In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 169: Podcast 4th Anniversary, Blink & You'll Miss It Retro(Toys), Weekly World News, #1 Songs On My Birthday, King Tut's Tomb(11-6-2024)

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The 4th anniversary of the podcast! The birthday of the podcast host! A new podcast logo! There is so much to celebrate!
Episode 169 starts off Year Four of the podcast with loads of fun nostalgia.
It begins with the 3rd installment of Blink & You'll Miss It Retro. This time we will look at toys that were here and gone quickly. Some you might remember, others might be totally new to you, but one thing is for sure, they all did not last very long.
We go way Back In the Day for a heavy dose of humor and weirdness as we do a deep dive into the legend of tabloid newspapers that was Weekly World News. Bat Boy? Elvis is alive? Aliens and Bigfoot are everywhere? What other insane stories were in the pages of this staple of the checkout racks of the grocery store?
It's a special Top 5 this week as we go over the best songs that were #1 on my actual birth date. Luckily when you get to be my age there are plenty of songs to choose from. Which ones made the list?
There will be a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule centered around the mysterious death of magic legend Harry Houdini.
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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 169. It's an overflowing birthday cake of celebration on this week's episode. My birthday, the podcast birthday. We're going to do tons of celebrating, starting with a brand new segment of Blink and You'll Miss It Retro featuring toys that you may or may not have known even existed. We're going to go way, way back in the day and have some laughs at one of my forgotten favorites of my childhood, and that was the weekly world news newspaper tabloid. There'll be a brand new top five. These are going to be the top five number one songs on my birthday. So my opinion, your opinion will likely vary. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule centered around finding King Tutankhamen's tomb and the curse that surrounded it? All of that is coming up right now on The Celebration, the birthday episode 169 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Welcome in, everybody. Did I mention it's Celebration Week? It's birthday week. I don't think I mentioned it enough in that intro. When this show goes live, it's four years ago yesterday, November 5th, 2020, that episode one of the podcast debuted. And it was the previous Saturday that my birthday dropped. My new birthday. It's a song. There's so much to get into on this week's show that it's like I don't even know where to start. The podcast has changed and evolved quite a bit since I started it. Those of you that are listening to this show, you likely saw there's a new logo, a new cover art for the podcast. I figured that this year, 2024, I switched over to mainly Gen X nostalgia. And as much as I love Cape Cod, I've grown up here, and I love New England, it didn't really fit into what I was doing with the podcast. I didn't want people to think they were getting one thing and then getting another. You can definitely go back in the archives, the first 120 maybe episodes, Have a lot more to do with Cape Cod, with New England, with the travel road trips. But as this show evolved, I realized that I really, really like doing the nostalgia stuff. I like the old days and I like to give you who listen kind of an escape. And I'd like to think I do a good job finding things that you probably haven't thought about in years. Like the first segment that's going to come up in a few minutes, the blink and you'll miss it retro. That comes from hours of me scouring the internet for old commercials and finding things that I didn't know existed or briefly knew existed and then sharing them with you. A big change that longtime listeners of the podcast likely notice is how my own interaction with you and my presentation to myself has changed over the years. The way I speak, my cadence, my pitch, I guess, it's way more how I am normally. My humor comes out a little more. When I first started this podcast in November 2020, I didn't know what I wanted it to be. If I wanted to be more serious and buttoned down, I came to realize that free-flowing and kind of foolish, that fits my humor a lot more. And those of you that aren't longtime listeners, here's my intro to the very first episode for you to hear the difference in how I sound in just four years. Hello, world. Hoping that wherever you are, you're having a good morning, a good afternoon, a good evening, whatever you've got. This is the debut episode of the In My Footsteps podcast. I am thrilled that you could join me. My name is Christopher Sederlin. I'm going to try to give you a little bit of an escape from the world. We're going to have a little bit of interesting history tidbits, New England travel, where to go, what to see, when the time is right, a little bit of retro, going back in time, and some more interesting things as we go along. So there you go. I've heard a quote from Chris Van Vliet, he's a big time podcaster, typically pro wrestling, but he said something a few months ago on his show that was basically if you can't look back at your earlier content and if you don't cringe kind of at how you sound or what you do, then you likely haven't been improving. So I do cringe a little bit. Thank you though to all of you that have been there from the beginning, those of you that have come aboard as I've gone along. I've got a pretty big spider web worth of content, 169 episodes and counting. I can't do this without those of you that listen, that share. At the top of the list are my Patreon subscribers. Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Marguerite, Leo, Neglectoid. Thank you all so much for being the ones that put your money where your mouth is to support me, the podcast, my YouTube videos. Content creation, if you do it right, can be a lot of work and time consuming. So having people that actually financially support you, even if it's a little bit, it really makes it worth it. It makes it feel like what I'm doing is kind of worth all the time and effort. $5 a month on patreon.com at In My Footsteps Podcast. It gets you access to bonus podcast episodes, the latest of which went up on this past Friday. They go up the first of the month. It gets you early access to the main podcast, to YouTube videos, sometimes digital art, and whatever else I can think of. One thing that I think is going to start going up on Patreon, it might not be until next year, you know, January. When I first started the podcast, I did live streams every Friday on Instagram. They were kind of like wrap-up shows for the podcast. Some of them I still have, so I may start to edit them and put them up. You can find them on YouTube, but I want to make them jazzed up a little better. I also put up on Patreon on the free tier a long short story, which is like oxymoron, called What I Learned in My 40s So Far. Just me looking at life since I turned 40 back in 2017. And a little bit of me, life lessons and such. I hope you'll check that out. But that's a good segue into this being my birthday week as well. And we're going to dive into the podcast in a minute. This was a lot of intro. There was so much I wanted to get into and I didn't know where else to put it besides the intro to the show. I had a lot of fun. I had a lot of great people reach out to me for my birthday. I would like to think that I'm... In good shape relatively for my age, but then things like this upcoming story happened that changed my mind. Last week I went to work one of the early mornings, so I got to the parking lot around 6.30. It's still dark because we haven't had the stupid daylight savings time yet. And I step out of my car. I open the back door to get my gym bag out of it. And it's just a beautiful morning. I hear the birds. I breathe in the fall air. And I do this nice long overhead stretch. And I'm just like, oh, what a beautiful morning. And then pop goes my back. In that moment with that lovely fall air and this stretch to enjoy the moment, I popped three ribs out of my back stretching. Yeah, so there goes the youth, the feeling of youth. Luckily, my boss, chiropractor Dr. Mike at MindBodySpine, he popped my ribs back in. But good lord, you want to think you feel young and are still young, and then your ribs pop out when you stretch, and reality comes crashing back in. There'll be a lot more celebration, but I want to get into the podcast. Thank you for dealing with that intro, because there's so much going on. But let's talk about toys. Toys that came and went that you might remember, might not remember. So let's open up the birthday edition, the anniversary of the podcast edition of the show with Blinkin' You'll Miss It Retro Part 3. Oh, there's that familiar or unfamiliar music of Blinkin' You'll Miss It Retro. This is the segment... Where I go over a six pack of things that came and went pretty quickly. This is the third Blink and You'll Miss It retro segment. I did a segment on food. I did a segment on TV shows. Now we're going to do a segment on toys. I briefly touched on it, but basically what I've done is I go through old commercial compilations, which is a favorite hobby of mine. And as these commercials are playing, if I see something I'm not familiar with, I'll pause the video and go Google search whatever it is that's on the screen. If I find that this product or show or whatever wasn't around for that long, I put it in a Word document just called Blink and You'll Miss It Retro. I denote where it falls as far as categories go and the timeframe when I think it was around. And then every now and then on the podcast, I do a collection and we go over them and I see how many of these you remember. I will tell you, this six pack of toys here, there's one that I remember and I put it on intentionally so I could talk about it. The other five, I have no clue about. So let's just jump into these and see if any of these you remember. So the very first one is one that I should remember, and maybe I do, and it's just blocked out of my head because it was when I was younger. And that's the Nintendo Power Pad.

Speaker 02:

You better get ready for the most challenging Nintendo system ever. Ready? Let's do it. The new Power Pad. It's only available in Nintendo's new Power Set. Now you're playing with body power. You've got to run.

Speaker 00:

Those of you that grew up in the 1980s with the original NES, you likely remember the gun to use for Duck Hunt. Some of you might remember the Power Glove, which was a glove you wore that doubled as a controller. There was even the Nintendo ROB, R-O-B, Robotic Operating Buddy, which I had no memories of. This year, the Power Pad, it's a little bit different. This power pad was first released by the company Bandai in 1986 as something known as the Family Trainer. It's a mat with dots on it. The dots are buttons. It's like a controller with your feet. A lot of these games with the power pad would be running games, movement games. Think about the more current game, the Dance Dance Revolution, like that type of game. It traces its lineage back to this Nintendo power pad. There were games like World Class Track Meet, Dance Aerobics, Jogging Race, Street Cop. These were the types of games that you use this power pad for, and you were basically running through the whole game. As far as I could see, it debuted for the NES in 1988. I couldn't find anything about it in the 90s. I don't know if it sold terribly and they shut it down within a couple years. Or if it was one of those things that was available for a lot longer, but they just stopped promoting it. Either way, the Nintendo Power Pad came and went pretty quickly. The second toy I want to talk about is the Quizzard board game.

Speaker 03:

You see, in Quizzard, somebody asks a question. And if you know the answer, you try to hit the buzzer first.

Speaker 02:

Which one of the seven dwarves had no beard?

Speaker 00:

Dopey! I knew that! From what I could find, this game first came out in 1987. There's a version of it developed by Random House, the publisher. I don't know if that was a special edition or something, but the idea is that not only do you have to be right with your answers to questions, you've got to be fast. There's a buzzer. You can have up to six players. The first person to buzz in gets to answer the question, but if you get it wrong, you lose points. There's a few different game types, fast hands, strategy. and Countdown. You've got these color-coordinated tracks, each one for whatever player is there. And as you answer, it gets lit up until you get to the center, which looks kind of like the finished pie in Trivial Pursuit. It seems like it being battery-operated with the flashing lights and computer-type challenges, it made this game ahead of its time, but for whatever reason, it did not sell well. It was not around for long. I couldn't find the exact time when Quizzard stopped being sold, but if you go to BoardGameGeek.com, they've got a whole page about the game with a lot of pictures of it, and you can find it on eBay. It's not cheap, so if you're not sure of the game, I wouldn't spend a ton of money and get it and then hate it and blame me. But we go from video games, board games, to dolls, specifically the Sunshine Family Dolls.

Speaker 01:

These

Speaker 00:

first came out in 1974, and the television network MeTV described them as the most 70s toys of the 70s. If Barbie is the glamorous world of the 70s, the Sunshine family is the opposite. They're like a small town family, I guess. Selling homemade goods, dressing kinda like hippies. If they were around today, they'd be something that you could see being sold in a Whole Foods. The dolls drove around either in a station wagon or a van. Mother, father, a couple of kids. They're like a unique alternative to the typical dolls that you would see people playing with in the 70s or 80s. But I think them being different is kind of what did them in. They did not sell well. They weren't around for more than a couple of years. You can find them on eBay. They're not selling for too high. So if you were nostalgic for Sunshine Family dolls or wanted to know what these hippie alternative dolls of the 70s were, you can find them all over eBay. We go from do-it-yourself farmer's market hippie dolls to killer animals with barnyard commandos.

Speaker 03:

Barnyard commandos! The rams are on the move! Led by Major Legger Mutton, a ram of great vision! Glasses? Ha! Who needs them? And Commodore Fleas Cardigan!

Speaker 00:

Barnyard Commandos were created by Playmates. They first came out in 1989, and they're kind of what you think they are. Barnyard animals that double as Rambo. And there are two sides in the fight. The Rams, rebel army of military sheep. And the Porks, platoon of rebel killer swine. There was also an animated series that was around for a little while. They were around for a couple of years, 89, 90, 91. They even had a tie-in with the Burger King kids meals. There were two series of the Barnyard Commandos action figures, some of them with the most foolish names that would fit into what I probably would have named them when I was that age, 11, 12 years old when they came out. There were the sheep ones like Wooly Pullover. And Fleece Cardigan. Those aren't too bad. Then you get to the big ones. And there's names like Side O' Bacon, like he's Irish. Tusker Chitlins. That really sounds like something me and my friends Barry and John would have come up with for a name. And my favorite, Ham Fat Lardo. That's like an insult in middle school. These did not last, unfortunately. You can find them on eBay. You can find the episodes of the cartoon. They're supposed to be maybe being reproduced again. But even if not, we'll always have the hilarious names like Ham Fat Lardo. Fifth in our six-pack on the Blink and You'll Miss It retro toy segment is something called Nerfels.

Speaker 03:

These

Speaker 00:

are little action figures that you put together. They were produced by Parker Brothers in the mid-1980s. The main part of this action figure is a soft ball. Then it would have a body, feet, and then some sort of head accessory. The tagline for these was, they're a ball to be around, which is... Alright. There were different names for these Nerfels. Typically, it was parents and kids. In the United States, there was Bart Ball, his wife Betty Ball, and the kids Bitsy and Bud. Plus their cat Scratch and dog Fetch. They lived in a town called Round Town Village. That was a place that you could buy. They had... vehicles you could put them in and have them drive. And I guess they did have to do with the Nerf brand, which maybe bought them a little more time in stores, because I don't see these lasting beyond a few years. When I list these down, when I research them, I try to see how long of a period of time I can find information about them. And Nerfles, it only seems to be a few years in the mid-1980s. Last but not least, though, this is the one that I remember. And I said, I've got to share this to see how many of you remember Pocket Rockers.

Speaker 03:

This

Speaker 00:

was a mini cassette player made by Fisher Price around the same time that the Walkman was really big. If you look these up, they look very 80s. You would get these little mini tapes. They looked kind of like 8-tracks. They would have songs from Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, The Bangles, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson. You can kind of get the idea of when these came out. I was probably 10, 11 years old when I saw these commercials, and I think I might have had a passing interest in getting pocket rockers until I realized you could get a Sony Walkman and get whatever tapes you wanted, or whatever tapes your parents were willing to buy you. The irony is that pocket rockers used the microcassette technology, so they looked like an 8-track, but they were one of those little tiny cassettes that you would use in a mini recorder to record lectures at school or something. And I have in my possession... Two old school mini recorders, one that I had in college in the late 90s, another one that I bought off eBay when my college one broke. So I have the technology, but I never got pocket rockers. I wonder if I went on eBay and bought old pocket rockers tapes, if they would play in the microcassette recorder. I do think that my money is well spent somewhere else besides 35 year old mini cassettes that I'd listened to once and might break when I played them. But there you go. We finished off a six pack blink and you'll miss it. Retro part three. Do you remember any of these toys? I tried to pick a combination of things I thought you might remember, like the Nintendo Power Pad, maybe Pocket Rockers, and then things that I'd never heard of, like the Sunshine Family dolls. We'll return to Blink and You'll Miss It Retro. We'll do a fourth part in the future of the podcast. It won't be toys again, although I've got plenty more to go through, but it'll be another fun collection of things that came and went before you even knew they were here. 🎵 This week in history, we are going back 102 years ago to November 4th, 1922 and the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen. The discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter marked one of the most significant archaeological events of the 20th century. Tutankhamen, often referred to as King Tut, ruled Egypt from around 1332 to 1323 BCE during the New Kingdom period. He ascended to the throne at nine years old and reigned for approximately ten years. Despite his short reign, Tutankhamun is significant due to his role in stabilizing Egypt after his father Akhenaten's death. However, he died mysteriously at around 18-19 years old, and for centuries his tomb lay forgotten. By the early 20th century, most tombs of the great Egyptian pharaohs had already been discovered, looted, or destroyed. However, the tomb of Tutankhamen remained elusive, and it was shrouded in mystery. The significance of finding an undisturbed royal tomb was monumental because it provided the archaeologists and historians an unprecedented look into ancient Egypt's burial practices and daily life. Howard Carter worked with his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, for many years, searching for Tutankhamen's tomb, even when most archaeologists believed that the Valley of the Kings had already been looted and exhausted. It was November 4th, 1922 that Carter and his team uncovered the first step leading into a sealed doorway. Three weeks later, they finally opened the tomb, and what Carter saw when he peered inside became an iconic moment in archaeology. The tomb contained thousands of objects, gold, jewelry, statues, chariots, and most famously the solid gold mask that adorned Tutankhamen's mummified body. The discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb was the culmination of years of dedication and research. Carter had worked in Egypt as an archaeologist since the 1890s, but by 1917 he had become obsessed with finding the tomb of King Tut. Lord Carnarvon was a British aristocrat with a passion for Egyptology, and he funded Carter's explorations. But uncovering the tomb was only the beginning of a much larger project, as Carter and his team spent more than 10 years cataloging and studying the contents of the tomb. But we all know what you came for with this history segment. What about the curse of King Tut's tomb? Lord Carnarvon died unexpectedly in April 1923, just months after the tomb's opening. This gave way immediately to the curse on the tombs. And even though Carnarvon's death was attributed to a mosquito bite that became infected, those that believed in the curse already, that wasn't going to stop them. Subsequent deaths of other individuals connected to the tomb, such as Lord Carnarvon's half-brother, several other excavators, this only fueled the legend. With some saying the curse had been inscribed in hieroglyphs on the tomb's entrance, but that was never proven. Howard Carter himself, the primary excavator, lived for another 17 years before dying in 1939 of natural causes. That suggests that the curse was more myth than fact. Overall, though, the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb remains one of the most captivating moments in the study of ancient Egypt, providing an unparalleled look into the wealth, power, and artistry of ancient Egyptian civilization. And that initial discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb occurred 102 years ago this week in history. But now we open our own tomb, a brand new time capsule. For this one, we're going back 41 years ago to November 4th, 1983. So I would have been a whopping six years old Oh man, how time goes. Let's see what was going on in the world of pop culture back then. The number one song was Islands in the Stream by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. This was released on Kenny Rogers' album Eyes That See in the Dark. This song was the second number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for both Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Rogers had the song Lady, Dolly Parton had the song 9 to 5. Another fun fact about this song was that it was originally written by disco legend band the Bee Gees. The number one movie was Boggy Share. And you could get into the theater with a ticket costing $3.15. What exactly is Boggy Share? It is a Pakistani action film. It was a major hit in Pakistan. That I could find out. But as far as what it's about... It's box office, anything. I can't find any information. But yet this movie went to number one in America. Of all the time capsule segments I've done, this may be the most confusing as far as the number one movie goes. If any of you out there listening have ever heard of Boggy Share, B-A-G-H-I-S-H-E-R, it's two words, what it's about, if you've seen it, let me know, because I have no clue how this movie ended up at number one in America. The number one TV show was Dallas. The drama about the Ewing family, the oil baron family. This soap opera was originally on for 14 years from 1978 to 1991. 357 total episodes, including the world-famous Who Shot J.R. episode, one of the highest-rated TV shows of all time. And if you were around back then, November 4th, 1983... Maybe you were a six-year-old child who just had their birthday. You get to have your favorite food for your birthday meal, which is naturally the McDonald's Happy Meal. What was the toy that you would get in your Happy Meal as a birthday present for McDonald's? One of these weird Astro Nix figures. These were little plastic action figures with these green goblin-type aliens, I guess, with different characters. One's wearing ice skates. There's a blonde-headed girl that's got a milkshake. There's one with a laser. I don't think I got one of these in my Happy Meal, or if I did, I lost it within five minutes. But there are lots of them for sale on eBay. Lots as in a collection, not lots as in many. So go buy an Astronix and then watch Baggy Share and tell me what you think. But that'll wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History. Now we really get into celebrating my birthday. We're going to have a new top five. These are my favorite number one songs that were number one on my birthday. Well, I guess the only good thing about starting my 47th trip around the sun is that when it came to doing this top five list, I had a lot to choose from as far as years went. This is going to be totally my own list as we look at the top five number one songs on my birthday. It's really not that complicated. I go through the Billboard Top 100 archives every year since I was born, the week that I was born, looked at what the number one song was, and thought, yeah, that song was good, or no, that song was crap. I've done a time capsule for my birth date in the past, but for those of you if you're wondering, the number one song on my birthday was You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone. Oh, and on my first birthday, the number one song was You Needed Me by Anne Murray. Neither of those will be on this list. You will easily see my bias towards nostalgia when you listen to what songs are on here as far as the years. So there's a top five. There are five honorable mentions. They're in no particular order, even though all of them are my choices of what I liked. I will tell you, there's only one song from this century that And believe me, I looked through every year from 1977 to 2023, and I found one song this century that I said, yeah, that's probably in my top 10 for my birth date. For the honorable mentions, I'll kind of gloss over them, give you the year, who they are. And obviously, you know, all these songs were number one. So honorable mentions for number one songs on my birth date, November the 2nd, include End of the Road by Boyz II Men. This came out in 1992. It spent a record at the time, 13 weeks at number one. Another honorable mention was Bad by Michael Jackson. This is the lead single off of his 1987 Bad album, with this song staying at number one for two weeks. Another honorable mention was Candle in the Wind slash Something About the Way You Look Tonight by Elton John in 1997. This song was written in dedication to Princess Diana, who had recently died. This broke Boyz II Men's record. 14 weeks at number one, this was, and it's the highest-selling single of all time. Another honorable mention is Miss You Much by Janet Jackson from 1989's Rhythm Nation 1814 album. Those of you longtime listeners know I had a huge crush on Janet Jackson. She was one of my OG crushes. And this song was number one for four weeks. And the final honorable mention is the most recent song on this list. And that is Closer by the Chainsmokers and Halsey from 2016. And this song also spent 14 weeks at number one. But those are the honorable mentions. Let's get into the actual top five number one songs on my birth date. These ones are in chronological order. So we start with number one, Pop Music by the British pop artist Robin Scott, known professionally as Em. This song came out in 1979. My second birthday, it was number one. This is one of the earliest MTV videos also. I mean, when the song came out, MTV wasn't out. But when they did debut, Em's pop music song was on there a lot. I think that's why I enjoy this song, was that I was familiar with it being on MTV a lot. And that pop music refrain over and over in the song, it was an earworm from my childhood. This song by Em was off of the album... New York, London, Paris, Munich, which is lyrics from the song. This was absolutely Em's biggest hit ever, with many of their other songs I've never even heard of. But it's all good. Having one hit is better than having no hits. Number two is Private Eyes. This came out in 1981 by Hall & Oates. My fourth birthday, Hall & Oates was number one. This was the lead single from their album, Private Eyes. It was number one for two weeks, and it's the third of six number one songs that Hall & Oates had. It's hard to overstate how big of a deal Hall & Oates were. For me in the early 80s, every song they had was great. But for that span of about 10 years, 76 to 86, Hall & Oates were everywhere. They were one of the biggest groups in the world. They are the best-selling duo of all time, with their album selling more than 80 million copies. Of course, now they hate each other and there's a lawsuit going on between them, but we can always remember the good old days. Number three is Caribbean Queen by Billy Ocean. This came out in 1984. I was seven years old. This was number one. It has kind of a beat to it that is... Eerily similar to Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. If you listen to them, now you can't unhear it. Billie Ocean's real name isn't Billie Ocean. I always thought it was. It's Leslie Sebastian Charles. This song was number one for two weeks, and interestingly, it was originally released as European Queen, and no one really liked it, so they changed the name to Caribbean Queen, and everyone liked it. This 1984 album, Suddenly, was a massive hit. It had Caribbean Queen. The song Suddenly is an excellent song. Loverboy. I was actually surprised when I just looked this up that this album only sold 2 million copies. Those are three huge hits from my childhood. I'm actually shocked. Oh well. Number 4. is Part-Time Lover by Stevie Wonder from 1985. The following year, I turned eight years old. My eighth birthday was spent at the Boston Museum of Science with my friend Brian. And this song was on the radio all the time. I probably heard it three or four times on the ride up and back. That and Who's Zooming Who by Aretha Franklin. Those songs are the soundtrack to my visit to the Museum of Science when I turned eight. This song is off of Stevie Wonder's album In Square Circle. Stevie Wonder is one of the most talented musicians in the history of the world. If you don't know Stevie Wonder, I mean, you should. But to be blind and to be able to play piano, be able to play drums, and obviously write and sing songs, it's no wonder he sold more than 100 million copies of his albums and had a total of 10 number one singles. It's interesting in the chronology of Stevie Wonder's singles that the song that came out before Part-Time Lover was the We Are The World single. And the song that came out after Part-Time Lover was That's What Friends Are For, which was a very sappy, cheesy song with Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick, and Elton John. That's just a weird trio of songs right there. And finally, number five on the list of top five number one songs from my birth date is Smooth by Santana featuring Rob Thomas from 1999. I had turned 22 in college, probably hungover the day after my birthday. This song basically brought the band Santana back from relative obscurity. Interestingly, the summer of 1999, Santana opened for Dave Matthews' band, and I saw them play. There were no songs off of the Supernatural album that was going to come out. It was all the classic Santana songs, Black Magic Woman, Oye Como Va. Little did I know when seeing them that within a few months they would be the biggest band in the world again. This song was number one for 12 weeks. It spanned two centuries. as it was the final number one song of the 20th century and the first number one of the 21st century. So there is a trivia you can stump people with. The album Supernatural has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, with its collection of various artists doing songs with the band Santana. It spawned a couple of follow-up albums that were decreasingly successful. But there's no doubting how big a song Smooth was in writing a second chapter for the band Santana. We go from celebrating songs mostly from my childhood to one of the funniest and most foolish memories of my childhood. As we look at the tabloid newspaper known as Weekly World News. I've mentioned a Never did I think that there'd be a newspaper that basically was my sense of humor. I think it did help to influence some of what I did. But let's go back in the day and take a deep dive, you're being warned, into the insanity that was Weekly World News. This is one of those, I wanted to just start this segment off by saying Batboy. I said, no, no, no. For those of you that don't know what Weekly World News is, I've got to kind of lead you in, give you some real info besides me just reciting funny stories from this newspaper. Probably the most famous tabloid newspaper ever is the National Enquirer. And at some point I will definitely do a segment on that. But the tabloids are the sensationalized or sometimes fictional stories in newspapers. These are the ones that are in the checkout lines at the supermarket next to the candy bars. There'd be these, National Enquirer, The Sun, Daily Mirror. They'd always have some headline on the cover with some celebrity, famous person doing something that was bad or having something bad happen to them. The thing is, most of those tabloid newspapers, they are at least have one foot or maybe one toe in reality. Weekly World News was different because it was obvious BS, but in the funniest, funniest possible way. Weekly World News was founded in 1979 by Generoso Pope Jr., who was also the creator of the National Enquirer. So there you go. Weekly World News was a reaction to technological change. Newspapers were transitioning from traditional black and white printing to full color. And Weekly World News capitalized on the cheaper production costs by keeping its now iconic black and white format. What's crazy is at the beginning... Weekly World News included a mix of exaggerated news stories, but also actual reports that were deemed to be too racy for the inquirer. It didn't take too long before Weekly World News became the insane, foolish newspaper that we who grew up in the 1980s and 90s knew and loved. And for those of you that are like, I never read that, or I've never heard of it, well, at its peak, Weekly World News had a circulation of more than 1.2 million. So even if you didn't read, more than a million people were reading this newspaper weekly. It was a staple of Sundays at my Nana's. Usually my father, maybe my Uncle Bob, would get a copy of it and would just read it, show us the pictures. And the stories got more and more bizarre as the years went on because these were not just exaggerations or inflated truths. These were usually complete fabrications designed to shock and entertain, entice you to plunk down your money to buy this thing. For those of you that have read Weekly World News or those of you that have never read it, the one that would probably be familiar to you even if you never read it was the Bat Boy Found in Cave. This one from June 1992 comes It's got this picture on the cover of a bald-headed child with big pointy ears, giant eyes, and a wide-open mouth with sharp teeth. And on the cover it says that his eyes help him see in the dark and his ears are better than radar, according to scientists. Batboy became like a cultural phenomenon in the 90s. They said that he even got his own musical. And it did. I just stopped and looked it up. There was Bat Boy the musical that debuted in 1997. I can't believe it. I'm hoping I can find a video version of it and watch it and see what the hell this craziness is. Those of us that read Weekly World News, if I start naming things off, you'll remember these covers. There was one that Elvis was alive. One that JFK was alive despite being shot in the head. He was brain dead. There were pictures of him in a wheelchair outside the White House. One that I always remember from the mid-90s was the continuing saga of aliens meeting with President Bill Clinton. And that became a recurring one, like the aliens were helping him make decisions. I will tell you, I'm so glad that I did this segment because if you go to books.google.com, you can find hundreds of archives of Weekly World News, the full newspapers. So they're digitized. You can just read this insanity. They date back to 1981. The very first one is about a man that's lived 16 lives. It's like, I got to keep this segment under control, but I am so tempted to just go through these archives and just read you the cover stories, not the whole things, but the headlines from all of these. So you can just say, what the hell? Some of the examples are diver attacked by mermaids, three survive UFO attack, a woman awakes from a 75-year coma, a woman finds out she's been pregnant for 61 years. Of course, there's tons of stories about Bigfoot. There are some that Bigfoot got a woman pregnant. There's others where they fight Bigfoot. There are some where Bigfoot saves survivors of a plane crash. Typically, the covers would be slightly altered versions of people. If Elvis was alive, they would have an aged composite. Or you could do some superimposing, like Bill Clinton with aliens. You just put an alien in the picture with him. This wasn't that expensive of a newspaper. In the late 80s, early 90s, it was 75, 85 cents. So it wasn't that much to spend to spend a little bit of time reading this insanity and laughing. And the stories were written like they were real. There wasn't a wink and a nod. It was like one of the issues had a story about Nazi astronauts that had been launched during World War II and they returned to Earth decades later. And it's written like science, like it's real. What's amazing is that even though Weekly World News is around online currently... If something like this debuted now with the rise of AI, it's like you could create Weekly World News, the same ideas, but have real photos that look like whatever you're describing. Like the horse born with a human face. You could make that with AI and I wouldn't think it would look too appealing, but you could still make it. For me, as an 11, 12, 13-year-old, when we would constantly read these weekly at my nana's, it was fascinating but inspiring the kind of craziness that these writers that thought of this stuff would put in there. Like a survivor of the Titanic found on an iceberg 75 years later thinking it's 1912. Or the hairy-faced wolfman thinking looking to get a wife and offering to pay $100,000 if she'll marry him. What I'm thinking I'm going to have to do as far as Weekly World News goes is at some point do a top five as far as the craziest headlines from this newspaper. Because I could just keep going on and reading these covers and sharing them with you, and that's maybe for a few of you it would be exciting, but for the rest of you, it would be like, all right, can we move on? Like I said, my... reading Weekly World News was pretty much the height of its popularity, late 80s, early 90s. And in the era before internet, it served as what ifs for people fascinated by the bizarre. Like I said, UFOs, Bigfoot. There'd always be historical figures that were still alive. Like I said, Elvis, JFK, Hitler. There'd be loads of just weird sci-fi, tons of aliens, people from other planets coming here, people that had been frozen for decades that were alive or had been buried for years were still alive. Any sort of weird craziness that you can think of, it was likely on a cover or inside Weekly World News. God, I remember with my camcorder, this was probably 1995, My friends and I did a segment of Weekly World News for ourselves. We called it the search for the boy that was raised by trees. And I'm wandering in the dark in the woods. And one of my friends is standing there and he's got branches coming out of his sleeves of his shirt and a branch coming up in his face from his shirt. And he's just standing there among the trees. But of course, when we go to talk to him, he can talk. And of course it devolves into insanity. Me fighting the tree next to him because it's his dad that's talking trash about me. And then the boy that was raised by trees running after me despite just having roots. With the rise of digital media, the weekly world news popularity faded. And people today can turn to websites like The Onion for satirical news or YouTube for conspiracy content. In 2007, Weekly World News stopped its print edition. There is a website. It's updated very infrequently as far as new content. But I'll put a link to that collection from Google Books if you want to read back issues of Weekly World News. And why wouldn't you? And I will. I'll do a top five segment for the weirdest or most foolish headlines ever in Weekly World News. When you think of spoof news, articles, videos. In many ways, Weekly World News inspired that. It was ahead of its time. It was for people that craved a break from reality. You knew that when the new Weekly World News issue came out, anything, literally anything, could be the headline. Did any of you out there ever read Weekly World News? I can't be the only one. There was more than a million people at its peak that would read this thing weekly. It was a staple of Sundays at my Nana's. It would always be on her coffee table for a day or two. I think then she finally would throw it out. But yeah, click on that link in the description of the podcast and at least go check out a few of the headlines from the old Weekly World News issues. It was definitely a crazy newspaper. But until next week, that'll wrap up Episode 169, the birthday edition, the podcast anniversary edition. Thank you all so much for spending this special week with me. Thank you to those of you that reached out with birthday wishes for me. I really appreciate that. As you get older, unfortunately, birthdays at times can just become another day, which is sad. When you think about when you're a kid, every birthday is just this huge celebration of you. And then at some point, it becomes less and less. I would have my mother would plan my birthday parties. Then when I got older, friends would plan get togethers, typically drinking a ton. And then as I got older, I would have to make the plans as friends would get married, have kids. Now it's... A little more low-key, I love celebrating my birthday, but it gets harder when you get older. Not all your friends are still around, and if they are, they have families or they have to work. So thank you to those of you that did reach out for my birthday. A huge thank you to those of you that have... Listen to the podcast. Even if it's one episode, you're a part of this journey from it being an idea that came to me after I stopped drinking all the way up to recently being able to have advertisements on it that make me a little money and the creation of the webcam weekly wrap up the video podcast. That deals more with my initial impressions 2.0 blog, the weekly random foolishness of my life. But it all started with that first kernel of an idea. It's been an ever-evolving process, which is why the show has changed not drastically all the time. Granted, going to all nostalgia was a bit of a big change. but I'm always looking for ways to make the show better, to make it grow in its audience. I can market it all I want, but you out there listening, sharing it, telling people to check it out, that's how we grow the audience. And a lot of the time it's throwing darts at the wall in the dark, choosing things that I think that you will enjoy. For example, my most downloaded episode is episode 13. That features Chuck E. Cheese, but it also features Henry Beston's Outermost House on Cape Cod. So I don't know which of those topics is what drives people to that episode, but I had no idea that my Chuck E. Cheese segment would lead to the most popular episode of my podcast. It just goes to show you that you never know. So I'm always trying new things, and we'll keep on working at the podcast. I hope you enjoy it. And if this is your first episode, I've got a whole big catalog of shows. Then you can catch up with them, whether audio or on YouTube, the webcam weekly wrap-ups. If you enjoy all this content, you can become a subscriber on Patreon for $5 a month. You can buy me a coffee. I cast a pretty wide net as far as content I put out there. So I feel like I snag a lot of people with something else I've done. And then they start to find like, wow, this guy's got hundreds of podcasts, hundreds and hundreds of YouTube videos, hundreds of blogs. Either he enjoys creating content or he's got no life. And it's probably a little of both. And it keeps going on. The treadmill I'm on, I'm just going to keep running. Next week is episode 170. We're going to look at educational children's shows of the 1970s. And we're going to celebrate 40 years of Freddy Krueger. A Nightmare on Elm Street turns 40. That's just part of what makes up episode 170. This episode was a lot of fun. I had to really work hard at reining myself in so I didn't just ramble on and on when it came to talking about the origin of the podcast or my birthday or the... Retro toys or weekly world news. I hope my enthusiasm for my content comes through in all of it. But until next week, 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 for four years of the podcast. Here's to my 47th trip around the sun. Oh, God. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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