In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 136: Friday Nights At the Video Store; The 17 Original Nintendo Games; Product Advertising Villains; Debut of COPS(3-13-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 136

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Memories of when a trip to the video store was a must on a Friday night. What were the original games released with the Nintendo Entertainment System? How about the bad guys of advertising?
Episode 136 is chock full of all of that and more!
It begins with a time when renting movies was as much fun as watching them. In the days before streaming and on-demand features if someone wanted to see a movie they could either pick up TV Guide and hope it was on a channel they had access to, or they could get to the nearest video rental store and hope that there was a copy in stock. We will go way Back In the Day through everything that made renting videos in the 1980s and 1990s fun, and sometimes not fun.
When the NES was first released in 1985, a certain number of games could be played on the console. Surprisingly Super Mario Bros was not one of them. We go back to those early days of Nintendo to review the 17 original games that were available. How many did you play?
The vast majority of advertising mascots are positive spokespeople for their products. However, there have also been some villains whose job it was to try to stop us from getting access to said products. This week's Top 5 will focus on the advertising villains. Who would win in a battle of these baddies?
There is also a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule centered around the debut and legacy of the COPS television show.
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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 136. Spring is right around the corner, and I've got some fun nostalgia in bloom for you this week on the podcast. We're going to kick it off by going all the way back to episode one, revisiting the Nintendo Entertainment System, but this time it's going to be looking at the original games. We'll see how many of these were legendary and how many of these fell through the cracks. We'll also go way, way back in the day in the wheelhouse of a lot of Gen Xers and as we look at what it was like Friday night at the video store. Oh boy, make sure you don't forget your membership card. There's going to be a brand new top five that are the top five TV product mascot villains. The bad guys that went after the good guys that were selling the products. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule centered around the debut of the famous, infamous cops reality TV show on Fox. All of that's coming up right now on episode 136 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Oh yeah, you can feel it. Spring is almost in the air. Although, as we joke on Cape Cod, spring isn't that much different than winter. It goes from being 35 with cold rain to 45 with cold rain and fog. But still, I hope wherever you are listening from... It's getting warmer. You're able to start getting outside. Enjoy that vitamin D. The winter blues, that's definitely real. And I'm hoping for a lot of warmer, sunny days to kind of shake those away as we get deeper into March. I want to take a moment to thank my Patreon subscribers, Leo, Laurie, Mary Lou, and Ashley. If you want a shout out on the podcast, you can definitely go become a Patreon subscriber today. You get monthly bonus podcast episodes centered around my wacky slice-of-life initial impressions blog that I ran from 2010 to 2012 and just resurrected back in February. There's a link to it in the description of the podcast. Just go and read one of the new ones and you'll get an idea of what it's all about. You also get early access to YouTube videos that aren't up on my channel yet. Early access to the main podcast, usually segments from it that I put up there for you. And I'm hoping for other things, some kind of merch, things centered around my books. It's all still new to me. And with so many other plates spinning, there's only so much time I can brainstorm cool ideas to do for Patreon. So if you have any suggestions... If you do any Patreon stuff for other podcasts, other content creators, let me know what they do that's different that you enjoy. We'll get into more of the housekeeping type stuff with the podcast at the end, but I wanted to definitely thank everyone who's been listening. Listening, sharing, you don't have to be a Patreon subscriber to help get more eyes on the content. sharing it, sharing videos from YouTube, subscribing on YouTube, which is free. All of those things help spread the word, get me more visible, and I'll keep doing my best to put out great content that you enjoy to make it worth sharing and worth telling others about. So let's start with Exhibit A right now. I'm at the point now where I can do flashbacks to old podcast episodes. So we're going to revisit a topic from the very first episode, the Nintendo Entertainment System. But this will be a little bit different, a little different shade of gray as we look at the original 17 Nintendo games that came out with the system when it was first released in America. And no, Super Mario Brothers was not one of them. So let's jump into that right now. All the way back in November of 2020, episode one of this podcast, the very first Back in the Day segment I did was about the Nintendo Entertainment System. I spoke a little bit about its introduction in America, what it was like for me as a kid to have access to this video game console. I mean, I had had access to the Atari 2600, and Nintendo was definitely miles ahead of that. In doing research for the podcast for future episodes, I sometimes go down weird rabbit holes that I hadn't even thought of. And one that I thought of was, what were the original Nintendo games that were released? Because obviously when they released the NES, the full system, it wasn't one game. There was kind of a series of them. And lucky for me, as I was looking, I found an article from Wired Magazine from October of 2010. In this article, it has a lot of ground I already covered about when the Nintendo was first released in America, October 18th, 1985. This article was interesting, though, because it talked about Nintendo releasing a limited batch of the NES systems in New York City, so it was a quiet launch, I guess to kind of gauge the interest of the public. Because don't forget, in 1985, there had recently been that video game crash, caused a little bit by the E.T. game for Atari. But a lot from the oversaturation of the market, which is interesting to say, oversaturation of the video game market in 1983, when you look at how many different video game systems and variations of those systems there are in 2024. So when the Nintendo was originally released, it was kind of a risk. There was no guarantee that people would still be interested in video games, which I know is crazy to say, but it was 40 years ago. Nintendo of America was the offshoot of the Japanese parent company Nintendo, and most people weren't interested in hearing that the Japanese Nintendo was a huge hit, because in America, the video game market had collapsed. So it was kind of a compromise to release the Nintendo with a limited number of games in New York City, figuring that if you succeeded in New York, then you'd make it pretty much anywhere, like the song says. The NES was released with the game console, the gray and white cube, two of the rectangle controllers, that zapper gun that you would get, and... ROB, the Robot Operating Buddy. So Nintendo had a robot. But what were the games that were released along with the Nintendo? There were 17 of them, two of which came with the console. And no, one was not Super Mario Bros., which I was blown away by. But in this first limited release of the Nintendo, there was no Super Mario. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go through all of these games, see how many of you that were growing up in that time remember these games. If you had some of these, I will tell you half of these I have no memory of. First off, there were two games that came with the console. One, you heard me already mention about The Gun, so you got Duck Hunt. Duck Hunt would end up being a game that came with the console when it had its mass release. Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers. Duck Hunt was the first-person shooter game with the dog that would go into the brush and the reeds and scare the ducks and they'd come up and you would have to shoot at the screen to get them. Even though it was released with the Nintendo upon its mass release in 1986, it still was a major hit as a game. Because it was way more arcade style to be able to stand there and shoot your gun at the screen and possibly hit one of these ducks and see them fall. And the dog would laugh if you missed it. I never played it enough to, I guess, beat the game. But it says if you get through round 99, you end up at round 0 and then the game just goes crazy. Did any of you get to round 0? The other game, though, that was released with the Nintendo was Gyromite. And this game actually used that ROB, the robot. You're a professor running around his laboratory trying to diffuse dynamite. You can't jump, but you can climb vines. And you have to avoid these green birds. They look a little bit like parrots, but they're called smicks. This is one of those games. It's interesting. I've never heard of it. And I think maybe part of it is because I never had this robot. That's another thing. Did any of you have this ROB, this little robot that helped you with Nintendo? If you look it up, it looks like Johnny Five from Short Circuit, a little bit like that. But that's, I think, what you would kind of expect from a mid-1980s version of a robot. The next game that was available for Nintendo was Ten Yard Fight. And this one, I think most video game players from the mid-80s, you'd remember this one. It's a football game looking down on the field. Naturally, there's no crossover with the NFL, but there are five different levels, high school, college, professional, playoff, and Super Bowl, which it's interesting that they got Super Bowl in there. This was also an arcade game. And the funny thing is the arcade game was basically you could only play as offense. And if you scored a touchdown, you went to the next level. But on the Nintendo, on the home console, because they wanted two-player games, they allowed you to do offense and defense so you could play against friends. This one I definitely played a lot in the days before Tecmo Super Bowl. The next game they released was another generic named sports game, just baseball. This is what you get, baseball, in Nintendo Stadium. These were the games where the crowd would sound like cooking bacon, or at least I thought it did. Even though they didn't have any officially licensed players or teams in the game, they tried to do a little bit of a sneaky thing to get around that. So there were six teams you could play as, and their letter of their name was supposed to represent an actual Major League Baseball team. A was for the Oakland Athletics. C for the St. Louis Cardinals. D for the Los Angeles Dodgers, P for the Philadelphia Phillies, R for the Kansas City Royals, and Y for the New York Yankees. And this baseball, just like 10-yard fight, was very straightforward. But for 1985, it was probably miles ahead of what people expected. The next game was Clue Clue Land. It's a puzzle game with the main character being this balloon fish named Bubbles. You have to recover these golden ingots, basically blocks of gold, while avoiding the evil sea urchin and any black holes that might pop up. It's got a very Pac-Man vibe to it going through the maze. I never played Clue Clue Land, but just saying the name makes me laugh, so maybe that made it popular. The next game is a tease. It's Donkey Kong. But wait, it's Donkey Kong Jr. Oh, but wait, it's Donkey Kong Jr. Math. It's like instantly you hear the lose noise from Price is Right. Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. were around back then, but for Nintendo you get stuck with this edutainment game where you've got to solve math problems that Donkey Kong sets up for you. I'm sure if you were a little kid, I mean, I was eight years old at this time, if you had gotten me this and I didn't know about the real Donkey Kong, maybe I'd be excited. Because it is a video game, but it's like the getting socks of video games. It's like, oh man, all right. Next is a game I played a ton when it came out, and that's Excitebike.

Speaker 01:

Excitebike

Speaker 00:

This is a side-scrolling motocross motorcycle race game. A lot of jumps and a lot of obstacles. The thing I remember most about this game that I really liked was the design mode. You could make your own courses. I can remember playing this game with my friend Matt, and I think our courses would be just 50 of the jumps in a row. I don't know, we thought it was cool, because you could make your own course, so we made stuff that nine-year-olds would make. At the time this game came out, I had my BMX bike, and even the cover of this game looked cool with the guy kind of in the middle of a jump. So naturally, I would gravitate towards a game like this. Next, we go back to the generic sports games with golf. I know these were all brand new, so you didn't have to come up with a catchy name, but it's definitely like the store brand version of video games. Golf is like getting a white box that just says Rice on it. The cover of the game has a guy that looks kind of like Mario in golf clothes. Even though you could only play on one golf course, it was still fun, and you had to control the power of your swing. So even though I make the joke that it's a generic name, it was still fun. It sold millions of copies. I did not play golf, the video game, or the sport itself. I just was never interested in it. The next game is another one I'd never heard of called Hogan's Alley. It's another one that uses the gun. The idea is that there are different targets, usually three of them in front of you, and you have to decide who's innocent and who should be shot. There's gangsters, but then there's innocent civilians. I didn't know that this was based on the real Hogan's Alley, which was a shooting range on the grounds of the special police school... at Camp Perry in Ohio, which was a training facility for the National Guard. The next game is Ice Climber. And this one is very similar to Donkey Kong, where you're trying to climb up these different levels. The characters are Nana and Popo, which are a boy and a girl in different colored parkas. And you've got to climb these levels and use your wooden mallet to smash ice. and eventually defeat the polar bear. It just says white bear, but the picture of it sure looks like it's a polar bear. Another game I played a lot, and this kind of shows what little boys in the mid-1980s were into, I played Kung Fu a lot.

Unknown:

Kung Fu

Speaker 00:

This is actually a remake of the very successful arcade game Kung Fu Master. You play as Thomas, the Kung Fu Master who has to fight through five levels of the Devil's Temple. He has to rescue his girlfriend from the evil crime boss, Mr. X. It's interesting, this game was inspired heavily by Bruce Lee's movie Game of Death, but fighting games were always fun. Then there's Mock Rider, which is a combat game set in the future in 2112. Mock Rider is the name of the main character who travels from place to place on his motorcycle looking for survivors and fighting these enemies called Quad Runners. This game was actually based around a toy that Nintendo released in 1972, a vehicle known as the Mock Rider. This is another one I don't remember ever playing, but if I was playing a ton of Excitebike and Kung Fu, I don't think I had time for Mock Rider. The vast majority of these games in this 17 original Nintendo releases were all arcade games that were then kind of shifted to a console. And you can't get more arcade than the game pinball. If you happen to find a place that's retro that has an arcade, they usually have at least a couple of pinball machines even now. You can play it as a regular pinball game that you would see in any arcade, but there's also a bonus mode and it's got Mario in it where he's got this platform he's holding above his head and you kind of use that to bounce the ball to rescue Pauline, who was his girlfriend, the one that Donkey Kong kidnapped. Next is the game Stack Up, which is another one I'd never heard of, never played, but it's another one that used that R.O.B., the robot.

Unknown:

R.O.B.

Speaker 00:

All I can find about this game is that there's a bunch of different colored discs, and you basically have to stack the chips to match the pattern that's on the screen. So I don't know if it's sort of like a Simon game, if you remember that game from the 80s. We're getting near the end here of this list, and we've got another generic sports game with tennis. It's very much what you would expect. It's either you against the computer, player one against player two, or two player against the computer. But it's literally what it says. You're looking at the tennis court from above. You can make it harder by making the computer's intelligence better. I always remember any of those games. I'd have the computer, I'd start them at the lowest level so they were stupid so I could always win. The next game is Wild Gunman. And if you don't know that one offhand from playing it for Nintendo, you might know it from Back to the Future 2, where Marty goes to the Cafe 80s and there's a wild gunman stand-up arcade machine. How

Speaker 01:

do you play this

Speaker 00:

thing? I'll show you, kid. I'm a crack

Speaker 01:

shot

Speaker 00:

at this.

Speaker 01:

You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy.

Speaker 00:

So it's a duel, a quick draw with different bandits. And you've got to try to kill them before they shoot you. And the last game that was released with the original Nintendo in 1985 was Wrecking Crew. This game's another one that it's got Mario in it, but there's no Super Mario. You can be Mario or Luigi, and there's a hundred levels where you have to destroy everything with your mallet, but you can't jump because the mallet's heavy, so you just smash and smash. But you also have to smash things in certain order because you can't jump, so if you smash a ladder, then you can't climb up to smash things up above. But those were the original 17 Nintendo games that got released in October 1985 in New York City. Super Mario Brothers had just been released in Japan, so it wasn't ready to be released in America then. But obviously when that became part of the Nintendo and part of the package you got when you bought the console, the rest was history. Do any of you remember most of those 17 games? I was honest, I remembered about half. Did any of you play those when they first came out? And those of you who did, what was your favorite of all those? For me, it's a toss-up between Excitebike and Kung Fu. And I'll end it off with, if any of you are interested in playing any of those games, the majority of them can be found online at retrogames.cz. And I'll put a link in the description to the podcast so you can go and relive the 80s glory days of Nintendo. Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? This week in history, we're going back 35 years ago this week to March 11th, 1989 and the debut of the Cops reality TV show on Fox. It's both surprising and not surprising that it was 35 years ago that Cops debuted, because it honestly feels like it's been a part of the fabric of television forever. You can find reruns of Cops all the time playing, and they're all over all the different streaming platforms. You don't even have to have a subscription. If you go to Pluto TV that's free, they got Cops on there all the time. The show itself was at the forefront of reality TV, giving the viewer basically an unfiltered view into what it was like to be a police officer in cities and towns all across the country. I say basically unfiltered because we know that pretty much all reality TV is not 100% reality. A lot of it is staged. And when it comes to cops, you know that you could edit things to make the cops look better just in case they do things that wouldn't be seen as good on TV. It was always an interesting format because there was no narration. The narration of the show was from the cops themselves talking to whoever was there with the camera. They would explain a little bit about who they were, maybe a couple sentences, and why they liked being a police officer. But it would immediately go into some situation. Arguments, drunk driving, they would have a lot of car chases. There was always a lot of action, a lot of chases, the cops yelling to people, trying to chase them down through streets and alleys and neighborhoods or in the woods. For the most part, the show did a good job at humanizing police officers because there's a good portion of people in the country that see police as not their friends, and rightfully so. There's a lot of stories, especially over the last few years, of abuse of power, police brutality. And these aren't novel from the last few years. It's been for decades. So a show like Cops would show you the other side, what it was like to be a police officer, putting your life in jeopardy every day that you're at work. For me, being a white kid from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I know that Cops would always make me feel better about myself if I was having a bad day. For the most part, it was entertainment-wise, because it was not always serious stuff. Yes, there was drunk driving and domestic violence. I'm not saying that. It wasn't particularly bloody, violent. There'd even be times that the people they arrested, they would have the cops go out of their way to get them help, rather than just taking people and throwing them in jail. But for me, if I was having a bad day... I can say, well, at least I'm not that person that led a high-speed chase through a neighborhood and then got arrested for drunk driving. With the rise of stories about police brutality in the late 2010s, the show Cops was actually canceled in 2020. But during my research, I have seen Cops is still on the air. In April 2023, they aired their 35th season on the Fox Nation channel. I don't know how many homes that channel's in. So even though it looked like it got canceled a few years ago, it's been brought back. And even if not, there's hundreds and hundreds of episodes of the show, including an infamous time in the early 2000s where they were at the apartment complex that I had lived in when I lived in Las Vegas. I don't think that's the TV show you want to see your home put on. But whether you love Cops or hated the show, never watched it, watch it all the time, it ushered in a whole new era of reality TV 35 years ago this week in history. Now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going to stick to that day. March 11th, 1989. Cops has debuted on Fox. What was going on in the world of pop culture back then on the same day? The number one song was Lost in Your Eyes by Debbie Gibson. Ah, big time crush of mine back then. This song went to number one for three weeks and was Debbie Gibson's fifth and last top ten hit song. It was off of her album Electric Youth, which has sold over four million copies since it was released. Debbie Gibson was 18 when this song came out. She was kind of like Britney Spears before Britney Spears, which is another dated reference for me. The number one movie was Lean on Me, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing on average $3.99. This was a fact-based drama starring Morgan Freeman as Joe Louis Clark, who was an inner-city principal in the town of Patterson, New Jersey. And it's the lowest-rated school in the state, so he has to help the kids get better grades to help save the school. I know I had to watch this movie when I was in probably middle school. It's a good movie. It's an inspirational movie. It's 68% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. and made just over $31 million on a budget of $10 million. The number one TV show was Roseanne, middle-class family show about the Conners. Roseanne and her husband Dan, played by John Goodman, their kids, Becky, Darlene, and DJ. The show was originally on for nine seasons from 1988 through 1997. It came back for an abbreviated 10th season before Roseanne got fired because she's a scumbag. And the show became The Conners. And in a bit of good fortune, The Conners has been a big hit. And it's been on for six seasons and 97 episodes without Roseanne. And if you were around back then, March 11th, 1989, spring is on its way. You've got to find yourself some patio furniture. Well, you're in luck. In the current Bradley Circular, 40% off deals on some of their patio furniture. Patio chairs marked down to $48 to $66. Tables anywhere from $71 to $131. And accessories as low as $599, although they don't say what accessories they are. So head on down to the local Bradley's. Get your patio furniture because spring is on its way. But that'll wrap up another This Week in History and another Time Capsule. Now we're going to go to the dark side of TV advertisements as we look at the top five TV product mascot villains, the bad guys that fought against the good guys selling their products to you. So let's check them out coming up right now. Hero is only as good as the villain that they have to fight. And although we're not going to get too serious into good guys and bad guys, this week's top five is definitely going to show you heroes and villains of TV products. I'm already laughing as we're going to look at the top five TV product mascot villains. This again was a subject that I had never even thought of until doing my research. And I was watching some old commercials, because that's a thing that I like to do. And one of the commercials had a typical product mascot, but there was a villain that was trying to thwart them sharing their product with others. And I started to think about how there are other villains that they have for these advertisements. And after a little research, I realized there are enough bad guys in commercials that I could make a top five. As with most of these top fives, they're in no particular order. I know last week's one with the MTV videos was in order, but that's an anomaly. Also with these top fives, there are some honorable mentions. And for this week, for those of you that have no clue what I'm talking about with the product mascot villains, the honorable mentions will help get you going. Honorable mentions for bad guys of TV advertisements include... Mayhem, who is from the Allstate insurance commercials. Mucus, or Mr. Mucus, or whatever he is, from the Mucinex commercials. The insects from the Raid bug spray, bug killer commercials. And a couple of really old ones. The Duke of Doubt from Burger King from the late 1970s. and Mr. Bad Lunch from the SpaghettiOs commercials of the mid-1980s. So there are some of the honorable mentions for these bad guys of TV advertisements. Let's move on to the actual top five, starting with number one, the Soggies. They're from the Captain Crunch cereal commercials, specifically the mid-to-late 1980s. I guess they represented the milk that would make your cereal soggy when you would pour it on there. They were these gremlin-type characters. They looked like big blobs of, well, it's supposed to be milk, but ugh. Kind of gross, drippy white, get the picture. They would steal things that Captain Crunch was sharing, either the Crunchberry Tree or just the cereal in general. And of course, the kids in the commercial would make sure to shout that it was the Soggies, just so you knew what they were called. But Captain Crunch would fight it because they would stay crunchy in milk, which is kind of not true. If you leave your Captain Crunch in milk long enough, it gets soggy no matter what he says. Then everything would be all right. He would save the day the Soggies were defeated. Number two is the Cavity Creeps, and they are from the Crest Toothpaste commercials. We put holes in teeth, is what they would just yell all the time. These were the late 70s through the mid 80s. And the cavity creeps, they looked a little bit like the foot soldiers from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kind of grayish purple, no face. They'd be yelling about how they make holes in teeth for a while until the crest team, the superheroes, would come to fight them off. And all of this would take place in the fictional city of Toothopolis. I'm actually surprised that they didn't make a short film about this Toothopolis and the Crest team. I mean, maybe they did. I'll have to research it and find out. But just like with the Soggies, the Crest team would defeat the cavity creeps every time, squirt the toothpaste on them, and then brush the teeth so they looked all nice and white. Number three... is the Cookie Crook from Cookie Crisp Cereal. This is another one, mid-80s, late-80s. A lot of these are from my childhood. Maybe this, I was researching these, but it seems like that period of time is when they really started to throw these evil characters that had to be defeated in commercials. The Cookie Crook would usually have his dog with him, Chip the dog. And then there was the Cookie Cop, but he was Officer Crumb, I think was his name. And he would come along to thwart the cookie crook who was stealing cookie crisps so that us kids couldn't have it. But his dog would always give him away. He would howl saying cookie crisp. And naturally that would draw the attention of the cookie cop and he would save the day. I think as the 90s went on, they tried to make these products without characters that appealed towards children. Because I noticed even the good guy characters, specifically with cereals... They all started to vanish in the later 90s, early 2000s. Because that's when I think the cookie crook kind of ended. That whole thing, mid to late 90s. Who knows? Maybe I'm just misremembering. Number four is the Noid from Domino's Pizza. The Noid was what made your pizzas cold. This weird little elf type thing with these long red ears. It was like he was in a suit. And he didn't talk, he just made these weird, high-pitched noises. This was the late 1980s, where Domino's Pizza wanted you to avoid the Noid by ordering from them, because they guaranteed your pizza would get there hot and fresh. In the beginning with the Noid, it was interesting, it was kind of stop-motion animation or claymation, and he was in tons of commercials trying to ruin your pizza. But of course, he would get defeated. Either something would fall on him, or he'd try to run at you and miss and slam into a wall. Two really interesting things about the Noid character was, one, there was actually a video game created around it for Nintendo. It was called Yo! Noid, and it's from 1990, and you're the Noid, but you're a good guy who has to defeat the evil Noid, which I don't understand because I thought the Noid was evil in the commercials. But also, the Noid ended up kind of getting phased out because there was a man with the last name Noid that thought that Domino's made this character to make fun of him, and he actually held people hostage. The man Kenneth Noid held two people hostage at a Domino's. Luckily, they managed to escape, and he was arrested, but he was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. That Noid, the Noid character, will probably get a longer form segment in a future podcast, because there's a lot to cover there. But finally, number five on the list of top five product mascot villains is the Hamburglar from McDonald's. A number one when it comes to villains was the Hamburglar, dressed in the classic jail robber costume, black and white stripes with a bandit mask, stealing the hamburgers from Ronald McDonald. All he could say was, The Hamburglar and all of those characters from McDonaldland, they were a huge part of my childhood in the early to mid-1980s. I didn't know until I got older that Grimace was originally evil, and that he had two sets of arms to help him steal milkshakes. It's no wonder McDonald's has been the king of fast food for 50 plus years. You have all of these characters, basically a whole village worth of characters. McDonaldland. I'll end up doing a full-length segment on McDonaldland itself in the future too. But the Hamburglar would usually get foiled, but every now and then Ronald would feel bad and still give him hamburgers anyway. Which I guess either teaches kids that it's okay to be nice to bad guys, or you can be a bad guy because sometimes you win. But there you have it. The top five TV product mascot villains, plus the honorable mentions. Were there any that I missed? Because I did my research and this is what I came up with, so maybe I missed some. And if we had a big battle royal with all of these villains, who do you think would win? My money's on the cavity creeps just because there's more of them. What do you think? Take a trip with me, won't you please? It's 1988. You just got paid. It's Friday night. Party hunting. Feeling right. Oh wait, that's the Johnny Kemp song. If you weren't old enough to go party hunting like Johnny Kemp in his song Just Got Paid, it's from 1988. Go listen to it. What else could you do as a child of the late 1980s, early 90s on a Friday night? Well, let's go way, way back in the day and reminisce about Friday nights at the video store. Looking at the landscape today of convenience, of online streaming, easy access to basically anything you could want, I can still say as a child of the 1980s, I never would have thought that there would be a day that video stores weren't a thing. It was such a big part of my culture, my growing up. At the peak in around 2000, there were nearly 28,000 video rental stores in the United States. And when you have an industry that's that big at that time, it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that today there's a handful at most. Think about it. People that are my age or anyone. When's the last time you went to a video store? I don't think they're totally gone, but for all intents and purposes, those days are over and long over. But what was it like Friday nights in the mid to late 80s through the 90s? I know growing up on Cape Cod, we had a lot of the mom and pop video stores, but we also had our share of bigger ones, blockbuster video, Hollywood video. I know in other places around the country, they had family video was a big one. On Cape Cod, I can remember smaller video stores that we used to go to like Video Galaxy or Entertainment Stop or Cape Video or Tela Rental. These are all very local chains. So those of you listening from outside of Cape Cod will have no clue about them. The best way as a kid, teenager, or anyone from that time period to get the movies that you wanted, if you weren't sure exactly what you wanted, the best way was to go and just browse. It's not that much different than going on Netflix and scrolling and scrolling, except you were in real life, where you'd walk in the front door of whatever video rental location you were at. And there they were, just aisles and rows of hundreds and thousands of different movies. Typically, when you walked in at the front, there would be new releases. There'd be lists of what had just come out, what was coming out in the future. Because then they could get you to put down money to reserve copies of the movies when they'd come out. It was usually cheap. Put down a dollar or two and you'd reserve a copy of whatever movie was coming out in the next few weeks. Because that was another big thing about the video store. You need to reserve your copy because there's only a finite number. Just imagine if you went on Netflix and only a certain amount of people could watch any certain movie at once. In this age of convenience, it's got to be hard for people to imagine that, that you might go to a video store and not get what you wanted. I typically had ideas of what I wanted to rent before I went there, but if not, I would just wander the aisles. It was all organized by genre, horror, sci-fi, comedy, etc. And if you were lucky, they'd be in alphabetical order, unless people started to rearrange them and then you didn't know where things were. You would judge movies based on their cover art, too. If you weren't sure of what a movie was, you had to read the box if it had a cool image on the front. They still do cool cover art for movies, but it's different when you're scrolling on a computer screen. When you're holding the box in your hands, you need that compelling image to make you want to actually flip the box around and see what the movie's about. If I went by myself, riding my bike or something, I could be in the video store for a half hour or more just wandering around. But if you're in there as a family, with parents, with other kids, you kind of had a certain amount of time, pick something and let's go. I remember hearing that from my mother plenty of times. But if you had the time, you could watch. They'd have movies on TVs around the video store. Unless it was a really small mom-and-pop, then they didn't have TVs at all. But you could get kind of a sneak preview of something and then go to see if you could find that box, bring the box to the front, and they'd give you the actual videotape. I remember specifically... Video Galaxy, which was in South Yarmouth. And I think it was in other video stores too. But you'd walk in and they would have popcorn being made. So it was that smell like it was the movie theater. It would just transport you to a different place mentally. There were usually little coolers with sodas. There'd be candy that you could get up by the front registers. There was always this sense of accomplishment when you would get... all the videos you wanted. Like if you went in to rent three or four movies to tide you over through the weekend, sometimes there were deals for renting more movies. But if you got all the ones you wanted, just easy as pie, it was something great about that. But I also liked the idea of renting something you weren't sure of. You were taking this risk, even though it was, you know, $3 to rent a movie. But you were taking this risk, getting something you weren't positive you wanted to see. And then if you went home and watched it and it was great, then you got that sense of satisfaction. I think when I was 13, 14 years old, that might have been when I got my first membership card. It was probably Hollywood video. Maybe it was Blockbuster. But to actually have a card that was your ID that you could rent your movies with. I had a... video store membership card before I had a driver's license. Although it didn't really matter too much in the late 80s, early 90s. I don't think I ever got questioned when I went in by myself to rent gory horror movies. I know for a fact that I used to go with my friend Matt to our local video store. It was probably a half mile bike ride down the road. Maybe it's because the people knew us. But we would rent these horrible movies. The Mutilator. That's the one I always remember us renting and watching. Look it up. It's pretty gory. But we never got questioned. It was a different time. It's almost like the people just assumed, oh, their parents must know they're renting this. Those of you that grew up in that time, did you ever get, not carded, but questioned about the videos that you rented? I rented R-rated movies all the time, and you're supposed to be at least 17 to be able to watch them. I definitely was not 17 when I was watching Friday the 13th and Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Another thing that was interesting about the video store experience was that if you didn't have a VCR, you could rent. Some of them had VCRs to rent that you could bring home. Some of them had video game consoles you could rent. I remember specifically renting a Nintendo at my Nana's house. And sure, it was more expensive, but I guess it made it more inclusive that you could play video games and not have to spend the hundreds and hundreds of dollars to buy the console and the game. Going to the video store, it was a destination. It was an event. Sometimes you'd see friends from school there. But you would plan around it, especially in the summer. Parents trying to find things for their kids to do so they'd shut up and leave them alone. Rent a stack of videos and say, watch these and stay in the living room. If you really had your act together, you could call the video store ahead and reserve your movies. Although that was a bit of a cheat compared to the people that actually took the time to drive down there not knowing. Because like I said, that was half the fun. Going there without an idea of what you wanted, wandering the aisles, looking at dozens of different boxes, and just planning your weekend around three or four movies that you were going to rent. Back in the day before internet, a lot of what you would know about movies would be from what friends told you. Sure, you could watch the critics' shows, but when it came to movies that teenagers are interested in, Older people as critics didn't really speak to me. I didn't want to hear people that were my grandparents' age saying what they thought of a movie that would appeal to a teenager. I wanted to hear from other teenagers. So you'd get your friends telling you what they saw, what was good, what wasn't good. It was another form of social bonding with people. Your video pics. So you'd bring up the empty boxes to the front. They... People that worked the registered would match the box. They'd get the actual tape out for you. It was typically a blank black plastic container with the tape inside. And usually it would have a sticker for whichever video store it was. So if you tried to steal it, the video would typically say, be kind, please rewind or something like that. Because if you didn't rewind your videos and brought them back, you'd get charged a fee. I would usually do it, but I was also thinking, is it really that big of a deal to rewind the tape there? And also, if you didn't bring it back on time, you would get charged late fees. That was another big thing, having to remember to make a trip back to the video store to throw the tapes into the little slot. I can hear the sound of the old printers printing out the receipts that you would get that were bigger, like full pages. that would then be folded and stuck into one of the containers for the video with when it was due back so that you had no excuse. Movie rental night was always a bigger thing, a bigger event, because typically it would be combined with certain snacks you liked or fast food, dinner, or you'd have friends over, they'd eat over, come over and have dinner and watch movies. It was this whole social interaction that just doesn't happen anymore. And I hope I'm not sounding like the old man, but it's just something that I miss about being a teenager. Having a couple of friends, we go to the video store, rent a couple movies, get dinner at McDonald's or KFC, and then sit in the living room and watch movies and they sleep over and we watch the really scary ones late. Even later on in the late 90s into the early 2000s when it became more DVD-centric than VHS. It was still a lot of fun into my mid-20s. I used to rent the first season of South Park VHS tapes that were these compilations from 1997-98. But slowly with the rise of online videos, online streaming, Netflix, the mom-and-pop stores went, and then even Blockbuster went. Those of you my age, you know, in your 40s or even into your 50s now, could you have imagined back then when they were so big that Blockbuster would just be gone? What were your favorite parts about those weekends at the video store? I couldn't pick a favorite part. It was a whole experience that was just different. Walking around the video store and looking for what you wanted. I'm not going to hate on the convenience and availability of online streaming. Not at all. But I do, even to this day, wish there was a video store nearby just for that experience of going and walking around like that. Maybe they need to make a virtual reality game where I put on the headset and I just wander a video store. That'll be something I'll be looking for when I'm in my retirement home days. But until next time, that's going to wrap up episode 136 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Thank you to everyone for tuning in. Whether this is your first time ever listening to the show or you've listened to everyone religiously, I appreciate you checking out my work. If you like what you heard, there's a lot more episodes where that came from. There's also full-length video episodes of the podcast on YouTube. I'm doing those because Google Podcasts is going away within a few weeks. So the video versions of the podcast, it's the audio, but with some place cards for each segment. I also do video segments of the podcast where I take segments and add a lot of spice and flavor to them. Animations, AI supported images. I use the help of Canva Pro and Bing AI in case you're wondering how I do what I do. Go and become a subscriber at my YouTube channel. Follow me all over social media. Instagram, Threads, X, the Facebook fan page. Check out the blog. The In My Footsteps podcast blog is a catch-all now, so it has the initial impressions 2.0 in there as well. If you're interested in any of my nine books, visit my website, ChristopherSatterlund.com. If you're interested in my true crime book, Searching for the Lady of the Dunes, or if you're interested in that case itself, as it is the 50th anniversary of that infamous Cape Cod case, check out theladyofthedunes.com, the website that I built. It includes a way to purchase my book, Searching for the Lady of the Dunes, or watch Frank Durant's incredible documentary that basically did all of this. And it's got tons of information about the case for those of you that have never heard of it or are looking for more information about it. Next week, I'll be back with episode 137 of the podcast. We're going to do another classic old educational film review. This is a personal favorite of mine. It's called Bomb Threat Plan Don't Panic. I'll explain more about why I really like this video next week. And I'm also excited to start a new recurring segment for the podcast. It won't be weekly because that's not going to be possible, but it's something called Blink and You'll Miss It Retro. So I've said before, I really enjoy old commercials. It's like a nice warm bath for my brain, all the nostalgia I could want from growing up. A fun little thing I like to do when I'm watching these is if there's a product I've never heard of, to kind of research it and figure out what happened to it. And what I found is there were a lot of products that were out and gone quick. And I've basically been jotting down notes anytime I watch these compilations of old commercials. So next week, we're going to do the first Blink and You'll Miss It retro. It'll probably be five products. It won't be another top five, but it'll be similar. And I'll tell you about five of these things that were here and gone. See if any of you remember them. But there'll be that and there'll be a lot more next week on episode 137 of the podcast. So spring is almost here. The weather's gonna get better, warmer, longer, sunny days. Even when that comes, you want to take care of your mental health, lean into the things that make you happy, whether it's certain people, certain places, foods, certain podcasts, hobbies, whatever it is. Make more time for the things that make you feel good. Like I've said so many times, if what you enjoy isn't hurting anyone, then who cares what anyone thinks? For me, it's the content creation. Even though there are times where I don't feel like I have the time to do all of this podcast editing and marketing and creating videos and the blog posts and book events and all that stuff. I get such a sense of accomplishment from all of this. So that's good for my mental health. And all of you who listen, who watch, who share, who review, leave ratings for everything, I appreciate all of you because that's good for my mental health. Having people that see my work as must-see, must-listen, destination viewing and listening, there's no substitute for that when you're a content creator. And remember, in this life, Don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. Thank you all again so much for tuning in. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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