In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 184: Bunnicula, Overhyped 1990s Athletes & Vanishing Casual Dining Restaurants(2-26-2025)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 184

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The last full month of winter is almost over, but we’ve got plenty of nostalgia to keep you warm! Episode 184 brings back childhood chills, cardboard heartbreak, and the flavors of restaurants we wish never closed.

📖 Bunnicula: The Vampire Bunny That Bit Into Our Imaginations – A bloodsucking rabbit? The Bunnicula series had just the right mix of humor and horror to captivate Gen Xers and older Millennials. We’ll revisit this beloved (and slightly spooky) children’s classic.

⚾ Overhyped '90s Athletes Who Ruined My Baseball Card Collection – If you grew up in the '90s, you probably got burned by the hype train. We’re looking at the athletes who were supposed to be legends but left collectors (and fans) disappointed. Were any of these guys in your stash?

🍽️ The Rise and Fall of Casual Dining Chains – Some places seemed like they'd be around forever… but then they vanished. This week’s Top 5 covers some of the most missed discontinued restaurant chains. The twist? A few might be making a comeback!

🕰️ This Week in History & Time Capsule – A jazz-infused journey back to the very first jazz records and how they changed music forever.

Hit play and step into the time machine! 🚀

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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 184. We are finishing off the month of February, the last full month of winter. We're finishing it off strong with so much nostalgia I can't wait to get into. We're going to kick it off with some of my favorite books from my childhood, and maybe yours too if you grew up in the 80s, and that is the Benicula books about a vampire rabbit. We're going to go way, way back in the day to a segment about overhyped 1990s athletes, a.k.a. the sports commentators. I thought were going to be worth way more than they are today. There'll be a brand new top five looking at the top five discontinued casual dining chains. You likely ate at some of these in your childhood. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time capsule looking back at the very first jazz music records ever recorded. All of that is coming up right now on episode 184 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we going to talk about this week? How February's ending, spring is only a few weeks away. There is so much fun stuff to get into this week, I can't wait to start. Of course, I couldn't start off my podcast without giving shoutouts to all my Patreon subscribers. Lori, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Leo, Marguerite, Neglectoid, Crystal, and my newest subscriber, Matt. Thank you for coming aboard and thank you all for being my Patreon subscribers, my biggest backers. $5 a month gets you access to bonus podcast episodes. It gets you early access to YouTube videos. It gets you access to other content that I'm coming up with. One thing I'll share is that what I'm going to start doing is kind of remastering my without a map live stream videos that I did during the early days of the podcast. They would be streamed live on Instagram, and then some of them would get put up on YouTube, but they kind of got lost in the shuffle with all my hundreds of videos up there. So what I'm doing is taking those videos, I'm remastering them, making them look better, adding more visuals to it, maybe fixing the sound with them, and then putting them up for my Patreon subscribers. That is my latest new project to put on my plate. You've heard me say it so much, I try to make room on my plate to do everything, and that sometimes means removing things like the webcam weekly wrap-up podcast that I didn't have time for, but I end up replacing it with something else. These should be fun to do, these live streams, remastering them. But whether you're a Patreon subscriber, whether you're a free tier subscriber... Whether you are a loyal listener since day one or you're just coming aboard now, thank you all so much for being here, for making me a part of your week. I'm glad so many of you share my enjoyment of the good old days, of the nostalgia. I'm Gen X, born in the late 1970s, so you kind of get my reference point. I always mention child of the 80s, teen of the 90s, but I try to make this a little more inclusive. where I dip back into the 1960s. I'm now getting into the early 2000s because that is now the old days, which, God, I can't believe it. I've got so much more fun content to come, and if you think there's something that's been missing from my shows, maybe check my archives. 184 episodes means there's 183 more that you can check out if this is your first time. Oh, but let's kick this show off with something I've wanted to talk about for a while. It was, I had to use restraint to wait this long to talk about. One of my earliest memories of childhood, of reading, one of my favorite book series as a kid, and that is the Benicula series of children's books. So let's dive into those starting now. In my early days as a writer, when I was doing e-books and putting them up on the Amazon Kindle store in 2007, one of my dreams was to be a children's book writer. Some of you that know me in the real world know that one of my first books, one of my first e-books I wrote was something called Goot's Mittens. So a quick description of it, it was a book about my Nana's cat. Her real name was Mittens, but my father, his siblings, when they were growing up, they had a cat named Goot. G-O-O-T. He was an orange striped cat. My Nana's cat, Mittens, had double paws. Big feet, looked like she was wearing baseball mitts on her front paws. And I thought to myself, oh man, Mittens, we could call her Goot in the book because it's a unique name, and I could use Goot. animals, pets that I grew up with to make an interesting children's book. I mean, I think it is. And this sort of wacky story didn't come out of nowhere. Yeah, it's based in reality. But my love of writing, my creativity, it began early on in my life. And one of the original books, the original children's books that was so wild in its premise that made my creative juices flow had to do with a vampire rabbit. It sounds like something out of a Monty Python sketch. But no, this was a series of books, and the name of the vampire rabbit was Bunnicula, a bunny-Dracula combination. These books were some of my first memories of being in school, of childhood, some of my favorite books to read and get lost in. And as I said a minute ago, it took all of my restraint to wait this long to talk about it. Those of you that grew up in that same time as me, 70s, 80s, few children's book series captured your imagination like Benicula. It was a quirky blend of mystery, humor, light horror, and it introduced kids to the concept of the supernatural through the eyes of a lovable household pet. The Benicula series was written by Deborah and James Howe. And these books remain a nostalgic favorite for Gen X like me, early millennials. What I love about the origins of Bunnicula is it starts in the mid-1970s. James and Deborah Howe, a married couple, they were inspired by a casual joke about a vampire rabbit. It just makes me think about when I was in high school creating skits with my camcorder with my friends. We'd sit around and we would tell these jokes or tell these stories, come up with these ideas that got more and more progressively weird until it was just the perfect amount of absurdity that it would be the funniest thing to us at least. For James and Deborah Howe, their love of storytelling led them to develop a humorous yet eerie tale narrated by Harold, who was a dog, alongside his feline companion Chester, and they become convinced their family's new pet, a small black and white rabbit, might actually be a vampire. The story would end up being called Bunnicula, A Rabbit Tale of Mystery. with the original manuscript completed by James and Deborah Howe in 1977. Tragically, before the book could even be published, Deborah Howe was diagnosed with cancer and passed away in 1978 at the age of 31. That could have easily killed the book right there, but James Howe was determined to honor his wife and honor their shared vision. So he saw the book through to publication, and it was released in 1979 by Athenium Books. Upon its release, Benicula was met with enthusiastic praise. It was a unique premise, filled with humor and light suspense, which would resonate with kids and parents. You know, it's a really fine line to walk when you're trying to introduce kids, likely 10 years old and under, to horror and scary things. You could go from scaring them just a little to then scarring them for life. Deborah and James Howe worked it perfectly. The story's charm lay in its gentle parody of the horror tropes, making the spooky elements accessible rather than frightening. With the characters of Harold and Chester, the dog and cat, providing a compelling comedy duo. Harold was the easygoing, food-loving narrator. Chester was the neurotic and highly intelligent cat who takes his vampire suspicions to absurd lengths. As the Benicula book gained popularity, it became a staple in elementary school libraries and book fairs throughout the 80s. That's where I come into the picture, elementary school. And seeing this really nice painted cover of this black and white rabbit with kind of red eyes hopping away where the shaggy brownish dog, Harold, is kind of sleeping and Chester's poking his head out behind Harold looking at the bunny that's hopping away. And I think me being seven, eight years old, the title Bunnicula was an interesting word and the cover was interesting. So I was immediately hooked. And it wasn't just me that was hooked in the early 80s. Benicula earned several literary accolades, including the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award. It was the combination of mystery, humor, and the animal protagonists that made Benicula a hit among young readers. Many of them were also fans of Scooby-Doo and other lighthearted mystery stories, so this fit right in. Encouraged by the success of the first book, James Howe continued the series with multiple sequels, further exploring the quirky antics of Harold, Chester, and Benicula. There were six more titles in the series. The first sequel was Holiday Inn from 1982, which was a hilarious take on the spooky mansion trope with Harold and Chester staying at a pet boarding facility filled with strange new characters. Then in 1983, there was The Celery Stalks at Midnight, where Chester remains convinced that Benicula is a threat, leading to another mystery-filled adventure. The third book in the series was Nighty Nightmare in 1987, where the pets go on a camping trip. They encounter eerie legends and an apparent werewolf. In my memory, I believe this was the last book when it came out that I immediately read, so the first four books in the series were must-read for me. But by the time Return to Holiday Inn came out in 1992, I mean, I was 15 years old, so I was a little bit out of the age range for Benicula books. To round out the series, there was also Benicula Strikes Again from 1999 and Benicula Meets Edgar Allan Crowe from 2006. The cultural impact of Benicula throughout the 1980s was huge. It became a beloved children's favorite, often found on scholastic book orders and in classrooms. And then in 1982, there was an animated adaptation, which aired as a television special narrated by comedian Louis Nye. It didn't launch an animated series or any films, but Benicula remained popular enough of a property that in 2016, the Cartoon Network and Boomerang Network debuted a new animated series loosely based on the books. This version, it reimagined the character of Benicula with a more mischievous, overtly supernatural edge, which modernized the concept for a new generation. One of the reasons why Benicula has remained a favorite is its timeless humor and engaging storytelling. I would say if you're out there and you have kids that are ages 5 through 9, 5 through 10, you could hand them the original Benicula book now, or maybe the e-book version. And they would be instantly engaged with it. Kids love rabbits. Kids love dogs and cats. It's a pretty easy sell. And I'm not getting a commission on these if you go and order them for yourself. But I think kids today would love the books. As for James Howe, he went on to write other well-received children's books, including Pinky and Rex and The Misfits. But Benicula and that series, that's his enduring legacy. It started off as finishing off carrying out the dream that he and his wife Deborah had in the mid to late 1970s, and it's now turned into a series of books and a character that has captured the imagination of kids for decades. For many kids in the late 70s, early 80s, and beyond, Benicula was a gateway into the world of reading. It offered you just the right mix of laughs and mild thrills to keep young minds engaged. Like I said, this book, the first four books that I read religiously really opened up my mind with creativity. Like if you could have a vampire rabbit, why couldn't you have a cat named Goot with big feet? But you out there listening, did you read the Benicula books when they first came out? If you're around my age, if you're anywhere from 40 to 60, and if you did, have you had your kids read them? Or if you're younger, have you read the Benicula books? Have you seen the animated show? Decades after its first publication, the Benicula series still finds new fans, proving that a vampire bunny, a nervous cat, and a lovable dog are a recipe for literary success. This week in history, we are going back 108 years ago to February 26, 1917, and the very first jazz records ever recorded. On that date, a group of musicians from New Orleans walked into the Victor Talking Machine Company studio in New York City and made history. The original Dixieland Jazz Band, with jazz spelled J-A-S-S, recorded what are widely considered the first jazz records, Livery Stable Blues and Dixie Jazz Band One Step. These recordings introduced jazz to a national audience, helping to shape the genre and forever changing the course of popular music. Jazz music was born in the melting pot of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, blending African-American blues, ragtime, jazz, brass band traditions, and Creole influences. The city's diverse cultural and musical heritage provided the perfect environment for experimentation, which led to the syncopated rhythms, improvisational spirit, and energetic performances that define jazz. New Orleans musicians like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and King Oliver played in the city's dance halls and clubs, developing the style that would become jazz. But it wasn't until the original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded their songs that jazz reached a mass audience outside of the South. The original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by Cornettist Nick LaRocca, was a group of white musicians who had adopted the New Orleans jazz style. Their groundbreaking recording session produced Livery Stable Blues, a lively track that featured animal-like sounds from the instruments, and Dixie Jazz Band One Step, a driving dance number. These albums were released in March 1917, with the record becoming a sensation, selling over a million copies and introducing jazz to listeners across the country. Despite the success, the original Dixieland jazz band was controversial, as many African-American musicians who had been playing jazz long before them were left out of the recording industry due to racial barriers. Jazz pioneers like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong would later bring a deeper complexity and emotional depth to the music, but the original Dixieland jazz band's recordings marked a turning point by making jazz a national phenomenon. These records, they changed everything. They established jazz as a commercial genre, proving that this energetic improvisational music had mass appeal. It encouraged record companies to seek out more jazz musicians, which paved the way for future legends like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith. Throughout the next decade, jazz evolved rapidly, moving from the Dixieland style to the more sophisticated swing of the 1930s and the bebop revolution of the 1940s. For me, I was introduced to jazz at a young age with my grandparents, Nina and Grandpa, being jazz singers, performing with and hanging out with all of the jazz legends that those who grew up on Cape Cod who are listening would remember. like Lou Colombo, Dave McKenna, Dick Johnson, and more. And I'm sure a lot of you out there listening who are jazz fans have your own personal favorites. But those very first jazz records, Livery Stable Blues and Dixie Jazz Band One Step, recorded by the original Dixieland Jazz Band, happened 108 years ago this week in history. We'll keep the good times rolling here with a brand new time capsule. We're going to go back 66 years ago this week to February 26th, 1959. What was going on in the world of pop culture back then? Well, let's find out. The number one song was Stagger Lee by Lloyd Price. This was an American folk song about the murder of a man named Billy Lyons by Stag Lee Shelton. on Christmas Day in 1895. Lloyd Price was nicknamed Mr. Personality after his 1959 hit Personality. This song was covered by almost everybody. Ike and Tina Turner, the Righteous Brothers, even the Grateful Dead would play it in concert. The number one movie was Sleeping Beauty, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing 51 cents. This is the classic Disney animated film about the evil witch Maleficent cursing Princess Aurora to die on her 16th birthday. The film took nearly a decade and $6 million to finish and was actually released to mixed reviews, although now it's 90% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. And it made more than $51 million at the box office on that budget of $6 million. The number one TV show was Gunsmoke. This is the famous Western TV show that was on for 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975. About Marshall, Matt Dillon, and Dodge City, Kansas. The show actually began as a radio show in 1952, and for a few years it was on as a radio and television program. It finished with a total of 635 television episodes, which was the longest running TV show ever until The Simpsons broke that in 2018 with their 636th episode. And as of the end of last year, 2024, The Simpsons had 781 episodes and was still going. And if you were around back then, February 26, 1959, maybe you were out watching getting some groceries at the local Stop and Shop, which was small and brand new in the Massachusetts area at the time. You want to get a little something extra with your groceries? Well, you're in luck. Because at this point in time, Stop and Shop was selling records. Great music is what they called them. There were eight great titles to choose from, with the first album costing 49 cents and all the other ones costing $1.49. Now, before you get excited about what possible titles there could have been for you to buy at Stop and Shop at the time, it's all orchestral music, London Philharmonic and other orchestras like that. There was no Elvis. There was no Jerry Lee Lewis. There was no Buddy Holly. Just loads of classical, but they call it great music. So go to your local Stop and Shop. And that'll wrap up another Time Capsule, another This Week in History. Maybe you're listening to this show late in the afternoon and you're starting to think about dinner plans for the night. Well, these places we're going to talk about you can no longer go to as we look at the top five discontinued casual dining chains starting now. Back in episode 128, I did a segment about discontinued fast food chains. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I did this segment about casual dining chains. Because some of them, they can blur the lines, but there definitely are differences. For one, fast food usually has drive-thrus. Casual dining chains do not. Although you probably have noticed in the last 20 years... The emergence of fast casual restaurants that literally are a blend of the two types. The one I think of is Chipotle. That's usually what you think of with fast casual. There's also Panera Bread, Five Guys, Moe's Southwestern Grill, those types of places. The casual dining restaurant was a place where you could go there dressed however you wanted to, but still get good food. It wasn't fine dining where you go in a suit or you go in a dress and you sit in the dimly lit candle lit places with the nice white tablecloths. Casual dining, they could be fancy-ish, but usually they had bars. Usually there'd be a lot of screaming kids in there. What I'm going to do here is look at the top five discontinued casual dining chains. Bring back a lot of memories. Just researching this and looking at some of the old commercials, man, it brought back a lot of memories. With most of these top fives, they're in no particular order, and there are some honorable mentions. In my memory, I think I ate at three of these places. But I think that's mostly due to my age and where I grew up here on Cape Cod. What we'll do now is jump into the honorable mentions. I will try to quickly gloss through these, but still give you a little bit of what they were for those of you that aren't familiar with them. So first honorable mention is Beefsteak Charlie's. This was a New York City-based restaurant that was open for nearly 100 years and had upwards of 60 restaurants at its peak. Another honorable mention is Valley Steakhouse. These were located in the northeast from the early 1930s to around 2000. And this one stuck out to me because in my baby book, my mother wrote that I loved the Valley Steakhouse commercial song from the late 1970s. So there's my memories of that place. Another honorable mention was Bugaboo Creek. These were Canadian-themed steakhouses opened from the early 90s to about nine years ago, 2016, and they were based in Providence, Rhode Island, which is probably why I remember them a lot. Another honorable mention was Old Country Buffet, which if you want more information about Old Country Buffet, in episode 139, I did a whole segment just about the Country Buffet as I reviewed an old employee training video, The Meat Carving Guy. And the final honorable mention was Lums. They were based out of Florida and hit their peak in the 1970s when they had commercials featuring comedy legend Milton Berle in them. So there's the honorable mentions. Did you eat at any of those? It seems like in the 1990s you could have eaten at all of those. Well, except Lums. They went out of business in 1982. Oh, but are you ready for some more... Casual dining, sad last days. Let's get into the actual top five with number one, Sambo's.

Speaker 02:

Sambo's

Speaker 00:

was founded in 1957 in Santa Barbara, California. by two men, Sam Battistone and Newell Bonnet. So they formed the name Sambo's from parts of their names, but it has very overt racial connotations from the book Little Black Sambo. And these two, even though they didn't name their restaurant after the book, they leaned into it and they decorated the walls of the restaurants with imagery from the book. At its peak in 1979, there were more than 1,100 locations of Sambo's, but the backlash kept growing. Eventually, they changed the image of the restaurant, family-friendly with Sambo now being more of a chef, a big, fat, white chef with glasses who looked like one of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch bakers. But by the late 70s, early 80s, it was already too late. In doing my research, they were going to open a Sambo's on Cape Cod by the airport rotary. I think they actually did open it, but it was immediately protested and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1981. The company was sold in 1984. Interestingly though, the original location in Santa Barbara, California remained open and remained named Sambo's until 2020 when it was finally renamed Chad's. Number two is Steak and Ale.

Speaker 01:

Steak and Ale welcomes you back to the old country inn. Comes up with us at Steak and Ale, we're hearty dining about. This takes me back to the old days, a place to relax and enjoy a good hearty meal.

Speaker 00:

The original Steak and Ale was opened in Dallas, Texas in 1966 by Norman Brinker. It was billed as an upscale steakhouse with lower prices. At one point, Steak and Ale was owned by the Pillsbury Company, and at their peak in the late 1980s, they had about 280 locations. In 2008, the Steak and Ale Company's parent company, their owners, went bankrupt, so all of the Steak and Ale restaurants were closed. But this story has an interesting twist. In 2015, Paul Mangimelli and his wife Gwen began the rumblings of a comeback of Steak and Ale. They purchased the intellectual property. And on July 9th, 2024, the first new steak and ale restaurant opened in Burnsville, Minnesota. I still had to include steak and ale as discontinued because there's one restaurant that has opened. There are rumblings of a second one, but it's faced delays. So it's sort of, we're waiting to see if the new steak and ale takes off again. Number three is Howard Johnson.

Speaker 03:

This

Speaker 00:

was an icon of Americana. It was opened as an original single location by Howard Deering Johnson in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1925. Fun fact is the first ever franchise of Howard Johnson's was in Orleans, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, about 20 minutes from me. You couldn't go anywhere in the 1950s and 60s without seeing one of these blue restaurants with the orange roof. It was like a slice of comfort and home, even when you were on a trip far away. At its peak in the 1960s and 70s, there were more than a thousand Howard Johnson locations. They were usually located around airports or travel hubs, and the restaurants were franchised differently from the hotels. Howard Johnson, they started fading away in the 90s and 2000s, but the very last location in Lake George, New York, held on until 2022. I always found it interesting that in the early 2020s, you could theoretically go to a Howard Johnson's and a Blockbuster video, even though neither chain had been relevant in like 20 years. Number four is the Ground Round.

Speaker 05:

This

Speaker 00:

here Ground Round, they were an offshoot of Howard Johnson's. They opened in the late 1960s. At its peak in 1985, they had 215 locations. This is another one I was familiar with because they were headquartered in Massachusetts. Growing competition from Chili's and Applebee's started to cause their business to dwindle. When they filed for bankruptcy in 2004, there were 71 locations left. This here is one that is kind of a cheat. It's kind of like steak and ale. Because there are four locations left, but we're looking at four from well over 200. And I really don't know what the future holds. I'd love to see Ground Round make a comeback. It definitely reminds me of childhood. But we'll have to wait and see if these four locations last through 2025. Or if by the end of the year, I'm eating my words and there's a dozen and it's growing again. And lastly, number five on the list of top five discontinued casual dining chains is Chi-Chi's.

Speaker 04:

Chi-Chi's

Speaker 00:

was a Mexican-style casual restaurant founded in 1976. It was founded by Marno McDermott, whose wife's nickname was Chi-Chi, and former Green Bay Packers football player Max McGee. At its peak in 1995, there were 210 Chi-Chi's locations. There was a one-two punch that doomed Chi-Chi's, though. In 2003, they filed for bankruptcy, and a month later, they had a huge hepatitis A outbreak, and that basically closed them down in 2004. Now, we're batting 1,000 with this list here because the rumor is that Michael McDermott, the son of original owner Marno, is restarting the Chi-Chi's franchise sometime in 2025. So we could end up with this top five having steak and ale, ground round, and Chi-Chi's all coming back and thriving. All we need then is to revive Howard Johnson's. We can leave Sambo's out. But there you go. Did you eat at any of these casual dining chains? Are there any I missed that you wish would come back? We'll check back on this top five in a year and see how many of these casual dining chains have made a comeback. When I was growing up, more specifically when I was in my early to mid-teens, I had this crazy fantasy that my baseball card, my sports card collection was going to make me rich someday. That I was going to find all these diamonds in the rough players, get ahead of the curve, have all these rookie cards, and then later on be able to pay for my college education off the backs of some of these players. I loved collecting baseball cards. But today, looking back, there are very few that I have that are valuable. They're kind of like my Beanie Baby collection, where the memories are more valuable than the thing themselves. What I thought would be fun to do for a segment here and probably a few other segments is look at overhyped athletes of certain decades and how that translated to me trying to hoard all of their cards. What I'm going to do here is I've got 10 athletes from the 1990s that I consider to be overhyped. Maybe it's my own stupidity that I saw how good they could be and I spent so much money that I didn't have on their cards. I did my best with these overhyped athletes of the 1990s to have representatives from all four major sports, basketball, football, hockey, baseball. Since I collected baseball cards, you'll see that four of the ten are baseball players. Those of you that grew up that are around my age will see how many of these athletes gave you dreams of making money on their cards only for them to be flushed down the toilet. When I was thinking of overhyped athletes of the 90s combined with baseball cards that I thought would be valuable, the first name that popped in my head was a baseball player named Kevin Moss. He was drafted by the New York Yankees, so it was, ooh, he's a Yankee prospect. He's got to be good. His rookie season was 1990, and the hype was off the charts for this guy. He finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1990, batting .252 with 21 home runs. He followed it up in 1991, batting .220 with 23 home runs. So even then, it was like, well, he's got the power. I had probably half a dozen rookie cards of his, just thinking all he needs is a few more seasons and he's going to be up there with the elites. But oh no, he fell off a cliff. He had 1992 and 93 with the Yankees. With his numbers falling, he played less and less. He was out of Major League Baseball in 94 and attempted a comeback with the Minnesota Twins in 95. He batted 193 in 22 games and never played in the majors again. I still have all his rookie cards, though. Maybe they're a cautionary tale. We move on to basketball. Not all overhyped athletes weren't successful. When I think of overhyped, I think of Larry Johnson from the NBA. Those of you that grew up in the 90s might think of him as Grandmama, his character. which was on Family Matters and in Converse commercials. Maybe it's because he was everywhere in the mid-1990s, but he, to me, seemed like somebody that never reached the potential for all the attention he got. In the mid-1990s, when you have Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O'Neal, you've got this guy that was kind of a mid-level player, but had all this exposure because of endorsements and appearances on TV. That's why I'm saying not all overhyped players were bad. I mean, he averaged 16 points a game and was a two-time all-star. But I feel when I was in high school that Larry Johnson was shoved down my throat way too much. But your opinions may vary. Let's go back to baseball, though. When I was thinking of the sports cards that I was collecting where I thought they'd be valuable... Another one that popped into my mind was pitcher Todd Van Poppel. Todd Van Poppel was a major prospect for the Oakland Athletics when they were the juggernaut in baseball. He was so hyped out of college that Oakland signed him to a major league contract instead of a minor league one. That was kind of the downfall because he had only so many options down in the minors. They had to bring him up at some point. He was so hyped, but it was that lack of seasoning down in the minors that was kind of his downfall. I just remember going to the corner store and getting packs of baseball cards and getting Todd Van Poppel. You would have thought that I bought a scratch ticket that won a million dollars. It was all systems go when he made his major league debut on September 11th, 1991. He proceeded to give up five earned runs in four and two-thirds innings. He ended up pitching 11 seasons, mostly as a middle reliever, and his best season was in 2001 with the Chicago Cubs, where he went 4-1 with a 2.52 ERA. By that point, though, his baseball cards were worth about three cents. We'll stick with baseball, though. Another majorly overhyped athlete of the 1990s was Brian Taylor, another baseball player, another New York Yankee. reading things like Sporting News or the Beckett Baseball Price Guides back then. Brian Taylor was the second coming of Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan. He was one of those hyped athletes that I would have gone to the baseball card store on Main Street in Hyannis near me and bought one of his cards rather than trying to get it in a pack. He signed for $1.55 million with the Yankees and was considered the best high school pitching prospect that people had ever seen. His issues didn't come from his talent. It came from an altercation defending his brother in 1993. Taylor basically destroyed his pitching shoulder getting in a fight. After that, he was never the same again. He never reached the majors and spent four years in A-ball, which is low, low minor leagues. Another overhyped athlete, and it's probably not his fault, we moved to basketball and Christian Laettner. He played at Duke University, won back-to-back national championships, had that famous shot in the tournament, the last second shot to win the game. I immediately saw him as overhyped because I was a North Carolina fan, so I didn't like Duke. But also he was picked to be on the dream team, the Olympic basketball team, instead of Shaquille O'Neal, who was my favorite player. It was like, here's the dream team and Christian Laettner. Like I said, it's not his fault, I think, but he was immediately behind the eight ball there. He needed to come out in the NBA and be like a top five player to be worthy of all those accolades. He had a respectable career, playing 13 seasons and making one All-Star game. He averaged about 13 points and just under 7 rebounds a game. So when you look back at the Dream Team and you put all their career stats up there, you can see he sticks out like a sore thumb. Some athletes, it's not their fault. They don't live up to the hype. Others, it's absolutely their fault. We look at Ryan Leaf, the football quarterback. All you have to do is Google Ryan Leaf or look on YouTube and find the video of him screaming at the reporter in the locker room. That sums up his career right there. He was the number two pick in the 1998 draft behind Peyton Manning. I mean, you talk about a falling off. I'm sure at the time nobody knew how badly he would do. In his rookie year of 1998, he had two touchdowns against 15 interceptions. And I guarantee you there are some of you listening out there right now who could have played in the NFL and had better numbers than Ryan Leaf. And then he missed all of 1999 with an injury, and that was about it. He played four seasons with a total record of four wins and 17 losses and 14 career touchdowns against 36 career interceptions. I didn't collect Ryan Leaf football cards. But the next person on the list, I did collect theirs. And that's Jeff George. He was the first pick in the NFL draft by the Indianapolis Colts, a quarterback with major height. So much so that when I got his rookie card, I said, oh, there you go. It's like a down payment on my first car. Now it's not even a down payment on a matchbox car. His first year in 1990, it was not terrible. It was slightly mediocre. He was 5-7 in his starts, 16 touchdowns, and 13 interceptions. I mean, Ryan Leaf would have killed for those numbers. And he was an All-Pro that year, which only increased the hype and the value of his football cards. He played 12 seasons in the NFL, and he was an All-Pro one other time. So he's not the worst number one pick ever, but I guess you had to be there in the early 1990s with the hype around him. thinking somehow he was going to be Joe Montana. The next one, this one hits close to home. We go back to baseball, my hometown, Boston Red Sox, and their overhyped prospect, Phil Plantier. This outfielder, his rookie season was 1990. He was hyped like he was the next Jim Rice or Dwight Evans or Carl Yastrzemski. So naturally, I had to run out to the store and try to get some of his rookie cards, just in case he was. He wasn't. He finished eighth in the Rookie of the Year voting in 1991, but the Red Sox gave up on him after three years. My dreams almost came true. His first year with the San Diego Padres, he hit 34 home runs and had 100 RBIs. So I was like, oh, here we go. He's going to live up to the hype, even if it's not in Boston. So he had 34 home runs in 1993. He played four more seasons and hit 39 home runs combined. He was out of Major League Baseball in 1997. We near the end and we move into hockey. Alexander Daigle, he was drafted first overall by the Ottawa Senators in 1993. He had so much hype. I didn't really watch hockey. I didn't really collect hockey cards. But the hype around him made me go get hockey cards. He is one that if he wasn't the first draft pick, if you looked at his career stats, you'd be like, oh, he was, you know, serviceable. But with the hype around him, his numbers were terrible. 10 seasons in the NHL, 129 total goals. But he was hyped like he was going to be a 40 goal a year scorer. He was out of the league a couple of times for a year or two years and kept trying to make comebacks, but finally retired at age 30. Finally here, my last overhyped athlete of the 1990s, we go to basketball and Sean Kemp. Just because you can dunk the ball hard does not make you great. Said by someone who can't dunk the ball. He was a power forward, 6'10", could do these amazing dunks that would just rock the hoop. So when he came into the league in 1989 with the Seattle Supersonics, I was all on board. I was all into the hype, the Rain Man, his nickname. He is one of the best dunkers ever, and he made six all-star teams. Like I said, just because he's overhyped doesn't mean he wasn't good, but he was a dunk guy. He was a spot-fest guy. I didn't see him being as talented as the other guys like Jordan, Olajuwon, Ewing, Barkley, Drexler. But he got just as much hype. He's one, maybe you fall in the camp that he was better than his hype. Maybe you think the same about Larry Johnson. But I also look at my sports cards and what aren't valuable anymore. These are the names that I came up with. But who do you think were the most overhyped athletes of the 1990s? They don't have to have been total busts like Kevin Moss or Todd Van Poppel. This was fun to do. I will definitely do lists like this for the 70s, 80s, for the 2000s. Maybe I'll go through my baseball card collection and finally get rid of some of these cards. But until next week, that's going to do it for episode 184 of the In My Footsteps podcast. I hope you don't think this podcast is overhyped. Although I do a lot of hyping of it on social media. If you haven't seen that, follow me all over social media. I'm on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky. I have a Facebook fan page. I have a YouTube channel with hundreds and hundreds of videos. I am easy to find. You can become a Patreon subscriber for $5 a month. You can also go there and just check out the free tier. I try to make sure I do have some stuff on the free tier so that you can see kind of what it's all about. I didn't want to have my Patreon be everything behind a paywall. You can always buy me a coffee. Those you can send as little as a dollar, which I don't think will buy me a coffee, but still. There are lots of ways to support me, my content, my work. I put in 15 hours a week, usually. Editing, recording, marketing, anything I do. It's going to continue in a big way next week with episode 185. We're going to look at the 35th anniversary of one of my favorite movies from my formative years, that being House Party, the kid and play movie. We're also going to look back at a time when Poppin' Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy, had his own restaurant. And of course, I'll go way more in depth about Poppin' Fresh, the icon that he was and is. So stick around for that next week. March is coming up in a few days. That's when I really get in the weeds as far as my first ever acting gig, my filming my scenes. I'm excited but also nervous. So it's interesting. I create scripts and notes for this podcast so that it's not... Usually not me rambling all over the place. And I spent a lot of years crafting skits with my camcorder in high school. So I'm no stranger to the structure of creating films and scripts and stuff. But as far as memorizing lines that I didn't write, I'm finding it harder than I imagined. So what I did, I put all my scenes together, copied and pasted them out of the script, So that I could study them. My genius move. I guess to help me memorize. Was to print them out again. But in bigger font. It's like speaking to a dog. And then saying what you said slower. Like that's going to make the dog understand you. That's like what it is with me printing out these scenes. In March though there will be way more hype about my filming debut. I'm going to be doing interviews with people from the movie. I'll probably interview producer Frank Durant again. I try to make these things videos on YouTube. So be on the lookout. And also be on the lookout for spring. Ooh, there's a segue. It's only a little while. We turn the clocks ahead again. Spring will be here for most of the country. Like I said, Cape Cod doesn't get spring really until late April. But still, get out there as the temperatures start to get warmer. Enjoy the vitamin D. Enjoy being outside. It hasn't been a terrible winter on Cape Cod. It was definitely colder than last year, but we still haven't gotten that much in the way of snow. Now I'm jinxing us. But a little bit of cold and snow makes you appreciate spring. And speaking of producer Frank Durant, A special happy birthday to him, today the day the podcast goes live. From a total cold call message on Facebook about talking about the Lady of the Dunes, to now almost four years later, my first film role. Frank opened up a whole new world to me of just opportunity. Anytime we talk, there's always something interesting going on that I'm usually included in. That's why when it comes to any projects, if Frank mentions it, I'm like, yeah, whatever it is, I'm in. So I'll always appreciate him reaching out, taking a chance on me to write the book based around his documentary that he worked so hard on. He might not get the credit that he should with his documentary, but he helped to solve the Lady of the Dunes case because of what he did with his documentary. No matter what you hear from anybody else. So happy birthday to Frank, the producer, and Frank, my friend. 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 for tuning in. 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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