Retroist Retro Podcast

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.

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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.

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

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

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.