While not as common as they used to be here in the United States, for a long time at restaurants you could get a beverage from a moving drink dispenser. Often referred to as bubblers, merchandisers, or dispensers, they came in many forms. Depending on the design, circulation could keep pulp suspended, improve cooling, reduce deposits on the container walls, and help mix the drink. Maybe more importantly the continuously moving liquid allowed people to see the drink in action. This motion both helped to mix the drink, but it also acted as an attractive advertisement for the often colorful beverage.

The idea of using moving fruit juice as a visual attraction appeared by the early 1920s. Leonard Sintzel filed a patent in 1921 for an advertising device that continuously circulated fruit juice through visible glass parts. The device was mainly intended to just simulate the preparation of fresh fruit juice. So it was more of an advertising display than a practical restaurant drink dispenser and it shows that moving fruit juice was already being used to attract customers before the middle of the 1920s.

The first attempt at something more practical, a mixer/dispenser, came from a patent from Harry C Smith and Dean B Gregg filed on May 18, 1925. Their machine used a transparent beverage container with a pump that continuously forced the beverage upward inside the container. There the liquid struck a deflector and fell back into the beverage. Designed to be used with orange juice, the inventors stated that the circulation helped keep pulp and other solid material from settling. Much like with Sintzel’s patent they also pointed out that the moving beverage attracted attention and could increase sales.

The idea turned out to be popular and as you might expect imitators were born and became more elaborate. In 1927, Harry Cleveland Smith filed a patent for the Autodrink Corporation. His machine mixed pulp into the drink while pumping the beverage upward and allowing it to fall through the display in a cascade. Sounds similar to the 1925 design, but this also added lighting to make the flow of the beverage more noticeable. Others would follow with some variation, but they all followed the same idea. That the dispenser was there to help advertise the drink.

In the postwar years of the United States a more modern version of the dispenser made by William H Jacobs began to take shape. His big changes were based around reducing the number of mechanical parts touching the drink. This reduced wear and also made the machine easier to clean. His magnetically driven impeller could pump liquid without a drive shaft passing through the liquid like so many past models. The liquid would be pumped to the top and then would flow down the side. This helped to prevent material from collecting on the side walls. For most people born after the middle of the 20th century, this is the design we are familiar with.

Jacobs’ work became the centerpiece of the company Jet Spray starting in 1953. By the end of that year, demand had grown so much that they expanded production. That company would file multiple trademarks for refrigerated beverage dispensers throughout the decade. One of the company’s advertising lines summed up what they were trying to make, “People Drink What They See.”

A rival of Jet Spray came directly out of the company. Three employees would leave the company and form Crathco in 1962. Crathco is important, not just because they have been making these dispensers for decades, but because they used the term Bubblers for their product. When I worked at an ice cream parlor as a kid, we had two Crathco Bubblers that I filled up every morning. Watching it start to bubble was one of my favorite parts of the day.

Here is a modern video of a Crathco Simplicity Bubbler. As you can see they did away with the excessive movement, which I find a little boring, but they say it reduces foaming. Plus cleanup looks super easy.

Volrath posted a great sales video showing some of their beverage dispensers and the movement on these is just what I like to see.

Lots of other companies made machines and I wanted to talk about two of them. One I have seen, the other I just read about. In Billboard Magazine’s November 1954 issue they mentioned that Tone Products Company was showing a “Kool Aire Animated Raindrop Dispenser.” Instead of just cascading down the side, the Lucite bowl had an animated raindrop effect. I have found photos of other vintage Kool Aire dispensers online, but not an animated one yet. Hopefully someone finds and posts a working one someday.

While stock dispensers are well-known I wanted to talk a little bit about McDonald’s Orange Drink dispensers. These large round glass containers haven’t been used at a McDonald’s in a very long time, but if you have ever seen one, they are very memorable. Here is an example of one from the movie, The Founder.

I also got to see one when I went to the replica of McDonald’s No. 1 Store Museum in Des Plaines, Illinois. It is unfortunately gone now, but I still have my photos.

Most people are more familiar with the Orange Bowl containers that you would see at community events that served McDonald’s Orange Drink. But their drink dispenser was a staple in the early years of the store when they tended to be walk-ups and you had a better view of the prep areas.

I have seen lots of modern dispensers, but its always treat when I spot a vintage one still being used. The photo at the top of this article is from the Triple XXX Rootbeer Drive-in in Issaquah, WA. Unfortunately its now closed, but I am glad I got to see their dispenser in action.

I didn’t live through what looked like a golden age of their development when these dispensers were made in all sorts of form factors and used tricks to draw your attention. Those machines show up from time to time for sale online, but you rarely see them in action. So we lost a lot of the history of something people enjoyed and eventually took for granted. Sadly now, I am not seeing many of the dispensers as often as I used to and I am not sure why. My guess is that it is the changing nature of the drink market. It might be a small thing to most, but I enjoyed watching the colorful liquid splash around and cascade down the sides of these machines. They probably won’t make a major comeback, but hopefully if you see one you can take a moment to appreciate their history and just how beautiful they are.

In 1987, the ABC news program 20/20 was trying to warn parents about the growing popularity of violent horror movies among kids. Having worked in a video store at the time, I can personally vouch for their popularity at the time. The report called, VCR Horrors, looks at how video tape was giving kids access to thing that adults weren’t comfortable with them watching. Presented by Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, with reporting by Bob Brown, its a an interesting time capsule that helps capture the time when home video was changing entertainment and creating new concerns about what was entering our living rooms.

By the late eighties, the VCR was becoming pretty common. In early 1987, nearly half of homes in America with televisions had a VCR. The video rental business was booming and more and more films were showing up on shelves. This was a boon to younger viewers who could now see movies at home that they been too young to see in a theater. It was a trend that was only growing. A March 1986 article in the Potomac News described teenagers who preferred video rentals because they were inexpensive and allowed them to watch movies with friends. Unsurprisingly since they make for great group viewing horror films were popular.

For fans of horror, this was all good news. The commercial success of earlier films such as Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had demonstrated that inexpensive horror productions could attract large audiences. Home video provided another market for these films, while giving smaller productions a way to reach viewers outside traditional theaters.

A year later 20/20 reported on the trend and the segment features interviews with several teenage horror fans. It does a nice job of catching their enthusiasm and nailing down exactly how they said they were watching at home. They describe competing to see who could keep their eyes open during the most frightening scenes and discuss the killings and special effects, treating the violence as something amusing rather than disturbing.

I can picture adults watching 20/20 that night and learning from it that the films these kids were watching were different from the older horror movies they were familiar with. They might expect suspenseful gothic horror only find out about movies like Friday the 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Evil Dead. The report presented this change as evidence that horror movies were becoming increasingly extreme.

Horror critic Chas Balun appears to conform this. Explaining that audiences had developed different expectations. He believed that viewers accustomed to television and music videos wanted things turned up to a notch in modern horror.

The real sticking point and around the fear of the VCR was access. Movie theaters usually enforced the age restrictions associated with R rated films, but video stores did their own thing. While some businesses required a parent’s permission, many allowed kids to rent films on their own with little oversight. To further confound parents, some direct to video releases could reach stores without a familiar theatrical rating. In this 1986 issues of Billboard magazine, they mention that numerous home video releases had never been submitted to the MPAA for classification

An October 1987 article in the Jackson Citizen Patriot examined this problem in their local video stores. They confirmed that policies differed between businesses, with only some stores refusing to rent adult titles to children. Most didn’t want to police what people were renting and said they depended on parents to decide which movies were appropriate. The article is further proof that concerns about children renting horror films were already being discussed outside the television report.

While I often think this sort of reporting is overblown, it does bring up some interesting things, and I like that it encouraged parents to pay attention to what their kids were up to. Several expressed surprise at the amount of graphic violence and they show the parents reacting to various scenes. The narrative moves between the kids and the adult and we see the gulf between how they perceive what they are seeing.

They give extra attention to the way women are treated in horror films and its one of the reports main concerns. If you had never seen a modern horror film, I imagine that pattern could be very shocking. They use examples from various films to illustrate the point. Even the teens seem to question why women were so often portrayed as victims. Actress Linnea Quigley, who has appeared in many horror films, makes an appearance to describe the various situations her characters have experienced.

They take this up a notch by examining actual acts of violence that authorities had tried to connect with horror films. One involved the killing of Texas teenager Theresa Downing following a graduation party where the video Faces of Death had been shown. The report does acknowledge that police believed alcohol was probably more important than the video in this case. These incidents make the program more alarming, but they don’t establish that horror movies had caused any crimes. This is probably the biggest reach of the report.

As expected one group did not agree that horror movies were dangerous. The filmmakers they interviewed thought that the violence was exaggerated enough to be clearly fictional and obviously not actual violence. They also mentioned that horror movies were useful in that they allowed people to experience fear in a controlled setting.

This report is both an argument between generations about how to perceive genre AND moral panic reporting. It also captures a moment when tech was changing how we do something. Which is the type of story that repeats itself time and again as technology continues to change how we view things. As we react to those changes and decide what’s best to do, I think it might help to take a look back and see that we are not confronting these things for the first time.

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.

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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.

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Production Notes

• This is the 374th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 27 of Season 18.

• This show was broadcast before I got to watch it and while my teacher put it in my sights, it was at Suncoast where I really met superfans. We didn’t have as man of them as say, Star Trek, but they were maybe even more rabid. It was something to behold.

• Dark Shadows movies is okay. Not my favorite take on the subject matter, but the choice makes sense.

• Barnabas Collins was originally supposed to be a temporary character. Jonathan Frid was hired for what was planned as a 13 week role, with Barnabas eventually being destroyed. His popularity changed those plans rather dramatically.

• For the first 274 numbered episodes, Alexandra Moltke introduced the show as Victoria Winters, usually beginning with the familiar words, My name is Victoria Winters. Starting with episode 275, the narration began rotating among members of the cast and was written in the third person.

• Dark Shadows produced 1,225 episodes, but the final episode was numbered 1245. ABC adjusted the numbering after preemptions so that Friday episodes would continue to end in a five or zero.

• Despite Barnabas being a vampire, the show avoided actually using the word for quite a while. It was not spoken until episode 410, broadcast in January 1968.

• Dark Shadows fans did more than keep conventions and fanzines going after cancellation. Fan groups helped get the series back into syndication during the 1970s and 1980s, and the Television Academy credits their continued campaigning with helping encourage Dan Curtis to revive the series in 1991.

• Seaview Terrace, the real house used for the exterior of Collinwood, is much larger than the television shots suggest. The Newport mansion is about 44,000 square feet, with 29 bedrooms and more than 450 windows. It was completed in 1925.

• Jonathan Frid received an extraordinary amount of mail at the height of the show’s popularity. Accounts from the period put it at as many as 5,000 letters a week. This gives some idea of how quickly Barnabas had turned him into a celebrity.

• I will check out the animated version if it every happens, but boy I wish we lived in a world where they could do another soap opera version of the show.

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

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

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

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Before it was an HBO television series, Tales from the Crypt was a comic book series and a movie. The series was a dark comedy that was a staple of the network for years. It attracted lots of star power with people many film celebrities willing to appear on the show because it wasn’t quite TV (its was HBO.)

Hosted by the Crypt Keeper, the show was a mix…

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Lately I have been thinking about all the small toy lines that crossed my path in the eighties that I didn’t have the money to collect. The Infaceables are a perfect example of one such line. Transforming toys were all the rage in the mid eighties and everyone was doing different takes. Infaceables kept it simple, but unique. They use vacuum suction to change the face of your figure from a human fantasy warrior to an animal. This one feature was central to the entire line of toys.

They were made by Galoob, a company that had been around since 1957. Lewis and Barbara Galoob began the company as a small distributor of toys and stationery in San Francisco. Their son David later took over the company in 1970 and pushed it toward developing more products of its own. By the time the Infaceables appeared, Galoob was already selling action figures connected to properties such as The A-Team and Blackstar.

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They are often billed as toys from 1984 due to copyright markings, but I can’t find any evidence that they were sold before 1985. That is also the year that they were prominently featured in Galoob’s dealer catalog. So if you are trying to remember what year you got yours, I have found them being sold overseas as early as April of 1985, but in the United States the earliest newspaper ads are from June of that year.

The coolest part of the figures was how the transformation worked. They called it Magic Vacuum Action. The face of each figure had a flexible outer skin with another sculpt underneath it. Pulling the upper body away from the legs changed the air pressure inside the figure and the flexible face was pulled inward against the hidden sculpt. Sadly, this is also the reason why intact figures can be difficult to find today. The outer face’s material was fragile and it could split, tear, or deteriorate over time. So many surviving figures have lost the feature that originally made them so cool.

In total they made eight figures, four heroes and four villains. Each was about six inches tall, came with its own weapon, and had a short background to explain its transformation. On the side of good you had Iron Lion, Sphinx, War Dog, and Robash. The villains were Brainor, Tembo, Tuskus, and Torto.

In a move that helped elevate the toy line, they also produced three vehicles, the Incredible Thrasher, Horrible Hammer, and Crusher Cruiser. The Incredible Thrasher and Horrible Hammer used a handle to spin a soft weapon around the vehicle. The Crusher Cruiser was a larger vehicle and had large jaws that could bite down and rotate. A lot of these smaller toy runs didn’t get vehicles. Online I read that these vehicles began as products for Galoob’s Blackstar line, but I can’t find any other sources to confirm it. It would explain how a toy line with only eight figures managed to get three vehicles.

Pricing varied depending on when and where you bought them. The figures retailed at $5.99, but they usually went for $3.99 during the first year. I found a lot more variability around the vehicle prices, with prices ranging from $14.99 to as high as $24.99. These might not seem like high prices now, but these were standard toy prices. So this was not a budget toy line.

I did find some media coverage from 1985 and the toys are, of course, compared to other action figure lines such as Transformers, M A S K, and Sectaurs, all of which performed much better. But Infaceables were fun and creative and had some variation. So what went wrong?

Looking online I see the commercial that I remember, but that is all I remember about their promotion. While they might have been a major investment by Galoob, they were not being supported in the same way other more popular toys at the time were being promoted. Properties like Transformers and Masters of the Universe had regular television and print exposure tied to their ongoing release. In a market saturated with toys, that might have been what made the difference between success and failure.

They also might have misread the transforming toy market, which was hot at the time. Transformers and Gobots had made changing from one form into another a major toy feature. The Infaceables used the same basic idea, but only transformed the face with the body remaining the same. That was cool, but even at its best, it was sort of subtle. As a kid, you could easily be sold on what the commercial presented, but I am not sure these would stand up to comparisons with Transformers in the schoolyard.

So when 1986 rolled around, they were not included in Galoob’s 1986 dealer catalog. That doesn’t mean they weren’t still available in stores, but without advertising support their prices started to drop on their march toward the clearance bin. I am still seeing them for sale as late as Christmas of 1987. This, of course, doesn’t mean that Galoob was still making them. They just had a lot of product to move.

They also kept selling them overseas, often under different names. I can find mentions of them in countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy. It does not appear that they were any more popular there than in the United States, but in all the countries where they were sold, they did find fans who still remember them fondly.

Sadly though, there is a lot about the Infaceables that has not been documented. We don’t know much about their production history or who developed the vacuum face mechanism. We also don’t know how they performed and why Galoob ended the line. Even the question of the Blackstar origin of the vehicles remains unresolved. What we do know, though, is that Galoob took a chance on a novel idea. It might not have succeeded, but for some kids, this was their favorite toy. That is why I wanted to write something about them. Who knows, maybe someone who worked at Galoob will read this and can shed some more light on this wonderful set of toys. I can only hope.

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.

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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.

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Production Notes

• This is the 373rd episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 23 of Season 18.

• Eric and Stella’s house was filmed at 302 Market Street in Venice. The house was reportedly still standing and recognizable in 2023.

• Linda Kerridge and Dennis Christopher had dated before the movie was made. According to Christopher’s commentary, Kerridge recommended him for the part of Eric, although their relationship had ended by the time filming began.

• Christopher has said that some of the scenes between Eric and Marilyn were partly improvised. He was already making changes to Eric after accepting the role, and that apparently extended beyond the voices and other character details.

• Christopher needed some convincing before signing on. Besides his concerns about the dialogue, he remembers the producers increasing their offer while trying to get him to accept the role. Good they got him, he is perfect for the role.

• The police station scenes were filmed at the old Venice Jail at 685 Venice Boulevard. Several other Venice locations turn up throughout the movie as well.

• There are a couple of songs in the movie that are easy to overlook next to Craig Safan’s score. Shoes contributed Tomorrow Night, while Sid Terror’s Undead supplied I Was a Teenage Vampire.

• Dennis Christopher was still promoting Breaking Away while Fade to Black was being made. A Washington Post profile published only days after filming wrapped mentions that he had just finished playing a psychotic killer, which must have been quite a change for people who knew him primarily as Dave Stoller.

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

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

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

I learned about the haunted Toys R Us the same way most other people did. I saw it on the TV show That’s Incredible. It was a show that I liked in general, but when things veered toward the supernatural I was especially interested. With this episode we have a toy store chain that I love where things were moving around on their own. Then they add a psychic to the mix to hold a seance inside the store. Needless to say, it was very memorable and all these years later when I think of the show, this episode really stands out.

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That’s Incredible premiered on March 3, 1980. The hour long show was hosted by John Davidson, Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton. In it they would show stories about unusual people or events, dangerous stunts, and sometimes the unexplained. Shows like Real People and In Search Of had shown that people wanted to watch this type of television and they really took to it. The show finished third in the television ratings for the 1979 to 1980 season.

The episode featuring the haunted Toys R Us was first broadcast on September 8, 1980, although it would appear a week or two later in some markets. As you can see from the full episode description, it was quite an episode. Mount St. Helens was still very fresh in people’s minds and I remember a lot of TV for years afterwards was playing and replaying footage of the eruption. I mostly wanted to put a date to this episode because, despite many people talking about it online, the date of the episode hasn’t been documented fully. The episode description above is taken from the September 6, 1980 edition of the Santa Barbara News Press. It was printed on a Saturday but the listing spans the week and the show was broadcast on Monday.

The full episode is not currently posted online, but here is a segment from a later episode of the show.

The Toys R Us featured on the show was in Sunnyvale, California. It opened in 1970 and was located at 130 East El Camino Real. On the outside it appeared to be like any location of the growing chain, but the history that would become attached to the store went back much further.

The stories about strange things happening inside the store started well before its appearance on television. Employees reported merchandise moving and strange noises inside the building. There were also stories about things happening when few or no customers were around. By 1978 these reports were interesting enough to become a national newspaper story.

The stories are what you would expect from a haunting. Employees reported strange noises and voices, things moving on their own, and my favorite, a story about a talking doll. A customer returned a large talking doll reporting that it didn’t work. When it was tested by the staff, they couldn’t get it working either. Then they put it into its box and it began to make noise. Opening the box though would make it stop. They reportedly tried this several times with the doll and it kept only talking while in the box.

Word spread and a group of psychic researchers eventually spent a night inside the store. One of the people involved was Sylvia Browne, who would later become nationally known. Browne believed that there was a man haunting the store, but who?

Now before I get into more details of the haunting I wanted to touch on the background of where the store was built. The land the store was built on had once been part of a larger ranch owned by Martin Murphy Jr. called Bay View Ranch. The Murphy family became an important part of the early history of the area that would become Sunnyvale and their story would eventually provide the haunting with its story.

Browne identified the ghost as a man usually called John, Jan, Johnny, or Yonny Johnson depending on what story you hear. She said he had worked on the Murphy property during the nineteenth century. He was also described as a preacher who sometimes worked on the ranch. According to Browne, Johnson had fallen in love with Martin Murphy’s daughter Elizabeth.

Unfortunately for Johnson, Elizabeth didn’t have feelings for him, and she eventually met someone else and left with them. John kept working at the ranch and was chopping wood when he badly injured his leg with an axe. He tried to stop the bleeding but couldn’t and eventually died from the injury. Browne believed his feelings for Elizabeth had kept him attached to the property where he died.

This story was perfect for a show like That’s Incredible. So many employees were willing to talk about things they had experienced. Then you had a celebrity psychic and a seance that gave the show something it could actually bring its cameras into the store to cover. People love a good ghost story, but what made it special and memorable was that it was also a Toys R Us story. This was a safe place for me, but I could picture it after dark filled with ghosts running amuck.

It’s such a good story, I am not surprised how durable it is. It returned to national television again in 1991 on Haunted Lives, True Ghost Stories hosted by Leonard Nimoy. This special brought current and former employees together to talk about the store and their stories sounded much like the reports that had appeared more than a decade earlier. I am so glad that they made a nineties version of this same story so that the next generation could hear about it.

If you are skeptically minded you might be wondering if anyone has looked into the history of the location to confirm Browne’s story. They did and the history of the Murphy family does not match the story Sylvia Browne told. Elizabeth Murphy married William Taaffe in 1863, and her husband died in 1869. Elizabeth died in 1875 at the age of 30. So she couldn’t have rejected Johnson during the 1880s like in the story. Even the name Browne said the ghost used for Elizabeth causes a problem, since family records indicate she was known as Lizzie rather than Beth.

Researchers have also been unable to find the Johnson described by Browne. Census records show Swedish farm workers in the area, but none who fit the story. Newspaper searches have not uncovered the supposedly documented axe accident either. None of these are stories being told by the employees in the store. They were just sharing what they claimed to see. Their stories were being reported before That’s Incredible and continued long afterward.

The Toys R Us continued operating in Sunnyvale until 2018. I visited the location about 11 years before that just to shop. I didn’t witness anything paranormal. After the chain closed all its American stores, the building was temporarily and appropriately used by Spirit Halloween. REI eventually took over the location and opened there in 2021.

Because of the internet and people’s TV watching memories, the closing of Toys R Us didn’t end the story. Instead it’s found new life online. The old television segments can still be watched and the story is regularly repeated on paranormal sites and in discussions by people who remember shopping there. While the idea of ghosts and haunting is fascinating, having the haunting be in a toy store dials up the interest level. That is certainly why it stayed with me. I saw plenty of strange stories on That’s Incredible, but none of them stuck with me like this one. Once I knew there was supposed to be a haunted one out in California, I never really forgot about it, and I am glad I got to briefly see it firsthand.

Over the years a lot of people I have encountered have complained to me about reboots, remakes and continuations of franchises they loved when they were younger. The complaints can be pretty specific, but you can tell their is an often unaddressed emotional component to their complaint.

The thing is, the thing you think is for you, isn’t really for you.…

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Usually on the 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. This month I thought I would try something a little different and just start talkingt about Halloween.

Initially this was just going to be about preparing for Halloween, but once you st…

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I can still remember the first Nerf ball I got. Like so many kids in America, I got a Nerf Football for Christmas. While I would not have described myself as particularly interested in football at the time, I was still excited to finally have once since all my friends already did. Unfortunately for me, while most kids loved Nerf products, so did other m…

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For Christmas of 1983, I received a toy that wasn’t on my list, a Manglor. Specifically, the one I received was Manglord. While I didn’t ask for him, I was pretty excited to get him. The TV commercials promised a toy experience like no other. I could stretch, crush, and even tear Manglord apart and he could be returned to his original shape or whatever shape I chose. I remember playing with it that morning and putting it aside. When I went back to it again, it was gone. Manglord could survive a lot of abuse, but he wasn’t coming back from being eaten by a dog. I wish I could say this was the last time I saw him, but sadly it was not, and it is something I would rather not talk about.

Manglors were made by the company Ideal and were being demonstrated at the New York Toy Fair in February 1983. They would hit store shelves later that year. In a crowded field of action figures, the company thought they were onto something different. A figure that invited being damaged.

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Manglors were made from Sorbothane, a soft viscoelastic polyurethane material that behaves partly like rubber and partly like a very thick gel. In this toyline it was a soft and sticky material that could be stretched, manipulated, and crushed. So kids could even pull them apart and stick them back together however they wanted. Heck, you could even combine parts from other Manglors. If you didn’t guess, this is where they got their name. You could mangle them all you want and so they became Manglors. The problem was that they worked better when being destroyed than when being repaired.

You could easily tear them apart and the pieces were sticky enough to be pressed back onto the figure. That didn’t mean that they returned to their original condition. After being torn apart, pieces were difficult to place back together in the right way. Also, when you kept tearing them apart, it weakened the figure. So the thing you were encouraged to do was rapidly wrecking your toy. This attracted attention before 1983 ended.

Before I get into that, let me tell you a little about the figures and playset. The original figures were Manglord, Manglosaurus, and Manglodactyl. They also created a playset called Manglor Mountain. The next year they added Manglodemon, Manglodragon, and Manglizard for a total of six figures. With the new figures they added a new package for them. The Manglors now came inside plastic eggs called Prehi Storage Play Eggs. These eggs contained a base and figure stand and worked as packaging, storage, and a small play environment.

Manglors retailed for $5.99, but during the first year you could find them on sale for as low as $3.99. The playset would run you anywhere between $9.99 and $15.99. This price would start to slip during year two and drop even further as the toys went into the clearance bins. Five years later, you could still find the toys being advertised with figures going for less than a dollar.

As I mentioned, not everyone was convinced that these were good toys. The Consumer Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action, long name, included Manglors on its list of the year’s worst toys. The group had children test toys and judged them partly on whether they worked as advertised, and Manglors failed their test. When kids tore a figure into pieces, not only did it not go together as they hoped, the kids also had trouble determining where the pieces originally belonged. The group also had some complaints about the goo used in the playset, but when Ideal was asked to comment, they responded by saying they had not received complaints of that type.

The criticism didn’t stop there. About a year later, the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, noted the same basic problem. They would cover the Manglors in their magazine and TV show aimed at kids, Penny Power. In a June 1985 episode they were highly critical of the Manglors, referring to them as “a piece of junk.” Sadly, I couldn’t find the episode, but only the newspaper coverage of it.

Manglors must have been at least initially popular. After all, Ideal released some new ones during year two and they were still showing up in toy catalogs. Still, I can’t find any sales figures and it’s hard to tell if this was just momentum based on predictions or real market driven decision making. The timing also didn’t help them. The mid eighties action figure market was very crowded. They might have had an unusual feature to make them stand out, but that was being questioned in the press.

Two other roadblocks were media support and variety. The most successful toys from this era often had some manner of cartoon or comic attached to them. These are often great places to introduce new additions to a toyline. But with just seven toys, there wasn’t a lot to build upon or market. Whatever the case, by the end of year two, it is pretty apparent that the Manglors were a dead toyline.

They might be better remembered if they had been easy to collect. Unfortunately, the way the toys were made and how they were played with made them very delicate as they aged. Surviving figures in good original condition became difficult to find. So the very feature that helped sell Manglors also worked against their long term collectibility. Fortunately, they were not forgotten.

Collectors eventually helped bring the name back. Toyfinity secured the rights to the Manglors property in the early 2010s and began working with Onell Design on plans to revive it. In 2015, Onell released Glyos figures inspired by the original Manglors while the two companies continued developing a new version of the toyline. The actual Manglors revival arrived in 2023 using the Glyos building system. Its removable hard plastic parts could actually be taken apart and reconnected, finally allowing the basic Manglors idea to work the way the original toys had promised.

The Manglor idea was simple. What if you could break your toy and put it back together any way you want? The promise was great, but the technology at the time really couldn’t deliver. That didn’t mean it wasn’t memorable. Kids like myself thought it was really cool and years later, when another company revived the idea with a more durable variation, we opened our wallets. They might not be as popular as GI Joe or the Transformers, but they have had an interesting run.

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.

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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.

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Production Notes

• This is the 372nd episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 23 of Season 18.

• When I first saw the Sun Sphere in person, it blew my mind. It has been so long since I had seen the news about it. It lived up to the hype. The Rubik’s Cube also did.

• The Simpsons episode is great. One of the golden eras of the show.

• Lots of retro audio in this one. I had to a cut a bunch of it out because I wanted to include so much more.

• Sadly, like so many people, I have never been to a world’s fair in my life. I don’t think I would be as obsessed with them if my mom hadn’t been to the 1964 Fair. Wish she had take photos of her time there. I have one or two photos that might be in the fair, but its not obvious.

• It must have been so exciting to live in Knoxville that summer. A daily party that everyone was invited to attend.

• I didn’t go into details about what happened financially and the court cases. I wanted to mention it, but didn’t want to linger since its a mark on the fair that wasn’t exactly the Fair’s fault.

• Amazing that this is the first time in lookin at newspapers that I didn’t want to really see any of these movies. I would watch them and I have but a rare weekend where the movies weren’t for me.

• Lame that supermarkets run Mother’s Day sales that are just groceries for sale and nothing mom-centric.

• 1982 Saturday Morning cartoons were amazing!

• I would like to cover the New Orleans Fair. I was also interested in that, but I had already been to EPCOT Center and the Olympics that year was very distracting. It was the most memorable Olympics of my chilhood.

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

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

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

When I was a kid, I tended to stay up late. I wasn’t supposed to, but once I was in my room and everyone else was sleeping, I would watch my small B&W TV or read way later than I should have. Because of this I was always running late for school. My mom thought I was just a sleepy kid and tried all sorts of things to get me up. Eventually she started to accept that I was going to maximize my morning time at home, but still wanted me to have something for breakfast before I got to school. When I couldn’t sit down to have a bowl of cereal she would insist I grab a Pop Tart or something even better, a Carnation Breakfast Bar.

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Much like with Granola Bars, I approached the Carnation Breakfast Bar with skepticism. I liked the bar part, but because my mom thought it was a good idea, I thought it must be filled with hidden vegetables or something. Boy, was I wrong. I am sure it was some sale that landed the first box of the bars in our house, but after having my first bar while walking to school that day, I knew they were going to go quickly.

Most online sources will point to 1975 as the launch year for the Breakfast Bar, but looking through old advertisements, I have found that they were being sold as early as the fall of 1973. Here you will see an advertisement from the Kansas City Star on September 9 using the word “Introducing.”

This ad shows that the bars were already in the familiar form many of us would come to love. While the bar pictured was Chocolate Chip, they also mention that they were available in four flavors, which were Chocolate Chip, Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and Frosted. An important component of their early advertisement really stressed that you needed to have a glass of milk to make it a complete meal. I usually ate them on the go, but when I did have them with milk, they really worked well together.

The obvious appeal of the bar is that it looked like a candy bar and tasted like one as well. This was not lost on concerned parents in the 1970s. The Florida newspaper, The Ledger, interviewed five people who had tried the bars in 1975. Four of the five people said they might use the bars as snacks or as a more nutritious substitute for candy. One concerned mother rejected them because they were, in her words, too much like the candy she discouraged her children from eating.

The children in this same article had a very different take. One parent said her two young children loved the bars and asked her to buy them again. Another ate the peanut variety with Coke and enjoyed them. The kids knew what was up. Carnation might be saying they were selling breakfast in a bar, but kids saw them as a chocolate covered treat.

This lines up perfectly with my memories of the bars. I never thought about them as nutritious. I looked at the bars as the candy they were and I was thrilled that Carnation had somehow hoodwinked the adults into buying them.

The bars did hit a major roadblock in 1978. The FDA recalled Carnation Breakfast Bars and Carnation Slender Diet Meal Bars after pieces of wire were found in some products. 4.3 million bars were recalled despite the FDA saying serious health consequences were considered unlikely. The recall does show that the bar flavors had changed since their first year. Flavors now were Chocolate Crunch, Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter, and Granola Breakfast Bars.

Granola Bars makes sense. They were becoming wildly popular around this time and Carnation took shots at them in advertising. A 1983 advertisement compared the nutrition in Carnation Breakfast Bars with products from Nature Valley and Quaker. They wanted people to know that their bars were more than just a sweet granola bar.

In 1985 Carnation was acquired by Nestle. The brand kept on being used and it didn’t seem to change the availability of the bar at the time. That would be the status quo for more than a decade, but then in 1997, the company began taking the bars off shelves and by late 1998, people were writing into newspapers asking where they had gone.

Nestle would release alternatives and even partially reuse the name after that, but the replacements weren’t the same. But people haven’t forgotten. They, like me, remember grabbing one on the way to school or having them as a snack at work, and they miss them. They were pretty tasty.

More than 50 years ago, Carnation tried something different with a convenience food and they were pretty successful for almost a quarter of a century. While fondly remembered, they haven’t generated the online fandom that might get them rereleased. If the Carnation Breakfast Bar were still being sold today, its nutrition would probably get a lot more scrutiny, but that does not change how well it is remembered by the people who ate them during their nearly 25 year run. For someone on the go, or a kid who would have preferred a candy bar for breakfast, they were a pretty tasty compromise.

A lot of people, myself included, love the non-soda orange flavored beverage that McDonald’s serves. I am being generic here on purpose because the history of the drink itself is not as straightforward as it might seem. While many will refer to it as Hi-C Orange, Orange LavaBurst, Orangeade, Orange Drink or a combination of those things, historically only two of those things are the same. So when I go to McDonald’s to get an Orange LavaBurst nowadays, I might like it, but it’s very different from Orange Drink I was served as a kid.

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Before Hi-C became the non-carbonated orange flavored drink at McDonald’s they had been serving an orange drink of theirs for decades. This was a beverage outside of their partnership with Coca-Cola. Not only would people find it in stores, but McDonald’s Orange Drink or Orangeade could be found at community and local sporting events usually in these large McDonald’s branded dispensers outside the restaurants. It’s been gone long enough now that it’s hard to remember, but it did taste different than what we can get now.

Even if you preferred getting a Coke or a milkshake you might have tasted orange drink outside of the restaurant. The company would loan out these large dispensers that would come to be called Orange Bowls. But they are really just insulated beverage dispensers with a spout. McDonald’s would supply the “bowl” but groups would buy the orange syrup that you would mix with water and ice. Just as an aside, at the restaurants themselves, the containers were so much cooler. Here you can see one in a recreated McDonald’s in the film, The Founder.

You can find a lot of former McDonald’s employees online who remember mixing up the stuff. The syrup mixture came in one gallon containers. You would add that to four gallons of water to get five gallons of finished Orange Drink. I know someone must have tasted the pure syrup, but I can’t find anyone who mentions it. Maybe I am just a curious person, but I want to know what it tasted like.

Now you might be surprised to know that the drink did have at least some real orange in it. Although it was mainly a sweetened orange flavored drink. I found a booklet online that listed the ingredients. The drink contained corn sweetener, sugar, citric acid, concentrated orange juice, and natural and artificial flavoring and coloring. In addition, it included vegetable gum, vegetable oil, glycerine, and glyceryl abietate and sodium benzoate for stabilization.

Since the drink was not from Coca Cola, the company needed other suppliers, and I found a few names that have popped up like R W Snyder Company, Richardson Food Corporation and Golden State Foods. Golden State Foods looks like the most likely chief supplier of the syrup starting in the 1970s. Before that I believe they allowed regional providers to do the work. Which might explain why I have a challenging time finding a confirmed single source.

McDonald’s was still serving Orange Drink as we moved into the 1990s. Then in 1993, without a ton of fanfare, they switched to Orange Hi-C. I would like to say I was one of the people who protested at the time, but I hardly noticed. When I did order an Orange Drink though, I could tell that things had changed. I wasn’t happy, but I also kind of like Hi-C. So I wasn’t exactly unhappy. Which is how I think a lot of people felt.

Why did they change? I am guessing the relationship with Coca-Cola was a big part of it. I can’t find any documentation, but I imagine they didn’t like seeing any beverages that weren’t a part of their company. McDonald’s did have a habit of sticking with established products that worked. A good example would be 7-Up which wouldn’t be replaced with Coca-Cola’s alternative, Sprite, until the 1980s. Whatever the case, the switch happened and while it might linger for a while longer in other countries (like Canada), eventually the old Orange Drink went away completely.

Still, while Hi-C might not have the brand recognition of Coke, it was a real brand. So McDonald’s was able to offer something to its customers where they might have some amount of outside recognition. Coca-Cola was also a large and dependable supplier with international reach. Allowing them to replace orange drink would give McDonald’s something it also craves, consistency.

Orange Hi-C would eventually get a new name, Orange Lavaburst and Hi-C stayed on the menu for nearly 25 years. Then in 2017, McDonald’s told its franchisees that they would no longer be serving the Hi-C product. McDonald’s wanted the fountain space for a new exclusive Coca-Cola product called Sprite TropicBerry. When asked for a reason, the company didn’t cite poor sales, but instead gave the generic answer of “sometimes we change our menu.”

While Lavaburst might not have been a top menu item, it had its fans, and they began to complain. There were petitions, years of social media requests, and repeated demands that McDonald’s bring it back. Most of the time, this kind of consumer pressure goes nowhere, but on February 10, 2021, the company announced it would be returning almost immediately. Two weeks later I had my first ice-cold Lavaburst in 4 years and I was thrilled.

The history of uncarbonated orange beverages at McDonald’s is long and has changed over the decades. A lot of people don’t even realize that the drink is different and I think that is because the history isn’t well documented. Even McDonald’s in their press release for the return of Orange Lavaburst stated wrongly, “The loyal fandom of this deliciously fun and fruity beverage that teases your taste buds dates back to 1955, when it first debuted on McDonald’s menus.” It’s good stuff, but it’s not the same beverage a lot of people grew up with and I think that’s worth remembering.

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.

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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.

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Production Notes

• This is the 371st episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 22 of Season 18.

• My mother really scared me away from these types of offers, which must not have been easy for her since I was so persistent. I would guess that I completely filled out an order form at last every month for years hoping she would change her mind.

• I have found surprising 8-tracks for sale that seem to be very late releases. Almost all of them are from Columbia House.

• Getting mail was a much bigger deal to me when I was young. Even junk mail felt like somebody somewhere knew I existed, so Columbia House already had an advantage with me before I even opened the catalog.

• I always assumed Columbia House was mainly a 1970s or 1980s thing. I was surprised to find an ad for the Columbia Record Club in one of my local newspapers from 1955, right at the beginning of the whole operation.

• The little album cover stickers might be the thing I remember best. There was something very satisfying about physically picking out the albums and putting together an order on paper.

• I knew kids who joined Columbia House, so I was amused to find old consumer columns dealing with exactly that problem. Apparently enough children were signing themselves up that Columbia House had a policy for parents who called to cancel the membership.

• One man managed to use more than 2,400 fake identities to get over 26,000 CDs from Columbia House and BMG. The number of CDs is impressive, but I mostly keep wondering how he kept track of 2,400 imaginary people.

• Columbia House CDs sometimes get treated like strange second class versions of regular releases, but they were legitimate licensed pressings. There can be differences between individual releases, but there does not seem to be any general reason to assume a Columbia House CD sounds worse.

• The famous gold box was not just decoration. It was part of an advertising experiment designed to see whether people had encountered more than one Columbia House ad.

• There was a point when Columbia House and Blockbuster actually discussed merging. Considering how closely I associate both names with buying and renting entertainment in the 1990s, I would love to know what that company would have looked like.

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

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

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

I didn’t plan on doing another bonus track like again, but it bubbled up again. I spend a lot of time thinking about nostalgia, which is probably obvious considering what I like to talk about. Lately I have been thinking more about how entire decades get remembered and whether the version of the 1980s we have now is really the same one I remember living…

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On the August 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:

• McDonald’s McCrescent

• Fotomat

• Hypercolor

• Atari VCS 1977

• Presentism

• RCA Studio II

• Diet Coke

• Burger King and Fast Food

• ZZ Top

• Stereo Update

• Experiencing Big Events in Life

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In the early 1980s, at a comic book shop near my grandmother’s apartment, I saw my first Mars Attacks cards. I had never heard of them before, but there they were under glass, so I thought they must be important. They looked old, but the imagery was colorful and intriguingly violent. So naturally, I wanted them. The problem was they were already pretty expensive. So I started putting money aside hoping to talk the owner down and land at least one of the cards. Eventually I managed to start my collection with a card in rough shape that I paid five dollars for. Over the months trying to get just that one card I learned that the series went all the way back to 1962 and that at this rate I was never going to get my hands on all 55 of the original cards.

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Topps is well known in the sports card business, but they had already been doing non-sports cards for over a decade by the time they released Mars Attacks. In fact, the company got its start with a set called Hocus Focus Magic Photos in 1948. They followed that up with Hopalong Cassidy cards in 1950, before getting into baseball cards in 1951. By the early 1960s, Topps has a product team just trying to figure out what kids might spend their hard-earned nickels on. The team was led by Woody Gelman who had worked as an animator for Max Fleischer and Paramount before joining Topps. While there he would help create both Bazooka Joe and Wacky Packages.

Working under Gelman was Len Brown. He joined the company as a teenager and would stay there for decades. Brown and Gelman hit upon a novel idea in 1961 when they were working on a set of cards to mark the 100 year anniversary of the start of the U.S. Civil War. They would lean into violence, exaggerating battles like Gettysburg into something that was closer to horror, at least by the standards of the time. These cards, which were called Civil War News, sold out quickly. It was a smart move and its success surprised the company. Next year they would get the opportunity to try something similar without having to borrow from history.

Brown was a big fan of science fiction and one film really seemed to stick with him, This Island Earth. The Metaluna Mutant from the movie was particularly memorable and would become the basis for what the invaders in the Mars Attack series would look like. He found an image of it in Famous Monsters of Filmland and showed it to Gelman who liked it. Artists Wally Wood and Bob Powell would combine the Mutant with inspiration from Wally Wood’s cover for EC Comics’ Weird Science #16 and turn them into finished sketches. These would be turned over to painter Norman Saunders who handled the final artwork.

Brown would write the story of a Martian invasion of Earth that would appear on the back and unfold over 55 cards. The basic idea is that Mars is doomed and they decide that they will take over the Earth. Its pretty straightforward, but its how the story unfolds that really captured your attention. Each card tells a nice self-contained little story and leans heavily into shock value. You would expect to see humans are menaced by aliens, but when a dog is blasted by a ray gun or a person is about to be eaten by a giant spider, they were really pushing the limits of the time, and kids couldn’t get enough.

Topps was worried enough about the subject matter that they released them through a company called Bubbles, Inc. under the title Attack from Space. They only became Mars Attacks once sales were strong enough to expand. Parents were shocked by what they were seeing and started complaining to government officials. Topps thought they could placate them by repainting the more objectionable scenes. Unfortunately, they never got far with that plan. A Connecticut district attorney started asking questions about the cards and they decided it would be easier to cancel the series rather than deal with the trouble.

While the initial sales were good, the bad press made Topps look at the cards as a failed experiment. In fact, in a 1974 article in the Chicago Tribune about Topps’ success in baseball cards, they talk about their other successes and only one misstep. It says, “Among their failures or Topps flops, is a science fiction card series entitled “Mars Attacks.” So a decade later and the card line was being looked at as something the company would rather see forgotten.

This would slowly start to change as new generations started to discover them and card collecting really took off as a hobby. By 1979 article in the New York Daily News discussing the growing trend and cite two non-sports card sets by name Gum Inc.’s 1938 Horrors of War and Mars Attacks. As we moved into the 80s, the trend continue and priced for complete sets started to climb. By the 90s a good set could fetch up to $3,000. That turned out to be a bargain. Just this decade, sets and cards are going for tens of thousands of dollars.

Like all cards, rarity drives up the price and some of these cards were really rare. Not because of the number printed, but the bad habit many young card collectors have of using rubber bands. I did this myself as a kid. I would put a set together and then take a rubber band and wrap it up. A lot of those cards stayed with the rubber band on it when it went into storage. So years later, you will pull out a bundle of cards and the top and bottom cards will be ruined from contact with the rubber band.

Because of this, Card #1, The Invasion Begins, is famously the hardest card in the set to find in good shape, since it sat on the outside of the pack and took the most damage. The checklist, card #55, has the same problem from the other end. In January of 2025, a copy of The Invasion Begins sold at auction for $54,067.20, a record for the set and a huge jump from the $19,981.35 a lesser graded copy brought just two years before.

The cards’ value would have probably slowly increased over time, but they got a boost in 1987. That is when Mario and Eileen Bruno approached Topps with the idea of reviving Mars Attacks as a mini comic series. They got a meeting with Sy Berger, the Topps executive known as the father of the modern baseball card. He liked the idea and green-lit the project. Berger was introduced to Len Brown who was still at the company and a young talent at the company named Gary Gerani. The partnership resulted in a four issue series published by Pocket Comics in 1988.

Fun fact about Gerani he was influenced by Mars Attacks when he created another Topps card series about prehistoric monsters loose in modern cities called, Dinosaurs Attack! This set was also released in 1988. Several decades later during some successful Kickstarter campaigns by Topps we would actually get some crossover sets between the the Dinosaurs and the Martians.

Fans of the set got a treat in 1994 when Topps finally gave the original set a proper reissue. They paired all 55 classic cards with 45 brand new ones drawn by a whole roster of comic artists. Its amazing what three decades can make and the new cards could be edgier than the original. Unsurprisingly the reissue sold out fast. Older fans could enjoy a brand new set and all new fans could discover the magic of Mars Attack for the first time. What more could fans of the cards hope for?

As it turns out some people in Hollywood were fans of the cards. Screenwriter Jonathan Gems pitched the idea of a movie to Tim Burton in 1993, after an earlier attempt by director Alex Cox back in the 1980s never made it past a few script drafts. Burton wanted to make the film in the style of a 1970s disaster film with a large ensemble cast and that’s just what he made. With an impressive cast and a look that aped 1950s science fiction B movies, Mars Attacks! hit screens on December 1996 and I was there on opening night at my local theater.

I loved it, but unfortunately, I was in the minority at the time. The film opened to mixed reviews and a disappointing box office. Fortunately though, it did much better globally and over time has developed a cult following.

While the movie might not have been a big hit. The cards it was based on got a boost from its release. As a tie-in with the film they released a new set of wide cards that are still a great starting set to get into collecting Mars Attacks cards. They didn’t stop there. New card sets and comics hit shelves and we even managed to get some toys. Not just the ones related to the movies, but some great stuff from companies like Funko and Super7.

I wasn’t around when the original Mars Attacks cards were first released. If I was, I would like to think I would have been one of those kids who tried to collect them all. Fortunately, they found plenty of fans among those first collectors, and that interest helped keep Mars Attacks alive long after Topps had written the set off. It eventually led to reissues, new card sets, comics, toys, and even a movie. Most of us will never own a complete original set, but there are still plenty of ways to collect Mars Attacks.

I remember seeing Hypercolor shirts down at the Jersey shore the summer they came out. Like a lot of people, I wanted one. By the time I actually got a shirt that Christmas, a few months later, the trend was already fading. I might not have been timely, but I didn’t care. Watching the color spread out under my own hand still felt like something out of the future. It turns out that I wasn’t alone in being late to the party with Hypercolor. These shirts only had about a year of shelf life in their original form. But like many other products that were short-lived, they never really disappeared. They just changed into something else.

Hypercolor got its start in Seattle at a company called Generra Sportswear. Generra was founded in 1980 by former executives from Brittania Sportswear. That company that had turned Seattle into the country’s jeans capital during the 1970s, but is hardly talked about today. Generra had that company’s expertise and grew quickly expanding rapidly in the early 80s before being sold in 1984 to a Texas company. Five years later it would be back in the hands of its original management team and looking for a breakthrough product which they found in Hypercolor.

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The color changing technology behind Hypercolor came from Matsui Shikiso Chemical, a Japanese company based in Kyoto that had spent decades making inks and pigments for the textile printing industry. In the early 1980s Matsui developed a line of thermochromic paints and inks, meaning color that shifts with temperature. The technology was pretty durable. According to Miska, it worked on almost every color except darker shades like navy. The big issue was care. You couldn’t clean it in hot water, iron it (despite what you see in the commercials) or tumble it dry. All of those things could kill the effect for good.

Generra licensed the technology and began showing off a clothing dyed with the thermal sensitive pigment in January 1991. This release was backed by a marketing campaign that had already been running in MTV spots and teen magazines like Seventeen and Thrasher since late 1990.

The commercial shows how fun Hypercolor was going to be and how it worked. Anything that changed the temperature of the shirt would change its color. Which I think to most people at the time meant temporary handprints. Generra chairman Steve Miska was quoted in the press at the time saying that moms would be confused when dealing with Hypercolor. I doubt that any of this would be true, but it works as generation marketing. He said, “Kids understand, but imagine their moms. She remembers the kid’s shirt as blue, but then it comes out of the dryer and it’s white. She sets it aside and it turns blue again.”

One the ads started running, Generra couldn’t keep up with demand. They shipped 32,000 different Hypercolor garments in February of 1991. The next month they shipped another 274,000. The hype was so great that stores around the country were pre-selling the clothing. This results in them being sold out before other customers had the opportunity to get their hands on them. The company had projected that they would sell $20 million worth of clothing for the entire year. By May of 1991 they had sold $50 million with t-shirts making up 80% of sales.

While this was a runaway success, on thing Generra couldn’t escape was the cost of the dye. This was a sophisticated product compared to normal non-technical clothing. Dye alone was $16 million a year.

How much did Hypercolor clothing cost? A basic Hypercolor T shirt ran about $24, with tank tops closer to $15, jeans around $54 and shorts around $34. This sounds pretty reasonable for clothing that was extremely popular, but for clothing that was so fragile, it felt like you were paying for something that was at best temporary. It was one of the reasons my mom didn’t want me to get one. She knew how rough I was on my clothing and the idea that I would properly take care of a shirt that wasn’t super easy to wash seemed ridiculous to her. Of course, she was right.

While marketing certainly contributed to the success of the brand, they were also being featured on TV and it was hard to escape seeing them anywhere young people were. At schools, the interactive nature of the cloth made them a walking advertisement. Those first few days when someone wore them to school, everyone wanted to touch the fabric and see it in action. Some schools even banned the shirts because of this. Not because they were a distraction, but because they invited unwanted or aggressive touching. Despite that, Hypercolor sales weren’t slowing.

Generra couldn’t keep up with demand. They hired more staff and added more production capacity to try and keep up. They even set up a subsidiary Generra Production Corp just to manufacture its Hypercolor and Hypergrafix lines. Despite these changes they could only make enough clothing for about half of what retailers wanted.

As demand raged on, Generra kept expanding, but by the 1992 the apparel industry was struggling. Licensed sports clothing was hot stuff and chains like the Gap was pushing new casual looks for young people. The companies junior and girl’s clothing line which had been doing well, crashed. It was being described as too “fashion forward” when the rest of the industry was moving towards simplicity. In July of 1992, Generra Sportswear filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They owed more than $60 million and shut down their juniors and girls divisions. At this point they started selling undyed cloths as part of their new LOH label, which stood for leftover Hypercolor. It not that Hypercolor wasn’t selling well. The problem was, it was one of the only things that was still selling at all and it wasn’t enough.

The company started to downsize and by the mid-nineties, less than a dozen employees were left. They did this by giving up on making their own cloths and instead licensed the brand to others.

“We tried to make too much product available in too short a period of time,” Miska admitted. If he could do it over again, he said, he would have limited distribution on purpose, since he believed it “would have done a lot to prolong the life of the product.”

One brand they wouldn’t be managing domestically was Hypercolor. In 1993 they sold that part of the business to the The Seattle T-Shirt Company. They did retain the international rights which they would sell under the name Global Hypercolor. After that the company would be sold and the Generra brand still exists today, but they do not put out Hypercolor or anything else. My thought is maybe the name is being kept alive for possible future use. The trademark is currently held by Exude LLC, but nothing in the Hypercolor line has been released in years.

That doesn’t mean that color-changing clothing went away. Over in the UK, Global Hypercolor seemed have found life in the rave music scene. There, crowds of dancers provided plenty of heat to keep those colors changing. By 2008, designers including Anzevino and Florence and Henry Holland tried using it, while American Apparel sold their own version and Puma even released sneakers that changed color. The original craze may have lasted only from 1991 into 1992, but the basic idea has continued turning up in new forms ever since.

None of these new uses would ever match the mania that ran wild for a little over a year in the early nineties. My own shirt showed up a little late in the original short story of Hypercolor. Amazingly after just a few months, it was already past its cultural peak. But for a kid who wanted one all summer at the Jersey shore, it didn’t feel like a futuristic fad running out of steam. I still felt like I was getting a small piece of the future, just a few months behind schedule.

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.

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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.

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Production Notes

• This is the 370th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 21 of Season 18.

• I cannot taste the sweetness in common artificial sweeteners. It was a confusing conclusion to come to after years of trying diet drinks. A few sweeteners are on ther market that work better for me, but none are being used in popular diet soft drinks.

• I expected the creation of Diet Coke to have a fairly settled history, but there are competing stories about who really pushed the idea inside Coca Cola. The company gives much of the credit to Jack Carew, while Sergio Zyman’s version puts him much closer to the center of things. I decided it made more sense to leave that disagreement in the episode than pick one version and pretend the other did not exist.

• We would get Pepsi Free or other diet sodas if they were ons all, but Coke dominated in all forms. We even went through a Caffeine Free phase.

• While I was never a big drinker of Diet Coke I was instantly taken by the packaging. Still love seeing the silver cans.

• I had been looking at New Coke and thinking about doing an episode on another popular soda when Diet Coke started to become my obsession.

• I have Computercide in my media library now. Can’t wait to watch it. It is on YouTube still. Sure it will be mediocre overall, but I think it might be tv movie-style fun.

• Still surprised when I see that we had a Chick fil A in New Jersey that we could have went to in 1982. I didn’t know about the chain until the 2000s.

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

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

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