In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 153: The Oregon Trail PC Game; What Ended McDonaldland?; Shocking Razzie Nominated Musicians; Tom & Jerry(7-17-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 153

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Don't catch dysentery on the Oregon Trail. What spelled doom for McDonaldland? Some of the most accomplished musicians nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award.
Episode 153 brings all the nostalgia you could possibly want.
The show kicks off with a favorite memory of many school-aged kids of the 1980s and 1990s. Oregon Trail was more than just a fun game that taught kids to avoid dysentery and to watch out for broken wagon wheels on the prairie. It was an educational game that helped teach critical thinking and encourage social interaction. We will take a deeper look at this classic game.
Years ago fast food restaurants catered toward the younger generation with colorful characters and bright cheery facades of their buildings. No establishment epitomized this as much as McDonald's. In the 1970s they revolutionized the way fast food was sold with their unique, and a bit trippy, McDonaldland. Then slowly it faded away. We go way Back In the Day to look at the events that led to the demise of McDonaldland.
Even the greatest of the great can have off days or perceived off days. In the new Top 5 we will look at some of the most beloved and accomplished musical acts ever, who also just happened to have been nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Song.
There is also a new This Week In History and Time Capsule centered around the first official Tom and Jerry cartoon.
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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 153. I often say this podcast is chicken soup for the Gen X soul. Well, it's kind of fitting now as it is soupy weather outside on Cape Cod. There's a segue. And this week we've got a lot of nostalgia to jump into. We're going to start off with a deep dive into one of the first beloved memories of school for a lot of 1980s kids. And that was playing the Oregon Trail personal computer game. We're going to go way, way back in the day. And look at the wild story and situation that led to the end of McDonaldland. There'll be a brand new top five. And these are the shocking musical artists that were nominated for Razzie Awards. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule centered around the very first official Tom and Jerry cartoon. All of that is coming up right now on episode 153 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we going to talk about this week? Well, there's a lot of fun nostalgia like I've always got. We're here deep into the month of July. It's been hot. It's been humid. It's been soupy. I keep saying that a lot, but I'm sure it's the same where a lot of you are in the United States. I know I've got a lot of listeners all over the country, and I'm pretty sure none of us has been spared from the heat and humidity, unless maybe you're in Alaska. Wherever you're from, though, if it's in the US, New England, Cape Cod, if it's across the pond, as they say in Europe, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for taking a little bit of time out of your day to enjoy, hopefully, a lot of fun nostalgia. A big thank you as always to my Patreon subscribers, Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, and Kevin. $5 a month gets you access to exclusive bonus podcast episodes, early access to the main show, early access to YouTube videos. And there's more stuff going up on the free tier. So you can go be a subscriber, but it costs you nothing. Because I know paying money for Patreon subscriptions, that's not feasible for everyone. Like I say, I listen to a lot of podcasts and I wish I could support all of them, but it's just not possible. So the best way you can support the show is listening, sharing. Currently up on Patreon is a special look at the Lady of the Dunes murder case because it was 50 years ago this month that that case occurred in Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I recorded a special podcast that went up on the 1st of July for Patreon subscribers. It's going to be next week's podcast episode because I wanted to share that with as many people as possible. But I also wanted to give Patreon listeners something good, a little advantage. So three weeks ahead of time to listen to it. Before we get into the meat of the podcast, you probably remember me saying a few weeks for a few weeks that I've been training for a race, a 5K race in Katuit on Cape Cod. It's a little village if you're not from here. Well, that race occurred, and it was definitely an interesting story. It occurred on a Friday evening, and a couple of days before the race, I got super sick to the point where the only time I even got out of bed was to take medicine. My throat, my lungs, my sinuses, it was a lot of fun, especially with the heat and humidity. Man, what a wonderful time. Anyway, it dawned on me that I had spent two months training and two months dieting, dropping 15 pounds, for this race. So I finally decided, the hell with it, I was going to go and run it even though I was half dead. To get from where I lived to where the race was, it was a good 35 minute drive. I was all medicined up. I was absolutely in a fog. It was like I was in a dream state most of this afternoon. But I had run this course before, back in 2013, so I was familiar with it. I had had a good race time in that one. So I figured, why not give it a shot? And for the first two and a half miles, everything was good. I was ahead of the pace I wanted. I couldn't believe it. Then reality set in, and all the sickness came rushing forward. I basically had to drag myself across the finish line. If I could have had someone put me in a wagon... and just tow me or the parents that were pushing their kids in the strollers. I could just throw the kid aside and put me in the stroller and bring me to the finish line. I ended up finishing in the exact same time that I did in my first race, my comeback race in May, which I guess was good considering I was so sick. The start and finish of the race were at the baseball field where the Katuit Cape Cod Baseball League team plays. So it was basically at a baseball field. I just walked my way all the way across the field to center field and sat at the fence. If I could have passed out, I would have. I consider it to be my flu game for sports fans. If you don't know what that is, in 1997 in the NBA Finals, Michael Jordan had the flu and he played through it against the Utah Jazz. He scored 38 points and it's one of his most famous moments in basketball. I said, I'm going to do something like that. I guess it would have been more like Michael Jordan's game if I had finished in the top 20 of the race or something. But I finished and I made it and now it's on to the next race. So for those of you that had been wondering how I did in that second race that I had been talking about, there it is. I made it, but man, I think I got more sick from running that race. But I'll tell you what, the cold that I had for four or five days and that I ran through was nothing like what the people on the Oregon Trail would have gone through. Dysentery. So right now we're going to look back at one of my favorite first memories of school in the 1980s and probably a lot of yours that are my age. And that's the Oregon Trail PC game. So let's talk about riding the Oregon Trail. I can't speak from personal experience because I don't have any kids, but I can only assume that elementary school in the 2020s is a lot different than it was in the 1980s. Long gone are the days of that rolling cart with the VCR on one level and a big old box TV on the top of it. Long gone are typewriters. Long gone is penmanship class cursive that I learned. But no matter when you went to school, when you started school, if you sit back and think right now, you've got some initial first positive memories of school, whatever they might be. Whether it was recess or certain friends you met or nap time in kindergarten or the first foods you liked at lunch, pizza, chicken nuggets, or that scoop of mashed potatoes that held its shape so well. In the last 20 years, computers have become so common in school that kids that are going to school now couldn't imagine there was a time without them. For me, I started school in 1983. Yeesh. Yeah, I know. That's a long time ago. I believe it was second grade when I had my first exposure to computers, the Apple II. Way back in episode 53, I did a segment about early 1980s educational PC games, and I did a quick look at the Oregon Trail. But I knew that wasn't going to be enough. We had to do a deeper dive, a little bit about what made the game special. Because I can only speak for me, but I think I do speak for a lot of you that grew up in that time period. That educational game, it captivated our minds. And it also brought forward, it was learning through playing video games. It brought the historic westward migration of the United States to life. It was adventure, strategy, learning, and I don't know. If I had to make a toss-up between watching the TV with Reading Rainbow or something or playing Oregon Trail in second grade, I might choose Oregon Trail. But before we go back 40 years to look at what it was like playing the Oregon Trail game, we've got to go back about 200 years to what the real Oregon Trail was. For those that don't know what it is or don't know the game, I'll give you some of what made this period of time perfect to be made into an educational PC game. Oregon Trail The real Oregon Trail was a 2,170-mile route that connected the Missouri River westward to the fertile valleys of Oregon. And it was used primarily in the early 1830s to the late 1860s. The real Oregon Trail was a critical path for settlers moving westward in search of new opportunities, better opportunities, and land. But the journey was fraught with challenges, difficult terrain, unpredictable weather, and the constant threat of disease, which became apparent in the video game. Tens of thousands undertook that journey, and lots of them didn't make it, and they're buried along the Oregon Trail to this day. But it helped to shape the American frontier. So what could be better than being eight years old and living on Cape Cod or anywhere in the United States in the 1980s and being able to sample a little bit of that danger, but knowing that you are one flick of the power switch from being safe? The Oregon Trail game itself was conceived in 1971 by three student teachers, Dan Rawich, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. and it was a way to engage their students in learning about American history. As primitive as the Oregon Trail game in the 1980s might look to kids of today, the original was actually a text-based game, so it was even more primitive. Played on a mainframe computer, and it simulated the trials and tribulations of a 19th century pioneer family. You travel from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Dan Rawich initially programmed the game to be used in his history class, and it quickly became a hit. He recognized the educational potential and later adopted it for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. They're the ones that distributed the game to schools across the U.S. in the early 1980s. And with the advent of personal computers, it went from text-based to More graphical. I mean, it was very primitive with the graphics and a lot of it was green and black. But to a kid in 1984, 85, seeing that and being able to play that, it was like the greatest thing ever. This was before Nintendo was readily available. Atari 2600 was readily available. But again, not a lot of kids had it compared to today where you've got games on your phone. I can't remember exactly because we're going back almost 40 years, but typically there was a group of three or four kids that would play at each computer. One of you would assume the role of wagon leader. You got to put in your name of you and everyone in your party, and you had to start to navigate your way westward. You had to make the critical decisions about when to travel, the supplies to purchase, how to handle the obstacles in the way. It really did help with critical decision making, despite it being very low risk for the actual kids playing. It incorporated the elements of resource management, risk assessment, and survival tactics. One of the most memorable aspects of the game was the educational value. We kids learned about the historical context of the Oregon Trail, the geography of the United States... This was the first time I learned about different landmarks in the United States. I mean, all I knew was Cape Cod and more specifically my town and the two towns surrounding it, basically. I didn't know about Fort Independence or Big Blue River or Fort Kearney, Chimney Rock, Green River, Snake River, all these different places. I didn't know anything about them. I just knew I had to defeat them to get to the end of the game. There was a lot of hardship in the game. where you would have diseases. That was the big one. Dysentery, snake bites, broken wagon wheels. It became a lot of fun to be playing the game with your classmates and suddenly you or one of them breaks their leg or gets dysentery. And it was funny because there was a bit of a disconnect because you could say so-and-so broke their leg, but in reality they didn't. So it became fun. Go out on the field at recess and say, ah, you have dysentery. I guess that's not good. Spread that around the school. I know there was at least one time that we were playing that I died in the game and I had to just sit there mad with my arms folded because I couldn't do anything. That's a big part of what made the Oregon Trail game such a success. It was the innovative blend of education and entertainment. And that made learning fun. And that's super important when you're impressionable. Seven, eight, nine years old. It's like you could go either way. If school seems fun, if learning seems fun, you want to really invest yourself. But if it seems boring, like you'd rather be at home sitting on the couch watching Price is Right, you're going to disconnect a little more. I'm not saying Oregon Trail made me a better student, but it definitely made school more fun. Because I wasn't just... passively receiving information from teachers. Me, my classmates, you who played back then, you were actively participating in historical scenarios. You'd make decisions and see the consequences. Try to pack up your wagon and go across the river and just watch it get destroyed and sink. That was another big thing was the replayability of the game. I don't think any time that I played in school that my classmates that we made it. Either we all died or we ran out of time and we had to go to lunch. And it made every journey on the Oregon Trail unique. There's always different challenges and different outcomes based on what you did. I still to this day can play Oregon Trail online and it's still a lot of fun. Because now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever actually finished the game and succeeded. Oh no, that's going to be what I do later today then. The last thing that made Oregon Trail such a success was the simplicity and accessibility of the game. It was easy to understand. Me at eight years old, I knew what the point was. Get your wagon crew to the West Coast. And it actually enhanced your social life. The people that you played with in your little group, even if you didn't know them, you had to interact with them and maybe you became friends with them thanks to Oregon Trail. All of those reasons right there are why the Oregon Trail game has left an enduring legacy in the world of educational gaming. I'm figuring that the vast majority of you that went to school in the 1980s and 90s played Oregon Trail when you were young. And when I bring up hunting, going out there trying to hunt squirrels or bears or rabbits, or I bring up dysentery or broken wagon wheels or your wagon sinking in the river, you can close your eyes and picture it. If you go to oregontrail.ws, you can play the game right now. You can pause this podcast, go online, and try to get your crew out to Oregon without getting dysentery. Naturally, I'll link to it in the description of the podcast so you can go and play it. Oregon Trail, it was a groundbreaking educational tool that brought history to life for a generation of students. I know it did for me. When I think of my first memories of school, especially positive memories, Oregon Trail is right at the top of the list. Did you play Oregon Trail? And did you survive? Did you win the game by making it to the end? I think my evening is going to consist of me creating a few friends and trying to succeed on the Oregon Trail. This week in history, we are going back 83 years ago to July 19th, 1941, and the debut of the very first official Tom and Jerry cartoon. You talk about beloved and cherished memories of my childhood, like we just did with Oregon Trail. Tom and Jerry cartoons are right up there. I mean, they're one of the most iconic duos in animation history. The reason I said... official Tom and Jerry cartoon is because when William Hanna and Joseph Barbera made the very first, I guess, Tom and Jerry on February 10th, 1940 in a short film called Puss Gets the Boot, Tom was known as Jasper and Jerry had no name. So it was them, but it wasn't them. The success, though, led to MGM Studios to commission Hanna-Barbera to produce a series, and they officially named Tom the Cat and Jerry the Mouse. Tom was a bluish-gray, depending on when the cartoons were made, cat, constantly fighting with the little caramel-brown mouse Jerry. They rarely, if ever, spoke, and some of the stuff that happened to them, it was really violent, I guess you could say. Although I grew up watching it and I didn't go hit someone with a wrench or anything. Tom and Jerry were kind of the inspiration for the Simpsons itchy and scratchy cartoons that were a part of the show and probably still are. And it really played up the violence in the cartoons. The golden age of Tom and Jerry cartoons were 1940 to 1958. Hanna-Barbera directed 114 Tom and Jerry cartoons for MGM. They became known for the high quality animation, the imaginative storylines, and the orchestral music scores by Scott Bradley. Honestly, I could spend this whole segment listing my favorite Tom and Jerry cartoons, but you can't go wrong picking any from this era and just watching. There was 1943's The Yankee Doodle Mouse, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. 1945's Quiet Please won another Academy Award. It speaks to the quality of Tom and Jerry that they won seven Academy Awards, seven Oscars for Tom and Jerry. They were nominated 13 times. But it wasn't all sunshine and roses. There was the Gene Deitch era. I hope I'm saying the name right. D-E-I-T-C-H. It was only a year or two, but it was after MGM closed its animation studio. The production of Tom and Jerry cartoons were halted for a few years. And then they were outsourced to Rembrandt Films, led by animator Gene Deitch from Prague, Czechoslovakia. And you can tell these cartoons based on how different the animation is, how weird and different the music is. I can just say as a kid watching these ones, they were way more trippy and weird. Luckily, there were only 13 cartoons in this era. And then Chuck Jones took over, known for Looney Tunes. That was 1963 to 67. Those were a bit of a return to form. They were a little more like the Looney Tunes cartoons. There were 34 of those. After the 1960s, cartoons, short films, they started to fade away really. So Tom and Jerry got into TV shows where they were friends. Then there were movies based around them, including a live action mix with animation in 2021. It's really hard to cram all this history into this bit of a segment here, so I might have to do a deep dive somewhere down the line. But Tom and Jerry, their influence is evident in so many homages, parodies, references, like I said, itchy and scratchy. I could pause this podcast and go pick out any Tom and Jerry cartoon, more specifically from the Golden Age, and just have so much fun and reminisce about childhood. And that very first official Tom and Jerry cartoon, which was entitled The Midnight Snack, came out 83 years ago this week in history. Now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going to stick to that day the first official Tom and Jerry cartoon came out, The Midnight Snack. Let's see what was going on July 19th, 1941 in pop culture. The number one song was Daddy by Sammy K and his orchestra. The song was originally written by Bobby Troop, a member of the Mask and Wig Club at the University of Pennsylvania. The lyrics are about a woman named Daisy who wants her lover or husband to buy her expensive gifts. The song was number one for eight weeks, and Sammy K went on to be one of the most well-known band leaders of the big band era, including releasing the very first copy of Blueberry Hill, the song that would be made famous by Fats Domino in the 1950s. The number one movie was caught in the draft, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing 25 cents. This is a comedy starring Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamar, with Bob Hope playing a movie star that plans to dodge the draft for World War II by getting married. It's hard to find exact numbers for this movie, as far as box office goes. All I know is it was Paramount's second most popular movie in 1941, behind the movie Louisiana Purchase, which also ironically starred Bob Hope. Back in 1941, there was no TV, therefore there were no TV ratings, so the number one radio show was the Chase and Sanborn program. This was a comedy variety show sponsored by the Chase and Sanborn coffee brand. It was on NBC from 8 to 9 p.m. on Sundays between 1929 and 1948. And if you were around back then... July 19th, 1941. You just brought your kids to the theater to see the very first Tom and Jerry cartoon, but now it's a warm July afternoon. You might want to mow the lawn while the weather is good while you're in luck. The Sears Summer Catalog has a sale on the Craftsman 100 Series Push Lawn Mower. This is before the days of electric or gas powered lawnmowers. This is the one you literally pushed and it had the spinning blades. It says it's lightweight. The blades rarely need sharpening or oiling. They say it's quiet, which obviously naturally it doesn't have an engine to it. And you can get your Deluxe Craftsman 100 for $2 down, $16.45 total, or about $351 when adjusted for inflation to 2024. And just for comparison, I was looking to see Craftsman Riding Mowers today. which I guess would be considered the deluxe version, like the 100 was back then, they go for over $2,000. So there you go. Go to an antique store and get yourself one of these push lawnmowers and see if it's better than the craftsman riding lawnmower. But that's going to wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History episode. Now it's time to look at some shocking musical artists that were nominated for Razzie Awards. Great musicians, great bands, nominated for Worst Song of the Year under the Razzie Awards. Let's see if any of these shocked you like they shocked me. I guess even the greatest legends of music can have missteps when it comes to what they put out. It's also kind of subjective, but what we're going to be doing now is looking at the top five shocking Razzie-nominated musical artists. The Razzie Awards, aka the Golden Raspberry Awards, go out to the worst of everything in entertainment. They started in 1981. Back in episode 65, I did a segment on the best movies to win a Razzie award based on their ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. So you can go and check that out. Here we're going to look at the musical artists bands that were nominated for a Razzie or won a Razzie. And I guess it's less about the song that got nominated and more the overall importance, legacy of the artist that was nominated. Because when you hear some of these names, you're going to be like, wow, they got nominated for a Razzie for worst song. And for this list, I really stuck to the 80s and 90s bands and musicians that legacies have been cemented by now. So people that get nominated for Razzies in the last five years, I don't know if that has as much meaning. Maybe in five years, some of these bands that got nominated will have fallen off the map and you'll say, oh, yeah, they deserved it. As with most of these top five lists, there are some honorable mentions, and the actual top five is in no particular order. So let's jump into it. Let's look at the honorable mentions for shocking Razzie-nominated musical artists. And I will give you the songs they were nominated for, just so if you want to go listen and see if they really stink as much as you would think with a Razzie. Honorable mentions include ACDC, who was nominated in 1993 for their song Big Gun. Olivia Newton-John, who was nominated in 1980 for her song Suspended in Time. There was George Michael, who was nominated in 1987 for his song I Want Your Sex. There was George Harrison, who was nominated in 1986 for his song Shanghai Surprise. And lastly on the honorable mentions was Freddie Mercury from Queen, who was nominated in 1984 for his song Love Kills. This immediately jumps into the subjective nature of Razzie Awards, because I was like, oh, I like Big Gun. I remember that song from Last Action Hero in 1993. And I Want Your Sex reminds me of Beverly Hills Cop 2. But you be the judge. I should make a Spotify playlist and you can go listen and see which ones of these you hate the most. But let's get into the actual top five and see how many of these you're shocked that are on this list. We'll start with number one, Elton John. He was nominated in 1990 for his song The Measure of a Man. This song is from the Rocky V movie soundtrack. I went and saw that movie in the theater. Yes, I was one of the five. But I have no memory of this song being in the movie. I do remember Rocky V not having any of the real classic Rocky music in it. But I don't remember Elton John. In his career, Elton John had nine number one songs and 29 top ten songs. And he has sold over 300 million albums in his career. And maybe to counteract the stink of a Razzie nomination, Elton John has been nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Original Song, although four of those were in 1995, all from the Lion King movie. Number two is U2. They were nominated in 1995 for their song Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me. This was off of the Batman Forever soundtrack. And although that movie was a commercial success, it was not a critical success because they changed who Batman was. You stick Val Kilmer in there instead of Michael Keaton and everything changes. U2 made their debut in 1980, and in that time they've had two number one hits and six top ten hits. U2 has sold more than 175 million albums worldwide in their tenure as a band. They've also been nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Original Song, but they didn't win. When this song came out, I was 17 years old, 18 years old. I liked this song, but I was always a huge U2 fan. I mean, I even found good stuff on the Pop album. It's definitely a song that you can tell was written for a movie. It's a little bit different than their normal style. But then again, they were transitioning into that rock techno they did on pop, so maybe it was their style. So, so far, these two songs, I'm not super shocked that were nominated. But number three, that's a big shock. Number three is Aerosmith. They were nominated in 1998 for their song, I Don't Want to Miss a Thing. This song is literally Aerosmith's biggest hit ever of their careers, and their only number one song. Yep, they had one number one song, eight top ten songs, and their only number one got nominated for a Razzie, and it's from the soundtrack for Armageddon. That's the movie Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler. It was not a critical success, which is maybe why it got Razzie nominated for this song, but the movie was a huge box office success, and obviously the song went to number one. Aerosmith has sold more than 150 million albums in their careers that span from back in the early 1970s. I guess you could say this song was kind of sugary, sappy, love song. And you'd get the fools that are like, oh, they sold out by writing a song like this to make money. That's my only reasoning because I like this song, but I guess that's why it would be Razzy nominated. Number four. is Prince, and he was nominated in 1986 for his song Love or Money. I have no memory of this song, and it was released as a B-side for the song Kiss, which was on Prince's album Parade. So I don't think Love or Money, which was actually written as heart emoji or dollar sign emoji, that was classic Prince. So I guess it was Razzy nominated despite never being released as a single. But I guess it's fair if you put a song on an album, it's out there. Prince is one of the most prolific and greatest songwriters of all time. It's estimated, and I'm not going to go and count and fact check, that Prince on all his albums combined had well over a thousand songs that got released. And who knows how many that are still waiting to come out. So I guess if you release well over a thousand songs, there's going to be a few that aren't great. Prince has sold more than 150 million albums in his career, which started in the late 1970s. And even though he's been dead for eight years now, it's still going on. In his career, Prince had five number one songs and 19 top 10 songs, but Love or Money was not one of them. And finally, number five on the list of the shocking Razzie Award-nominated musical artists is Whitney Houston. She was nominated in 1992 for her song Queen of the Night. What makes this one even more shocking is that Queen of the Night is on the soundtrack for The Bodyguard. That's the best-selling movie soundtrack ever with more than 45 million copies sold. The same album that had I Will Always Love You that became Whitney Houston's biggest song ever also had a song that was nominated for a Razzie Award. You talk about running the gamut of extremes. It's like having a plate with your absolute favorite food and your most hated food right next to each other. Whitney Houston has sold more than 220 million albums worldwide in her career that started in the mid-1980s. And even though she's been gone for, I think, 12 years now, she's still considered, if not the best, one of the best female voices ever in music. Again, much like the Razzie Awards, that's also subjective. She would get one of my votes. In her career, Whitney Houston had 11 number one songs and 23 top 10 songs. But despite that, she couldn't escape the clutches of the Golden Raspberry Awards, at least nominations. But there you have it, the top five shocking Razzie-nominated musical artists. Which one shocked you the most? I mean, that top five is a murderer's row of legends. Elton John, U2, Aerosmith, Prince, Whitney Houston. But in all honesty, those of you that have heard these songs or any of the honorable mentions, do you think they deserve to be there? Believe me, I could have gone with the low-hanging fruit as far as Razzie nominations. I mean, Sylvester Stallone got nominated for two Razzies for worst original song, which you'd think, okay, of course. But I went with the established stars. I don't know about you out there, but to me, fast food restaurants, the fast food chains seem very sterile and thoughtless and just boring, at least on the outside. When I drive past a Kentucky Fried Chicken or Burger King or Taco Bell or Wendy's, they all just look the same. Growing up as a child of the 1980s, no place said, come on in kids and have some delicious fast food than McDonald's. Their building had bright colors, some of them had the playground outside, they just looked like a place 8, 9, 10 year olds would want to go and live. And it was the same for Wendy's, KFC, Burger King, they all looked different and unique and inviting. Now McDonald's is like brown and gray, and they've still got the Golden Arches logo, but it looks more like a Walmart than it looks like the McDonald's I remember. When I first have memories of McDonald's, probably 1983, I remember their playground being called McDonaldland. I didn't know until much later on when I started getting into retro commercials that that there used to be an actual McDonaldland with a lot of characters. Now, don't get me wrong. I grew up with Ronald, Grimace, Birdie the Early Bird, the Hamburglar, the Fry Guys. And I remember all of those commercials. But I was late to the game. I was too late to remember Mayor McCheese. And there's a good reason why. There's a reason why My growing up years of the 80s didn't have Mayor McCheese and only fleeting glimpses of McDonaldland. What I'm going to do is this is going to be a two-part series. The other part will be at some point in the future, but I'm going to kind of do them backwards here. So this would be part two as we look at the story of McDonaldland, but this is the end of it. It's sort of giving you the bad news first, good news later on. The idea of McDonaldland, I guess, goes back to the creation of Ronald McDonald in 1963, when he was a way more terrifying looking clown with a cup for a nose and a tray on his head. I guess the marketing geniuses at McDonald's figured Ronald would look better in bright colors and way more friendly and not like some lunatic that would be hiding in your closet. As the 1960s ended, They figured if Ronald McDonald was a success, why not add more characters, give him more of a backstory? And that's what happened in 1970. Needham, Harper, and Steers was the company that came up with McDonaldland. And going more in depth with each character and the creation of the commercials that were very much like acid trips in the early 70s, we're going to skip ahead a few years to the ending of McDonaldland. Because those of you that grew up in the early 70s, you probably remember the very old commercials that had the weird music and everything. It just looks weird when you watch, at least compared to what I remember in the 80s. McDonaldland as a concept came out 1970-71, and it only took until 1973 for everything to come crashing down. The center of this story revolves around the character Mayor McCheese. He's a character with a hamburger for a head, had a purple jacket, purple hat, and a sash that said Mayor. It seemed like a fun character, another one in the McDonaldland universe. But that didn't work for Sid and Marty Croft, who were the creators of the popular children's television show H.R. Puffin Stuff. They filed a lawsuit against McDonald's claiming that... they had copied the look and feel of their show for the McDonaldland characters, particularly pointing out similarities between Mayor McCheese and their character, H.R. Puffinstuff, who was also a mayor. On quick look, these characters obviously don't look anything alike. One's got a hamburger head, the other one looks like a yellow slug with big bags under his eyes and stringy, reddish-orange hair. In November 1973, there was a three-week trial at which the jurors were shown episodes of H.R. Puffin stuff along with McDonaldland commercials. In the end, after three weeks, the jury ruled in favor of Sid and Marty Croft for $50,000. But that's not the end of the story. Because both sides appealed, so then the case dragged on for years. And this time on October 12th, 1977, the decision was a lot different. Again, the court ruled in favor of Sid and Marty Croft, agreeing that McDonald's had infringed on their intellectual property, saying that Mayor McCheese and H.R. Puff and stuff both had disproportionately large heads and large mouths and were both mayors. The court also said the Needham, Harper, and Steers company had gone to the Croft company before, so they had access to H.R. Puff and stuff, and maybe that creeped into their thought process. Monetarily, it wasn't as big a deal, but what ended up happening was McDonald's had to stop using certain characters for McDonaldland, including Mayor McCheese. So Mayor McCheese was started to be phased out. But that wasn't the only ones. There were four other major characters from that McDonaldland era of the early to mid-1970s that got phased out. There was Officer Big Mac, who was a character that was a police officer with a Big Mac for a head, and he was law enforcer of McDonaldland. He doesn't look that much different from Mayor McCheese, except he's got a police officer's uniform on. I don't remember if they had it at the playground at the McDonald's in my hometown when I was growing up in the 80s, but some had a jail that was Officer Big Mac's head with bars around it that would be his mouth. There was also Captain Crook, who was a character that was a pirate. He was always trying to steal the Filet-O-Fish sandwiches from... So he's basically like the Hamburglar, but he went after fish sandwiches, so they're like cousins. Captain Crook, he looks a bit like the Captain Morgan logo, with the red pirate outfit and the black hat, the big round Muppet head. There was the Professor. who was a character that was portrayed as an inventor and scientist, and he was responsible for creating various gadgets in McDonaldland. They said he bore some resemblance to characters from H.R. Puffinstuff due to his whimsical and fantastical nature, because that can be copyrighted. The Professor was played by an actual human. Well, I mean, they all were played by humans, but he had his real face. His lasting legacy was he created the McNugget Buddies in 1983, which if you remember back then, the McNuggets, the six-piece, came in the styrofoam kind of yellowish container and in the commercials they'd open it up and there'd be six McNuggets talking in there. Go back to episode 127 to hear my segment about that wacky McDonald's training video from 1983 when the McNuggets first got invented. It is highly recommended if you enjoy an edible or a glass of wine. It'll be a lot of fun to listen to and then watch the video. Finally, there was also the hamburger patch, which wasn't a specific character, but it was part of the McDonaldland setting featuring the anthropomorphized hamburgers that were growing in a garden setting. Watching those commercials is pretty weird and creepy. At least they ended up keeping the hamburgers. They ended up being usually in school or doing something and the Hamburglar would come and steal them. From what I can gather in my research, Sid and Marty Croft, the decision, it wasn't immediate. So it wasn't 1977 and the characters are gone. They were phased out. And from the best of my research, it seems to be about 1985, the last commercials either new or in syndication that were out there with Mayor McCheese and the Professor and Officer Big Mac and Captain Crook. Luckily, Ronald McDonald survived, Grimace survived, Birdie the early bird, and the McDonald's commercials in the mid-1980s, late 1980s focused on those characters, The Happy Meal guys that were a burger and small fries and a drink that would talk. Like I said, the Talking McNuggets, the Hamburglar. Those were the ones I remember that I grew up with. But the McDonaldland characters that got phased out, they're still around. You find the old commercials. They're easy to find on YouTube. There are Funko Pops of Mayor McCheese, Officer Big Mac. So they're gone but not forgotten for those of you that grew up in that time. And like I said, in the future we'll do part two, which would be part one, the beginnings of McDonaldland. It'll have a lot more of the characters and a lot more of commercial segments in there for your listening pleasure. But at least McDonald's is still around to this day, even if the buildings are brown and gray and sterile. The food's still good, or at least so I've heard. Wink. But until next time, that's going to wrap up episode 153 of the podcast. Thank you so much to everyone for tuning in, sharing. Word of mouth is so important for content creators. A lot of these big time podcasters, big time content creators, they've got a team. They do their recording. They got other people to write out their scripts and edit their videos and market their videos. Everything I do, everything you hear, everything you read, it's me, one person. So I need all the help I can get letting others know to check out the podcast, to check out the YouTube videos. Those aren't released as regularly as I'd like to, but again, it's a time thing. Sometimes videos being made, especially done well, properly edited, they take five, six hours. And I usually don't have that much time to sit and do it. But I try my best when I've got free time to chip away at some videos, segments from the podcast that I make into videos. And I'll keep pumping out the content. The podcast is my number one. So I always make time for that. And it's obvious. Next week is episode 154. If I didn't have time for this, I'd have stopped a long time ago. Episode 154 is the special Lady of the Dunes at 50. Kind of an all-encompassing look at the case, the documentary, my book. What I basically do in this podcast is my presentations when I speak about the book. So it'll be like you're there, like you've gone to one of my events. I had put it up July 1st as the bonus episode for Patreon subscribers, but they got access to it, you know, three, three and a half weeks early. And it's good. You'll enjoy it. It's a full length episode. I'm on the fence whether I'm going to make a video companion to it because it's hard enough making eight to ten minute videos that are good. But a video that's 50 minutes long? I'd rip my hair out if I had any. If you're in the area, two days from when this podcast goes live, so July 19th, I'll be speaking at the Osterville Village Library at 1 p.m. This is about my Cape Cod Nights book, all about the golden age of Cape Cod nightlife. You who lived through it probably don't remember much of it because you were drunk or hungover. A little further down the line on Tuesday, August 6th at 10 a.m., I'll be speaking at the Pammett Theater in Truro. An outdoor talk Tuesdays under the tent. I'll be speaking about the history of Cape Cod music. It's a lot of fun. I got the presentation ready. So if you're in the area, then come on out. Hopefully it won't be 90 and humid because we'll be outside. Oh, man. If you're interested in any of my nine books, visit my website, ChristopherSetterlin.com. It's got links to all the books so you can find them there. Don't forget to check out the Initial Impressions 2.0 blog. Weekly, I put that up. It's kind of a journal of randomness of my life. Every now and then there's something poignant or deep, but it's mostly just foolishness that I can't believe is real. But I'm sure a lot of people have things like that in their lives. They just don't chronicle it like me. There's links to all of this in the description of the podcast. Even though I'm a one-man show here, I do my best to try to market myself. Even though it's sultry and soupy and steamy and all the other S-words to describe the weather outside, try your best to get outside. If you're near water, go there. That kind of helps a little bit. I enjoy running in the heat and humidity because you don't have to go as far to feel like you've done as much work. I've gotten into running Monday nights with my buddy Mike and we go around a local middle school track and then we run around the school and there's a cemetery next to it. So if we get tired, we can just kind of accept our fate. But it's basically every time we run, it's 6.30, 7 o'clock at night. When we're done, we look like we've literally gone swimming in our clothes. So you don't have to do things like that. But just getting outside and enjoying the sun, the vitamin D. Summer seems to go by faster the older I get. So that's why I'm imploring you, please go and enjoy it. Although fall is my favorite time of year. So I'm not going to be sad when Labor Day comes. And remember... In this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can, summer, fall, winter, spring, every moment, because you never know what tomorrow might bring. Thank you again so much to everyone for tuning in. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, but you already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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