

It was an interesting moment in packaging. Nathaniel Wyeth’s work with PET plastic made large carbonated bottles possible. Jimmy Lee Jr. and Buffalo Rock took a calculated risk and helped turn an experiment into a national product. Pepsi’s leadership saw an opening in the cola wars and pressed the advantage. Even the first Coca Cola customer to buy a three liter became part of beverage history, whether she meant to or not. In the end, the three liter bottle wasn’t a revolution. It was a step along the way, shaped by technology, competition, and changing habits. For a brief stretch in the mid 1980s, bigger really did feel better, and that towering plastic bottle was pretty convincing. For those who remember seeing it for the first time, it recalls a period when soda companies were willing to push size, value, and spectacle as far as the shelf would allow.

In the summer of 1985 I was at my cousin’s house in upstate New Jersey. We had just wrapped up a long morning of playing outside when his mom called us in for lunch. Sandwiches were already out, and next to them sat a row of bright green soda cans I did not recognize. The logo said Slice, with the dot on the “i” shaped like a lemon. On the front of the can it promised something I had never seen before on a soda, 10 percent real fruit juice. What the??

I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but my cousin cracked one open and took a drink. He said it was better than Sprite, and he was right. It was sweeter, sharper, and had a citrus bite. You could almost convince yourself it had come from an actual lemon at some point. For a while after that, Slice felt new in a way soda usually didn’t. It felt like a glimpse of what the future of soda might taste like.

So what was Slice? Where did it come from? And why did it disappear? Slice makes more sense once you move past memory and into its history.

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Slice entered the market on June 28, 1984, positioned as a fruit forward soda at a time when the lemon lime category was crowded and predictable. Introduced by PepsiCo as the replacement for Teem, Slice was meant to compete directly with Sprite and 7 Up, but with a clear point of difference. It contained real fruit juice, ten percent in the original lemon lime formula, and that fact sat at the center of its identity. Pepsi leaned hard into it, using the juice both as a flavor distinction and as a marketing hook. The slogan said it plainly, “We got the juice.” That framing shaped how Slice stood out on the shelf in 1984 and how it tends to be remembered now.

The timing turned out to be perfect. This was the mid eighties, when people were starting to glance at labels and notice ingredients, even if it had not changed many habits yet. The juice thing hit home. It made Slice appear healthier, even if it was still a soda loaded with sugar and sitting next to all the other sodas on the shelf. Perception helps move product, and Slice had it.

Slice was a hit right out of the gate. By May of 1987, it had captured over three percent of the soft drink market, which is actually pretty impressive when you consider how dominated that space was by Coke and Pepsi. Test markets in places like Rochester, New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma showed that people really did prefer a carbonated drink with juice in it.

According to articles from the time, Pepsi’s research indicated that seventy-five percent of regular lemon-lime drinkers would choose a carbonated beverage with fruit juice if given the option. This put some wind in the their sails. They expanded the line in 1986, adding Mandarin Orange, Apple, and Cherry Cola flavors, all with diet versions. Each one had that same ten percent juice content and the same promise that you were getting something a little bit better, a little bit more “real.”

Slice showed there was money in the juice adjacent soda idea. Coke and Cadbury already had the fruity brands and the distribution. Once they decided to compete directly, Slice lost the advantage. By the summer of 1988, just a year after hitting that high point, Slice’s market share had dropped to around two percent. The New York Times ran an article in July of 1988 calling it a case study in how difficult it is to create a new consumer brand, especially when competitors can just copy what you are doing and have bigger marketing budgets to back it up.

Pepsi started making changes. The juice content was quietly reduced. Packaging that used to say “10% fruit juice” now just said “with fruit juices,” no percentage mentioned. The slogan changed too, from the confident “We got the juice” to the more defensive “Either you got it or you don’t,” which felt less like a boast and more like Pepsi trying to convince people that Slice was still cool. The Apple and Cherry Cola flavors were discontinued around this time because they were the most low-performing flavors

I remember noticing the change, even if I did not recognize it at the time. Slice stopped feeling different. It still tasted good, but it no longer felt connected to fruit. Which it wasn’t. Whether the formula had changed almost didn’t matter. What faded was the clearness of the message. Slice had been built around a small but specific distinction, and once that slipped away, it blended back into the shelf with everything else.

By 1990, Pepsi had redesigned the packaging again and dropped the juice content entirely. At that point, Slice was just another flavored soda, no different from Crush or Fanta except for the name. They tried to expand again, adding Grape, Strawberry, Pineapple, and Fruit Punch to the lineup. They even brought in Fido Dido, a sunglasses-wearing cartoon character that was associated with 7-Up in international markets, to be the mascot. The new slogan was “Clearly the One,” which sounded good but didn’t mean much. By this point, Slice was coasting on name recognition and whatever shelf space it could hang onto.

The cans themselves went through a string of redesigns that mirrored how unsettled the brand had become. The original green can, most closely associated with lemon lime, gave way in 1994 to black cans with loud, colorful fruit graphics. They were kind of cool, very nineties, but they also marked a shift away from the clean fruit first identity. In 1997 the look changed again, this time to blue cans with swirled graphics, and even the flavors started to wobble. Mandarin Orange was renamed Orange Citrus with the slogan “It’s orange, only twisted,” then quietly reformulated again and returned to being Orange Slice. It felt less like refinement and more like Pepsi trying different ideas without committing to any of them.

By the summer of 2000, the lemon lime version was replaced in most markets by Sierra Mist, which would go national a few years later. Other Slice flavors lingered into the mid 2000s before being folded into Tropicana Twister Soda. After that, Slice largely disappeared from American shelves, even as the name lived on elsewhere, most notably in India, where it was repositioned as a mango drink under the Tropicana Slice label.

For a while, you could still find Slice at Walmart. In 2006, Pepsi tried one more time with something called Slice ONE, a diet version sold exclusively at Walmart in orange, grape, and berry flavors, sweetened with Splenda. It did not last. By the late 2000s or early 2010s, Slice disappeared from Pepsi’s product locator entirely.

The name did get revived eventually. In 2018, New Slice Ventures acquired the trademark and relaunched Slice with a new formula “including prebiotic, probiotic and postbiotic ingredients.” It was a completely different product, aimed at a very different market. Beyond the name, it had little connection to the original soda, though the fact that it was brought back at all suggests the brand still carried some residual recognition.

The funny thing is, I think Slice lasted longer in people’s memories than it ever did on store shelves. Not just because it was a great soda, but because it felt like it was reaching for something different. It showed up at a moment when soda companies were starting to flirt with the idea of health, or at least the appearance of it, and Slice got there early. The ten percent juice hook was simple and for a brief window it gave the brand an identity that felt distinct.

I still picture that green can sometimes, the one with the lemon logo. I remember liking it, but what comes back first is not the taste. It is how it was presented. On the shelf, with its juice claim, it felt slightly out of place. It wasn’t better, but it was different enough. That impression is what stuck with me. Long after the cans changed and the formulas shifted, the idea of Slice lingered, even as the soda itself quietly slipped away.

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On the January 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:

• Fruit Burple

• My Buddy

• WPIX Superstar Station

• Sha Na Na and Punk

• Grease

• Stranger Things

• Video Store Podcast

• Film Criticism

• When Social Media is Rewarding (It Happens)

• Back to B…

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In the 1980s my family got cable. I had heard about things like HBO, but really wasn’t sure what we might get through that magic wire. The afternoon that we got it, I was flipping through the channels and I landed on something that looked like a regular local station, except it wasn’t. There were commercials for car dealerships I had never heard of, and the weather forecast was for a city hundreds of miles away. It took me a while to understand what I was looking at. What I was seeing was a superstation, and at the time I had no idea that what I was watching was one of the reasons cable television existed in the first place.

So what was a superstation? Where did it come from? And why does it matter that a handful of local TV stations in the late 1970s ended up in living rooms across the country?

A superstation was a local independent television station, one that was not affiliated with NBC, CBS, or ABC, that ended up carried by cable systems far outside its home city and delivered nationwide by satellite. The word had been used before to describe powerful regional broadcasters, but this was something different. This was a local station deliberately redistributed on a national scale. It sounds simple enough, but the way it happened was not simple at all. It took a stubborn businessman, a quirk of copyright law, a satellite, and a movie called Deep Waters to get the whole thing started.

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The story begins in Atlanta, with a man whose name would become a household word, Ted Turner. Turner had bought a struggling independent UHF station in 1969, channel 17. It wasn’t a station with lofty goals, just a normal local station. It aired old movies, reruns of older shows, and local sports. Turner renamed it WTCG, for Turner Communications Group. They were barely able to keep the lights on. It got so bad they ran a telethon to raise money to keep it going. But Turner wasn’t a quitter, and by the early 1970s he had started to see something that most other people in broadcasting hadn’t noticed yet. There were a lot of cable systems out there in smaller towns and rural areas that had almost nothing to watch. Three network affiliates if they were lucky. Sometimes just two. And there was no independent station anywhere near them. Turner thought, what if you could get an independent station into those cable systems without laying any new wire?

The technology that made it possible was already out there. HBO had figured out in 1975 that you could use a communications satellite to send a television signal to cable systems across the country instead of running microwave relays from city to city. HBO used this to distribute its premium movie service nationally, and it worked. Turner saw what HBO had done and realized there was no reason a regular local station couldn’t do the same thing. He just needed someone to actually uplink his signal to a satellite and a legal framework that allowed cable systems to carry it.

The legal piece was the tricky part. Federal copyright law at the time required cable systems to pay royalties when they carried programming from distant stations, but it didn’t actually require those stations to give permission. There was a compulsory license built into the Copyright Act that let cable systems retransmit broadcast signals as long as they paid the fee. Turner didn’t need WTCG to be invited onto cable systems. He just needed to get the signal up to a satellite, and cable systems could pull it down on their own.

On December 17, 1976, WTCG became the first nationally distributed superstation in the United States. At one in the afternoon Eastern Time, its signal was relayed via the Satcom 1 satellite to four cable systems. They were in Grand Island, Nebraska, Newport News, Virginia, Troy, Alabama, and Newton, Kansas, a strange little map that only made sense if you were thinking like a cable operator. The first thing those subscribers saw was a 1948 film called Deep Waters, already thirty minutes in. The movie almost didn’t matter. The surprise was the channel itself, a signal from somewhere else that had slipped into their lineup.

Within two years, WTCG was available to cable systems in all fifty states. Turner changed the call letters to WTBS (Turner Broadcasting System) in 1979, and by then the station was reaching millions of households. People kept it on for simple reasons. WTCG, and later WTBS, carried Atlanta Braves baseball, Atlanta Hawks basketball, and a steady stream of classic movies. For cable systems with no local independent station, that mix filled a real gap.

Turner was aggressive about his superstation in a way the stations that followed him were not. He promoted it nationally, invested in programming, and even bought the Atlanta Braves in part to guarantee sports content for the channel. Cable systems embraced WTBS because it filled hours that would otherwise have gone unused. Much of the programming had been licensed at local station rates, because the contracts were written for a time when a station like WTCG was only expected to reach Atlanta. For a few years, Turner was paying local prices for programming that was suddenly being seen nationwide, and the industry was slow to catch up.

The second superstation arrived less than two years later. On November 9, 1978, WGN TV in Chicago was approved for satellite distribution, opening the door for its signal to reach cable systems nationwide. Unlike Turner, WGN had not set out to become a national channel. The push came from satellite carriers, including United Video, which applied to retransmit WGN’s signal under the same rules that had allowed WTCG to go national.

The decision was widely seen as new competition for Turner. Contemporary reporting framed WGN’s satellite approval as a direct challenge to WTCG’s growing reach. Turner’s operation did not object to the ruling. Instead, it dismissed the idea that WGN would pose a serious threat. Turner’s cable division argued that WTCG already had the advantage, citing its programming and its acceptance within the cable industry, and expressed confidence that it would continue to outpace any new superstation entrant.

That response says a lot. Ted Turner did not try to shut the door behind him. He saw another superstation as competition, not a legal threat. By the late 1970s, he was confident that WTCG’s early start and national push would keep it ahead, even as others copied the idea.

WGN became a superstation for the same reasons WTCG had, but with a different flavor. Where WTBS was Atlanta, WGN was Chicago, and Chicago meant the Cubs. WGN had been carrying Cubs baseball since 1948, and because the Cubs played most of their home games during the day, their telecasts became something you could watch after school. When WGN went national, millions of kids across the country suddenly had Cubs games to come home to. Harry Caray, the Cubs’ announcer on WGN, became a national figure almost overnight. People who had never set foot in Wrigley Field started following the Cubs because of what the superstation had done. It is not an exaggeration to say that WGN turned the Cubs into a national team during the 1980s, and it did it without any help from Major League Baseball. In fact, baseball was furious about it.

The sports leagues did not like superstations. The Cubs on WGN, the Braves on WTBS, and New York teams appearing on WOR were suddenly being watched far beyond their home markets, and league officials worried this diluted the value of national television contracts with ESPN and NBC. Major League Baseball responded in the mid 1980s with new fees and restrictions tied to superstation telecasts, while the NBA placed limits on how many games a superstation could air each season.

There were lawsuits and repeated petitions to the FCC. At one point MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth explored National League realignment in part to curb the Cubs’ national games on WGN. Tribune Broadcasting sued over the proposal, and the dispute became one of several high profile fights that defined the league’s uneasy relationship with superstations.

None of this killed the superstations. By the mid-1980s, WTBS was available to over 40 million cable and satellite households. WGN was not far behind. A handful of other stations followed the same path, including WOR-TV and WWOR-TV in New York/New Jersey, WPIX also in New York, and KTLA in Los Angeles. Each one carried a mix of movies, syndicated reruns, local news, and sports, and each one ended up in cable systems hundreds or thousands of miles from home.

They had a great formula for early cable TV success. Often it was the combination of things you could not get anywhere else. A Cubs game at 2:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. Wrestling on a Saturday night. A newscast from a city you had never visited. An old movie at midnight that your local stations had never bothered to air. Superstations were messy, unpolished, and wildly varied in quality, and that was exactly what I loved about them. They were different from the big networks. They felt like something had slipped through the cracks, a channel that was not supposed to be there but was, and somehow that made it more interesting.

Their decline came gradually, through a combination of regulation and competition. The FCC reinstated syndication exclusivity rules in 1988, which required cable systems to black out programs on superstations if a local station held exclusive rights to the same show. This forced superstations to create separate national feeds with different programming schedules, which made them less like the local stations they had been and more like generic cable channels.

Then the launch of Fox in 1986 absorbed a lot of the independent stations that had served as regional superstations. By the 1990s, the rise of cable channels with their own original programming meant that superstations were competing against networks that had been built from the ground up for a national audience, and they were doing it with programming that had originally been put together for a single city.

WGN held on longer than most. It carried the Cubs into the 2000s and even served as an unofficial national feed for The WB television network during the mid-1990s. But in 2014, Tribune converted WGN America into a conventional cable channel and stripped away the local Chicago programming that had made it a superstation in the first place. It became a news network called NewsNation in 2020. WTBS had already transitioned to a national cable network back in 2007, spinning off the over-the-air Atlanta station under a different name.

The era was over.

It is hard to know exactly what to make of the superstation now that it is gone. It was an improvised product, shaped by copyright law and constantly challenged by sports leagues, studios, and regulators. The programming was uneven and sometimes chaotic. But it changed what cable was for. Before superstations, cable mostly extended the reach of local network affiliates into places antennas could not reach. After superstations, cable became a way to see programming that did not belong to your market at all.

I think about that sometimes now, scrolling through streaming services looking for something to watch. Hundreds of options, all of them curated and organized and recommended by an algorithm. It is nothing like flipping through channels on cable in the early 1980s and landing on a station from a city you had never been to, watching a Cubs game or an old movie or a newscast that had nothing to do with your life. That was the superstation. It was not supposed to work. Maybe not supposed to be there. And for about twenty years, it was one of the most interesting things on television.