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I had seen bits and pieces of Dark Shadows when I was growing up, but didn’t take it seriously. Probably because it confused me. It looked and sounded like a soap opera, which wasn’t my thing, but its theme and tone was spooky. In my teens is when I discovered the show for myself and finally started to watch some episodes and the two movies. I start the show talking about how a teacher in my school shared her passion for the show with us. Her stories of watching it were right up my alley and it stuck in my brain. So when I had the opportunity to watch any episodes, I did. It wouldn’t be until I was working at Suncoast Video that I started to meet really hardcore fans of the show. After sharing some of this I move onto the show itself. I discuss the history of soap operas, the show, the people in front of an behind the camera, the musics, its reception, and much more. Dark Shadows is a soap opera. So if you watch it, you should temper your expectations. Still, just think about the idea of daily a horror how on in the middle of the day in the 1960s. Sure it was tame by our horror standards today, but it was doing something very different and for that I think it should be celebrated, rediscovered, and remembered.   Support the Retroist on Patreon

I was surprised the first time I watched Fade to Black. It was on cable TV and I hadn’t heart of it before seeing it. I was thrilled, thinking I had found some gem and couldn’t wait to get to the video store I worked at. My co-worker was unimpressed having seen it several times already. So we argued about his lack of recommendations and the shallowness of my film knowledge before finally settling down and discussing the film, which is good since its a fun film to talk about. This movie is chock full of classic film references and had a great main perfomance and a lot of quirky supporting performances. I start by telling my story of discovery before moving onto the film itself. Then I talk about the films production, cast, plot, release, movie to home video and much more. Fade to Black is an unusual horror film. It is violent, but sometimes its hard to tell when it supposed to be scary and when its supposed to be funny. This aspect of the film is what I think makes it so revisitable, so if you are looking for a light scary film with fun performances and wonderful costumes and make-up, please give it a try. Support the Retroist on Patreon

I never got to go to the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, but I really wanted to. My mother had been to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and talked about how much she loved it, so when Knoxville came along we couldn’t get enough of it. We watched stories about it on television, and whenever something appeared in the newspaper, she would save it for me. We were never likely to make the trip to Tennessee, but the fair did help convince my family to visit EPCOT Center a few months after it opened. Which was amazing. Support the Retroist on Patreon On the show, I talk about how Knoxville managed to host a World’s Fair and some of the people who made it happen. I spend time on the Sunsphere, the international pavilions, and some of the technology people were able to try there. I also get into Jake Butcher and the strange turn his story took almost immediately after the fair closed. As usual, I pull out my local newspapers to see what was happening around the time of the Fair’s debut. I have always liked World’s Fairs because they bring together a very specific mix of technology, tourism, architecture, and spectacle. Knoxville had all of that, along with a fairground that could be a little messy and occasionally ridiculous. More than 11 million people showed up, and the Sunsphere remains part of the city more than forty years later. I never made it there in 1982, but I am glad so much of it is still around to visit.

Joining Columbia House was something I wanted to do long before I really understood how it worked. I remember filling out the forms for records and later CDs, then having my mom stop me before I could send them away. A couple of my friends actually belonged, and from where I was sitting they seemed to have figured out some secret way of getting huge piles of music for almost nothing. I mostly knew Columbia House through the catalogs and all the mail that came with them. At an age when I loved getting anything addressed to me, that alone gave the whole thing a lot of appeal. On the show, I start with the Columbia Record Club in the 1950s and how it grew into the Columbia House most of us remember. I get into the famous introductory offers, the monthly selections, and how the company could afford to send people so much music for so little money up front. Later I follow Columbia House through its enormous success with CDs and into the period when buying music online started making the whole system feel increasingly unnecessary. I also pull out a newspaper from when the club first appeared near me and look at what else was going on at the time. What interests me most about Columbia House is how much I remember something I didn’t even get to try. The catalogs were everywhere and I spent plenty of time deciding which albums I would choose even though I was probably never going to send the form away. Columbia House managed to make ordering music fun (at least for me as a kid). By the time I could have joined Columbia House without asking anyone, I had plenty of other ways to buy music. The company kept going much longer than I realized, first with music and later with movies, while the part of it I remembered had already faded away. I never got the stack of tapes or CDs for a penny that I imagined as a kid, but like millions of other people, I remember choosing them and I am sad those days are over.

Diet Coke was a regular presence in our house almost as soon as it became available. Before that my family usually bought two bottles of Coca Cola each month, and I could count on drinking my share before it disappeared. Then my mom tried Diet Coke and one of those bottles changed over to the new drink. My sisters sorta would drink it too, which sometimes meant more regular Coke for me, but once that was gone I would stare at the remaining Diet Coke and wish it were something else. I found out years later that my mom felt much the same way and never actually liked it as much as regular Coke. On the show, I start before Diet Coke existed, when Coca Cola already had a successful diet soda with Tab but was still reluctant to put the Coke name on anything except the original drink. That changed in the early 1980s with a secret project that would change what people drank around the world. Aftere that, I get into the launch, the switch in sweeteners and how Diet Coke unexpectedly became part of the story of New Coke a few years later. I also pull out newspapers from when Diet Coke first showed up near me and look at what else was going on at the time. What interests me most about Diet Coke is that it eventually stopped feeling like a substitute for something else. It is its own thing. Coca Cola later created Coke Zero specifically for people who wanted something closer to regular Coke without the sugar, yet Diet Coke continued because its drinkers actually wanted Diet Coke. The company has tried changing its image and introducing new flavors, but people seem happiest when it simply lets the drink stay the same. After more than forty years, it has its own taste and its own history, and there are people who are every bit as particular about it as regular Coke drinkers are about Coke. I may have spent part of my childhood wishing that bottle in the refrigerator was something else, but I understand a lot better now why it never went away.

I am trying something a little different with this episode. I am heading back to 1977 to take a look at the original titles for the Atari VCS. I have been a lifelong Atari fan and collector and while my top games are not from the first year of the console, I am very much intrigued by the idea of a time when the console only had 9 titles. It would take me a while, but eventually I would get to collect ‘em all. Support the Retroist on Patreon On the show, I start off by talking about this time in Atari’s history and how I have loved the start of any product line. Variety is great, but a small checklist is very satisfying. In addition to the original games, I talk about Sears, cartridge technology, the art and artists, and the original cast of programmers who made these first few games. These trailblazers would all go onto other things. Its is amazing that Star Wars and the VCS landed in 1977. Two things among many that helped to define a lot of childhoods. This episode helped to remind me why I really loved early Atari games. I sat down to play them and tried to put myself into 1977. Other consoles had been trying to do what Atari was doing, but the Atari VCS with its joysticks and paddles feels so much more intuitive. The color, graphics, and sound might have been simple, but it showed what the future was going to be like. Games would grow by leaps and bounds over the next few years, but most of these games remained very playable.

The Bad News Bears made more sense to me after I played baseball when I was young. I was put on a T-ball team that seemed to be assembled from the kids nobody else wanted, and we were terrible. We never got great, but we improved and somehow eventually managed to win a few games, and got the award we were dreaming of. That was enough to make us feel like champions. When I later watched the Bears, probably on VHS or cable, I could relate to being part of a team that was bad but still worth playing for. Support the Retroist on Patreon On the show, I talk about how The Bad News Bears was made and the people who brought it to the screen. I spend time on Bill Lancaster’s screenplay and Michael Ritchie’s work with the young cast. I also look at the film’s unusual music, its reception, and the other versions that followed it. As usual, I pulled out my local newspapers to see what was happening when the movie opened in 1976. The Bad News Bears remains one of my favorite sports movies because it understands how strange youth sports can be. The kids behave like kids, the adults frequently make everything worse, and Walter Matthau never tries to make Buttermaker more respectable than he is. The film does not need a conventional victory to make you feel good about the Bears. What they accomplish together is maybe even better.

I want to start off by saying I don’t know much about soccer or as I think most of the rest of the world calls it football. But with the World Cup back in the United States I thought this would be a nice opportunity to talk about my time working security at the World Cup the first time it was played in America back in 1994. I was very young at the time, but it was great job to get. It might not have taught me much about how soccer is played, but I did finally get an idea of how rabid the fans are. On the show, I start by talking about my limited exposure to soccer growing up. I then move on to the 1994 tournament, how it was presented to an American audience, and some of the strange details surrounding it. Most of the episode is about how I got the security job at Giants Stadium, the different assignments I was given, the people I encountered, and what it was like to be close to such a large event without really understanding the sport being played. The 1994 World Cup was far more successful than many people expected and helped establish professional soccer in the United States. I cannot claim that working there turned me into a fan, but it gave me a much better understanding of what the tournament meant to the people who traveled to see it. It was loud, chaotic, and unlike anything else I had worked before.

I start this podcast episode by talking about my own trips to Action Park. I was so excited to go as a kid when I visited and got to go because it was close to where my uncle lived in Northern New Jersey. My mother was not a big fan of amusement parks unless they were connected to Disney, and she had started reading enough about Action Park to be worried. My uncle did not have the same concerns, so he took me there and I had a great time. I rode what I could, brought home brochures, talked about it all summer, and assumed I would keep going back. That didn’t happen. Then I talk about how Action Park came to be. The story starts with Gene Mulvihill, Great Gorge, Vernon Valley, and the problem of what a ski resort is supposed to do when the weather gets warm. The Alpine Slide came first, and from there the place kept growing into something much larger. Action Park was built around participation, which meant you were not simply strapped into a ride and moved along. You had some control, or at least the feeling of control, and that was a big part of what made the park so exciting. Of course, that same idea also made the place dangerous. In the episode, I get into the rides people still talk about, including the Alpine Slide and the Cannonball Loop. I also spend time on the wave pool, Motor World, and some of the other attractions that helped make Action Park feel less like a normal amusement park and more like its own strange world. Looking back now, it is much easier to see how quickly excitement could turn into something else. The darker part of the Action Park story is impossible to avoid. I talk about the deaths and injuries connected to the park, along with the lawsuits and insurance problems that followed it for years. Some of what happened there is shocking even if you already know the general reputation. The park has become famous as a place that probably should not have been allowed to operate the way it did, and there is plenty of truth in that version of the story. But I did not want this episode to be only about the worst things that happened there. For a lot of kids from New Jersey and the surrounding area, Action Park was a summer trip people talked about afterward. It was a place that felt enormous, especially if you were young enough to believe you could eventually get to everything. The danger is part of the story, but so is the memory of wanting to go back. That is what makes Action Park such a strange subject for me. The stories about the park are real, and some are worse than I understood when I was young. At the same time, my own connection to the place is still tied to being a kid who thought he had found the most exciting park in New Jersey. My last trip there had already happened before I knew it, which may be part of why the place stayed so large in my mind. Action Park does not fit neatly into one version of itself, and that is why it still feels worth talking about.

I begin this podcast episode by talking about the strange timing of television in our lives. Sometimes a show arrives at just the right moment, and for a while it feels like part of your weekly routine. Then you get older, your habits change, and without really deciding to, you stop watching. Years later, you come back to it and realize there was a whole stretch of the story you never saw. Perfect Strangers was one of those shows for me. Then I talk about Perfect Strangers, including its creation, the people in front of and behind the camera, its place as one of the anchors of ABC’s TGIF lineup, and the full run of the series from its mid eighties debut through its final season in the early nineties. I also talk about how the show changed over time, how Balki and Larry grew from mismatched roommates into family, and how Perfect Strangers helped lead to one of television’s most successful spinoffs, Family Matters. Perfect Strangers worked because Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn Baker were so right together. The show could be very broad, and sometimes very silly, but their chemistry kept it grounded. Balki and Larry were funny because they were opposites, but the show lasted because you believed they cared about each other. That friendship gave all the physical comedy, misunderstandings, and catchphrases something warm to hang onto. Metagirl is also back this week with a Top 5 list of the best episodes of Perfect Strangers. If you watched the show years ago, it is a nice reminder of why people loved it. If you never really watched it, it might give you a good place to start.

I first saw the Game Genie at a friend’s house just after Christmas in 1991. We were doing the usual thing, seeing what everyone got, trying out games, handing controllers back and forth. Then he brought out the Game Genie and plugged it into the Nintendo. The second I saw what it could do, I wanted one of my own. It was that simple. If you spent enough time with games, you knew their rules pretty well, and this thing seemed to step right past them. On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk about that first time seeing the Game Genie in action and why it was such a revelation the moment it was plugged in. Until then, games felt locked. They were hard in the ways they were hard, and if you could not get past something, that was that. Then this little cartridge adapter shows up and suddenly you can start with extra lives, make impossible jumps easier, or see parts of a game you had never been able to reach on your own. It did not feel like a normal accessory. It felt like you were getting access to something you were not really supposed to have. From there I get into how the Game Genie actually worked, by changing the values a game was reading without permanently altering the cartridge itself. I talk about where the device came from, how Codemasters developed the idea, how Galoob brought it to the United States, and how Nintendo saw it as a real threat almost immediately. A big part of the episode is the court case that followed, with Nintendo arguing that the Game Genie created unauthorized derivative works and Galoob arguing that players were only changing the experience temporarily on games they already owned. It is a fascinating fight because the whole thing turns on a question that sounds simple but wasn’t clarified at the time. What still makes the Game Genie worth talking about is that it sits right at the point where childhood excitement, technical ingenuity, and corporate control all ran into each other. For user, it was a way to bend games that had always seemed rigid and unforgiving. For Nintendo, it looked like somebody else stepping in between them and their product. And for anyone looking back on it now, it is a good reminder that this odd little device was tied to much bigger questions about ownership, software, and who gets to decide what a game is once you bring it home.

There were a few cars that could stop me in my tracks when I was a kid, and the DeLorean was near the top of the list. We had one in my town, parked outside a dentist’s office, and just knowing it was amazing. It was not something you expected to see in everyday life. It looked like it had landed from somewhere else, all sharp lines and brushed metal, like the future had somehow ended up next to where I got scolded for not brushing properly. On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk about what it was like to grow up with that kind of local landmark, a car that felt larger than life before I knew much at all about how it came to be. Back then, the DeLorean was just the DeLorean to me, a machine that stood apart from every other car on the road. Later on, of course, I came to understand that behind it was John DeLorean himself, a figure who was just as unusual, ambitious, and complicated as the car that carried his name. That is part of what makes this story so interesting to revisit. You cannot really separate the man from the machine. From there I get into both sides of that story. I talk about the car itself, why it looked the way it did, why it made such an impression, and how it managed to become iconic even though its actual time on the market was so short. I also get into John DeLorean, his rise in the auto industry, the image he built around himself, and the strange and sometimes messy path that led to the creation of the company. It is one of those stories where big ideas, personality, timing, and unexpected trouble. What makes the DeLorean worth talking about now is that it carries two stories at once. There is the car people remember, and then there is the man who willed it into existence. One became a symbol, helped along by pop culture and memory, while the other remains a much harder figure to pin down. Bringing them together in one episode felt like the right way to do it, because the DeLorean was never just a car. It was a dream, a reputation, a gamble, and for some of us, one of those unforgettable sights from childhood.

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. Support the Retroist on Patreon 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.

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. 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.

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. 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, stranger, 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 the one that really fired up your imagination. For a lot of us, it was the movie that made the future feel close enough to almost touch.