Retroist Retro Podcast

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.

I start this podcast episode by talking about my own trips to Action Park. I was so excited to go as a kid when I visited and got to go because it was close to where my uncle lived in Northern New Jersey. My mother was not a big fan of amusement parks unless they were connected to Disney, and she had started reading enough about Action Park to be worried. My uncle did not have the same concerns, so he took me there and I had a great time. I rode what I could, brought home brochures, talked about it all summer, and assumed I would keep going back. That didn’t happen.

Then I talk about how Action Park came to be. The story starts with Gene Mulvihill, Great Gorge, Vernon Valley, and the problem of what a ski resort is supposed to do when the weather gets warm. The Alpine Slide came first, and from there the place kept growing into something much larger. Action Park was built around participation, which meant you were not simply strapped into a ride and moved along. You had some control, or at least the feeling of control, and that was a big part of what made the park so exciting.

Of course, that same idea also made the place dangerous. In the episode, I get into the rides people still talk about, including the Alpine Slide and the Cannonball Loop. I also spend time on the wave pool, Motor World, and some of the other attractions that helped make Action Park feel less like a normal amusement park and more like its own strange world. Looking back now, it is much easier to see how quickly excitement could turn into something else.

The darker part of the Action Park story is impossible to avoid. I talk about the deaths and injuries connected to the park, along with the lawsuits and insurance problems that followed it for years. Some of what happened there is shocking even if you already know the general reputation. The park has become famous as a place that probably should not have been allowed to operate the way it did, and there is plenty of truth in that version of the story.

But I did not want this episode to be only about the worst things that happened there. For a lot of kids from New Jersey and the surrounding area, Action Park was a summer trip people talked about afterward. It was a place that felt enormous, especially if you were young enough to believe you could eventually get to everything. The danger is part of the story, but so is the memory of wanting to go back.

That is what makes Action Park such a strange subject for me. The stories about the park are real, and some are worse than I understood when I was young. At the same time, my own connection to the place is still tied to being a kid who thought he had found the most exciting park in New Jersey. My last trip there had already happened before I knew it, which may be part of why the place stayed so large in my mind. Action Park does not fit neatly into one version of itself, and that is why it still feels worth talking about.