Retroist Podcast Episode 358 (Grease)

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.