The Retroist

Diet Coke was a regular presence in our house almost as soon as it became available. Before that my family usually bought two bottles of Coca Cola each month, and I could count on drinking my share before it disappeared. Then my mom tried Diet Coke and one of those bottles changed over to the new drink. My sisters sorta would drink it too, which sometimes meant more regular Coke for me, but once that was gone I would stare at the remaining Diet Coke and wish it were something else. I found out years later that my mom felt much the same way and never actually liked it as much as regular Coke.

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On the show, I start before Diet Coke existed, when Coca Cola already had a successful diet soda with Tab but was still reluctant to put the Coke name on anything except the original drink. That changed in the early 1980s with a secret project that would change what people drank around the world. Aftere that, I get into the launch, the switch in sweeteners and how Diet Coke unexpectedly became part of the story of New Coke a few years later. I also pull out newspapers from when Diet Coke first showed up near me and look at what else was going on at the time.

What interests me most about Diet Coke is that it eventually stopped feeling like a substitute for something else. It is its own thing. Coca Cola later created Coke Zero specifically for people who wanted something closer to regular Coke without the sugar, yet Diet Coke continued because its drinkers actually wanted Diet Coke.

The company has tried changing its image and introducing new flavors, but people seem happiest when it simply lets the drink stay the same. After more than forty years, it has its own taste and its own history, and there are people who are every bit as particular about it as regular Coke drinkers are about Coke. I may have spent part of my childhood wishing that bottle in the refrigerator was something else, but I understand a lot better now why it never went away.

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• This is the 370th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 21 of Season 18.

• I cannot taste the sweetness in common artificial sweeteners. It was a confusing conclusion to come to after years of trying diet drinks. A few sweeteners are on ther market that work better for me, but none are being used in popular diet soft drinks.

• I expected the creation of Diet Coke to have a fairly settled history, but there are competing stories about who really pushed the idea inside Coca Cola. The company gives much of the credit to Jack Carew, while Sergio Zyman’s version puts him much closer to the center of things. I decided it made more sense to leave that disagreement in the episode than pick one version and pretend the other did not exist.

• We would get Pepsi Free or other diet sodas if they were ons all, but Coke dominated in all forms. We even went through a Caffeine Free phase.

• While I was never a big drinker of Diet Coke I was instantly taken by the packaging. Still love seeing the silver cans.

• I had been looking at New Coke and thinking about doing an episode on another popular soda when Diet Coke started to become my obsession.

• I have Computercide in my media library now. Can’t wait to watch it. It is on YouTube still. Sure it will be mediocre overall, but I think it might be tv movie-style fun.

• Still surprised when I see that we had a Chick fil A in New Jersey that we could have went to in 1982. I didn’t know about the chain until the 2000s.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

The Retroist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Also Available on Patreon

The RCA Studio 2 was a system I knew mostly because it would turn up in discussions of failed video game consoles. It came from RCA in 1977, played games in black and white, and used a pair of number pads built directly into the machine instead of separate controllers. That makes it easy to look at now and wonder what RCA was thinking. Once I started le…

A while ago I posted some ramblings about Rockism and poptimism. I got a lot of nice messages from people about that Bonus Track, so I thought I would record something similar about Presentism, Moral Panic, and Chronocentrism. This was much longer, but I cut it down a great deal. I think about these things as they apply to pop culture frequently, especi…

There was a Fotomat in the parking lot of the Acme Supermarket in my hometown. It was still open when I was a kid but barely. That same supermarket started processing film as well and that took away a lot of it business. Still, it didn’t close all at once. It was open less frequently at first. Then one day, it closed and never re-opened. Finally, years later someone unceremoniously hauled it away.

Fotomat is worth remembering for more than its little kiosks. The company was way ahead of its time in many ways. It built a business around drive up photo processing when that was still a new idea, and later rented home movies years before Blockbuster existed. The problem was that Fotomat often seemed reluctant to move too far beyond the business it already knew, even when it had a head start on what was coming next.

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Fotomat started with a man named Charles Brown (Charlie Brown!?), who built the first version of the idea in Florida in 1965. It was recognizable as a Fotomat. A drive up kiosk where customers could drop off film for processing. Two years later, Preston Fleet heard about it. Fleet came from a wealthy aviation family and had also been one of the founders of WD 40. In La Jolla, California, he met a local businessman named Clifford Graham. Graham had a reputation for talking investors into risky ventures.

Fleet and Graham bought out Brown’s stake in the Florida operation and founded the Fotomat Corporation in 1967. Graham became president, while Fleet was one of the company’s vice presidents. By May, Fotomat had opened its first California location, a five by nine foot booth near Rosecrans and Midway in San Diego. According to the Daily Breeze, it reached its break even point on its fifth day in business.

An ad placed by Fotomat, Inc. of St. Petersburg, FL was still recruiting new franchisees that August. They were offering a one man operation for a total investment of $9,500 and the promise of up to $1,000 a month in extra income.

Word got around fast after that. The concept grew to 1,800 locations within its first eighteen months and it had a thousand stores nationwide by 1970. The franchise fee climbed just as quickly. In 1967 it ran around $9,800 plus $300 a month in rent. By the summer of 1968, to buy the rights to Houston, TX, the fee had jumped to $21,000.

By October of that same year, an investor ad in the Pittsburgh Press was crossing cities off the list as they sold out. As you can see, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Kansas City were gone. Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh were still open. Back in California, the pace was just as fast. The tenth Fotomat in the San Diego area opened in Chula Vista that August That is just four months after the first one.

Fotomat’s yellow and gold kiosks were hard to miss, film giant, Kodak had a problem with that. They said some customers thought the two companies were connected because the colors and lettering resembled Kodak packaging. By 1970, Kodak and Fotomat were fighting over the trademarks and the appearance of the kiosks. Fotomat fired back with a $321.5 million antitrust suit against Kodak. The fight eventually ended in a settlement the next year. Fotomat would change its look and Kodak contributed $500,000 toward the cost of doing that.

All of the kiosks came from the same factory outside Cincinnati, a location Fotomat chose because it made shipping them around the country easier. Each one was only thirty six square feet. For a while, the factory was turning out about three kiosks a day. By 1981, it was making only about two a month.

Finding places for new kiosks was getting harder. Local planning boards were paying more attention to what Fotomat wanted to put in their parking lots and wanted custom work to match the style of their towns or cities. For example, near Tampa, FL, they wanted the kiosk to look more like a palm tree. So they built one with a green roof and horizontal siding. Don Hausrath, who was the Fotomat employee who had to deal with this new trend, remembered that they were happy with how it turned out. He was not.

With parking lots getting harder use, Fotomat eventually opened more than three hundred locations inside shopping malls. There it didn’t have to deal with the same restrictions. This is one of the reasons locations started to disappear even when the company was still going strong.

By the mid 1970s, Fotomat had grown to 2,269 stores, and net income reached $10.9 million. This is the best the company would ever look on paper. Over the next three years the chain kept adding roughly 500 stores a year, but per store sales fell 12 percent and net income dropped by more than 40 percent.

Fotomat had built its business almost entirely around the Kodak Instamatic, the cheap cartridge camera that dominated the 1960s and early 1970s. Instamatic film made up about ninety percent of what Fotomat processed in the early part of that decade. By 1981, 35 millimeter film had grown to half of everything the company handled, and Fotomat had been slow to notice. The company didn’t roll out a real push into 35 millimeter processing, a program it called Series 35, until December of 1978, years after the market had already started shifting under it.

While they might have been slow on film formats, they were willing to take a chance on new technology. In 1978 the company started transferring 8mm movies onto videotape and selling blank tapes. Then a year later, they took an en even bigger step and started renting movies.

Rentals were not like at other video stores. A customer looked through a catalog and called in their order. Then they would pick up the cassette the next day at whichever Fotomat was nearby. Paramount was the first studio they partnered with and offered titles like The Godfather, Star Trek, and Airplane. Disney followed in March of 1980. How much did it cost? A rental cost $12 for five days. This would later be cut to under 10 bucks. Either way, it was on the high side for rentals as the market grew.

Fotomat already had thousands of locations and a business built around getting customers to drop something off and come get it later. While they had a good head start, they forgot that people didn’t like waiting for stuff. This would become a bigger deal as small video stores started opening up nearby offering same day rentals at lower prices. By 1982, they were already stopping rentals, but it would linger in some locations.

The video rental failure was just part of the problem. The bigger issue was their finances. In 1979 they had lost $4.7 million and decided to stop paying dividends to investor. The next year things were much better. They made less than a million in profit on revenue of over $236 million.

Fotomat’s chairman, Richard Irwin, was unusually candid when the New York Times asked him what had gone wrong. He said, “The biggest single factor was our own ineptitude,” It seems that in its rush to grow, Fotomat had opened new kiosks so close to existing ones that they simply stole customers from each other.

Over-expansion and a slow response to changing film formats hurt Fotomat. The real blow was the minilab. Starting around 1980, drugstores and other retailers began installing one hour minilabs. These were machines that let a store develop film on site. Their growth during the eighties would take a huge bite out of Fotomat's core business and they went from a peak of 4,000 locations to just 800 by 1990. Its last real product was an online photo storage site called Fotomat.com, which shut down in September of 2009.

Neither Fleet nor Graham stuck around to see any of that. Graham was pushed out of the company in 1971 over allegations that he was misusing funds. His life after Fotomat only got stranger. He later ran a company that promised investors it could turn sand into gold, was indicted on federal fraud charges in the 1980s, and vanished before he could be tried. He was never found.

Fleet sold his shares years before the company’s decline and spent much of the rest of his life helping popularize Omnimax movie theaters and writing a book arguing that Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays. He died in 1995.

Most old Fotomat kiosks often got some kind of second act They would be remade into a coffee stand or an ATM. The one in our Acme parking lot never got that far. It just sat empty in that same spot for years, going nowhere, until someone finally came and hauled it away.

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I am trying something a little different with this episode. I am heading back to 1977 to take a look at the original titles for the Atari VCS. I have been a lifelong Atari fan and collector and while my top games are not from the first year of the console, I am very mich intrigued by the idea of a time when the console only had 9 titles. It would take me a while, but eventually I would get to collect ‘em all.

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On the show, I start off by talking about this time in Atari’s history and how I have loved the start of any product line. Variety is great, but a small checklist is very satisfying. In addition to the original games, I talk about the name VCS, Sears, cartridge technology, the art and artists, and the original cast of programmers who made these first few games. These trailblazers would all go onto other things.

Its is amazing that Star Wars and the VCS landed in 1977. Two things among many that helped to define a lot of childhoods.

This episode helped to remind me why I really loved early Atari games. I sat down to play them and tried to put myself into 1977. Other consoles had been trying to do what Atari was doing, but the Atari VCS withs its joysticks and paddles feels so much more intuitive. The color, graphics, and sound might have been simple, but it showed what the future was going to be like. Games would grow by leaps and bounds over the next few years, but most of these games remained very playable.

For those not familiar with the art of these boxes, which I talk about at length, here they are.

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If you have a moment, please stop by Apple Podcasts or wherever you might download the show and perhaps give the show a quick rating. It is very much appreciated.

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• This is the 369th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 20 of Season 18.

• I did a podcast for episode 100. That was a long time ago. At the time I thought it might be my last episode. Atari was that important to me.

• If you came to the Atari in the 80s, its amazing to think about a console with just a handful of games.

• I almost always refer to the console as the Atari 2600.

• A slightlly longer Technical Overview about the size of cartridges at the time. It had been much longer, but it was getting too technical.

• Love Atari art. I know a lot it made of it as “misleading,” but I feel strongly about its purpose and try to explain it here.

• I got to brush off some Atari bumpers I made over a decade ago. I used to have more of them, but couldn’t find them.

• Some fun retro audio here. Lot’s more, but I didn’t want to make the episode longer.

• Watching the Olympics is fun, but the argument given to me was about events with judging being not in the spirit of the Olympics. I stand by my Pong-based Olympics.

• I will be doing another console podcast soon. I started working on it in the Spring, but got distracted. This has made me want to get back to it.

• Combat and Indy 500 are my two of the favorite original games,

• Have you ever gotten to play Indy 800? I haven’t seen one since I was a kid. By then it was already pretty old, but when 8 people were playing it was amazing to even watch, which you could do from mirrors that hung over the game.

• Star Wars!!

• I don’t think I ever have heard of MetricFit, but I am intrigued. Was it true metric or were they just using the name? I am still very pro-Metric system.

• I figured out what was in the Bradlees ad. Its a chip in the palm of the hand. Really not easy to tell in an illustration of that size.

• The teen who played chess and lost will stick with me.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

The Retroist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Most people have never eaten a McDonald’s McCrescent. That includes me. The sandwich only existed in Rockford, Illinois, for about three months in 1983, and it never expanded anywhere else. It was a food ideas, as others would demonstrate, but it sat on McDonald’s lunch menu instead of breakfast, and that turned out to be a big mistake.

By the early 1980s, McDonald’s was already a company running constant small experiments. Some worked out. A chicken product first spotted testing in the Midwest in the mid 1970s eventually became Chicken McNuggets and turned into one of the biggest hits in company history. Others disappeared almost as soon as they arrived. The McCrescent belongs to the second group, but its short life offers an unusually clear look at how a single decision, made somewhere far from the test kitchen, can sink an otherwise reasonable idea.

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The sandwich arrived just as croissants were becoming a real fast food trend. Sara Lee had introduced its national line of frozen croissants five months earlier, and by the fall of 1983 the pastry was turning up everywhere a fast food chain or brand could put it. Terry Moran, then a spokesperson for Sara Lee, told the Fort Lauderdale News at the time that “what was a staple of Paris, France is now available in Paris, Illinois.” I am sure the French were thrilled to see this trend.

McDonald’s wasn’t alone in jumping on the croissant bandwagon in 1983. Burger King was already testing its own version around the same time, filling croissants with ham, egg, and cheese under the name Croissandwich (not Croissan’wich, yet) in test markets like South Florida, Savannah, and Hartford. Even the much smaller seafood chain, Boston Sea Party, ran ads for something it also called a Croissandwich.

McDonald’s version showed up in Rockford that same year, a croissant filled with egg, Canadian bacon, and American cheese. Frank Patton, who had opened the first McDonald’s in the Rockford area more than 20 years earlier, said the company considered the region a good place to test new products, and that the sandwich would stay limited to the area’s 16 restaurants for now. The company turned the launch into a real event, running a public contest called “You Name It” that pulled in more than 10,000 entries. The winner was Mary Hannawell, a Rockford freelance artist whose entry combined the shape of the new sandwich with the first syllable of McDonald’s own name. She won a trip for two to Paris and a $1,000 bonus.

Why McCrescent and not McCroissant? The Crescent Roll name was popularized by Pillsbury when they released a product under that name in 1965. Even thought the products are different, they looks similar and some Americans would even use them interchangeably. Part of me wonders if McDonald’s preferred the name because it was just a bit easier for most people to spell. Although maybe we were just seeing how much they like to reference the moon.

Now I cannot find any examples of what a logo or promo would have looked like, but I can guess. So I decided to draw my own. First I did the McCrescent with the C replaced with a croissant. I could also see this done with many croissant letters.

I also thought to do a general McDonald’s logo. I originally tried it with the C as a sideways croissant as well, but it looked too busy.

Fewer than two weeks after Hannawell’s win, McDonald’s pulled the sandwich. Eric Miller, the company’s operations manager for the Rockford area, announced on October 11 that the McCrescent, on the market for about three months by then, would come off the menu and go back to the kitchen for more testing. “It did not have the acceptance we expected,” he said. He added that it had only been sold after 11 in the morning, which meant competing directly with lunch sandwiches instead of other breakfast items. The company had pulled other Rockford test products before, he said, including a steak sandwich and an earlier quarter pound burger called the McFeast.

Hannawell, interviewed again for the story, said she thought the sandwich would have sold better as a breakfast item, since it had to compete with lunch food instead of other morning options. She told the paper she preferred it to the Egg McMuffin because of the softer roll, and that McDonald’s had simply picked the wrong part of the day to sell it.

An editorial two days later mocked the decision, noting that “sophisticated market research costing untold sums” had somehow missed what one customer had figured out for free. The piece nicknamed the sandwich the McFlop and suggested that if it were ever revived successfully, Hannawell should get another trip to Paris out of it.

She never got one. The McCrescent did not return to Rockford, or anywhere else. In the years since, according to the company’s own history of its breakfast menu, McDonald’s added biscuit sandwiches in 1986 and breakfast burritos in 1991, but never returned to the croissant format the McCrescent briefly occupied. Maybe that is because their big rival at the time already staked a big claim on the format.

Burger King’s own croissant sandwich followed a very different path. It launched in test markets that same year under the eventual name Croissan’wich, and by that November had gotten the green light to expand company wide, according to a wire service report picked up by USA Today. Newspaper ads for it kept spreading through 1984, including a big discount push with coupons in papers for lower prices and free sandwiches with the purchase of another, across its ham, sausage, and bacon versions. It spread quickly and by July 1984 it had reached Alaska, priced at $1.49 and already Burger King’s second breakfast menu change of the year, according to the Anchorage Times. Soon newspapers were running taste tests pitting the Croissan’wich against McDonald’s Egg McMuffin, and customers were picking sides in the same debate.

One of those comparisons came from Rockford itself. In May 1984, a Register Star columnist named Pat Cunningham noticed a Burger King commercial on television and wondered whether the company had borrowed its idea from the very contest that had produced the McCrescent the year before. He then laid out, without much sympathy, why McDonald’s version had failed while Burger King’s was thriving. McDonald’s, he pointed out, had been selling essentially the same sandwich, just at the wrong meal time.

It was a big mistake. Burger King’s Croissan’wich is still on its breakfast menu more than 40 years later, having survived a wider breakfast overhaul in 1985 that added French toast sticks to the lineup, a plant based version introduced in 2020, and a “Fully Loaded” upgrade that now stacks ham, bacon, and sausage into one sandwich. The McCrescent lasted three months in one Illinois city, sold at the one time of day almost guaranteed to bury it, and never got the second chance at the right mealtime that Hannawell always thought it deserved.

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On the July 2026 Monthly Update I talk about what’s been going on with the site and podcast, but also some other things going on in my life and some random thoughts I have. They include:

• Suncoast Motion Picture Company

• Mall Store Coverage in the future maybe?

• Making Milshakes

• What makes Colorforms stick? Is it some kind of a trick?

• Cake Yearbooks and collec…

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The idea of SilverHawks clicked with me immediately. I had read that a new cartoon was coming to Channel 5, so I made sure I was home in time to see it. Once the theme song started and those metallic heroes appeared, I was hooked. I soon saved enough money to buy one of the figures, but when I reached the toy aisle I suddenly began thinking about how ma…

I do not bake much. Actually, I hardly bake at all. But I love cakes, cookies, brownies, whatever I can get my hands on. As a kid, my family would make bakery items from box mixes or get something from the many great bakeries in our area. Cake was always served at birthdays, and they were delicious, but I always dreamed about getting a fancy decorated cake. This was before the modern fancy cake movement, where the height of coolness was a cake baked in a Star Wars or other pop culture themed cake pan and then covered in icing to complete the effect. Despite wanting on those, it never happened. That is probably why as an adult, I am so attracted to images of them.

Now, I could have gone for collecting cake pans. I certainly see them all the time while thrifting, but I know that I won’t ever bake one of them and if I tried, it would be very disappointing and the pans would just fill up my cabinets. Luckily I found a compromise. I started collecting Wilton Cake Decorating Yearbooks.

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I like old cake decorating books or articles I find in magazine in general, but these are much more entertaining because they are dedicated to the cakes you make with Wilton equipment. They are filled with birthdays, weddings, school events, holiday parties, and ambitious home bakers trying to make something memorable. Some of the cakes are genuinely beautiful and so many of them are of characters I loved as a kid that even after looking at them dozens of time I can’t help but smile.

Wilton dates back to 1929 and was selling cake decorating tools through catalogs by the late 1950s. In 1964, the company published Cake and Food Decorating Ideas. Wilton says the title became the Yearbook in 1972, and the series continued for another four decades. The 2014 Wilton Yearbook of Cake Decorating was promoted as the fiftieth edition and turned out to be the last.

The yearbooks aren’t really cookbooks. They combined decorating instructions with patterns, supply lists, product numbers, and photographs of finished cakes. A cake that looked impossibly elaborate is broken down into something a home baker could at least imagine attempting. Naturally, there was a Wilton pan or decorating tip involved. Wilton was showing people what could be done with its products, then providing everything needed to recreate the results at home. Each page served as both inspiration and advertising, though it rarely felt like a hard sell. You were being invited to take on a project.

Here you can see some instruction on how to make cake and non-cake snacks for the big game.

Here are the results. Love the giant show and you can see the Pass the Pate mold (a tailgate favorite) and the adorable Take to the Field Cakes. Note that these are all just using the various egg cake molds that you would be using for Easter.

These yearbooks were also an opportunity fro Wilton to sell their Home Study Courses. $15.95 per lesson sent by mail in 1982 is over $50 today. Wilton still offers courses today both in person and you can find courses online. I have seen people post results and its impressive. I wonder if you could learn the same stuff from tutorials posted online?

The books also changed with the times. The colors and decorating styles shifted, as did the characters and occasions that appeared in them. Some of the older wedding cakes look like buildings. Many of the birthday cakes wandered over from the toy aisle, movies or television. The holiday sections are filled with cakes that would make any person’s holiday a little brighter.

Where have I found these? Pretty much everywhere. They are in thrift stores and used book stores that sell magazines. I never bought them when they first came out, but looking at the price tags that some of them still have, I think a lot of people bought them at Kmart.

I have built up a large collection of Wilton yearbooks, and I thought it would be fun to start sharing some of the pages that catch my attention. I am not planning a formal history of the company or a serious examination of cake decorating here. I just wanted to start sharing some photos from them starting with one of my favorite ones, which is from 1982. These will be photos and not scans since I don’t want to damage them anymore than they already are.

First let me start with a character cake. These were why I originally started picking up these Yearbooks and they never fail to please. Here we have Donald Duck and you get a good view of his pan and how the icing is applied to the cake to capture his image. Every year they have new cake pans joining their collection. Still my favorites.

Fake Food are popular. Here are three examples from 1982. They are not hyper-realistic, but I think most people in 1982 would have been happy to get one. I especially like the faux hoagie.

This Taco Tempter is pretty sophisticated for its time. No way I could make this happen even now.

They also have some odd cakes in here. When I first started this one, I thought it was a Barbie cake, but instead its a weird take on a bachelor party classic. At least a classic as I have seen on many sitcom episodes from the 70s and 80s.

Looking through these magazines is probably the closest I will ever come to owning all those character cake pans I see at thrift stores. I can enjoy the finished cakes without finding room for the pans or discovering how badly my own version would turn out. The yearbooks let me have the part I always wanted, which was seeing what the cake was supposed to look like.

I never did get one of those cakes as a kid, but now I have shelves filled with pictures of them. That seems like a pretty good compromise.

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The Bad News Bears made more sense to me after I played baseball when I was young. I was put on a T-ball team that seemed to be assembled from the kids nobody else wanted, and we were terrible. We never got great, but we improved and somehow eventually managed to win a few games, and got the award we were dreaming of. That was enough to make us feel like champions. When I later watched the Bears, probably on VHS or cable, I could relate to being part of a team that was bad but still worth playing for.

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On the show, I talk about how The Bad News Bears was made and the people who brought it to the screen. I spend time on Bill Lancaster’s screenplay and Michael Ritchie’s work with the young cast. I also look at the film’s unusual music, its reception, and the other versions that followed it. As usual, I pulled out my local newspapers to see what was happening when the movie opened in 1976.

The Bad News Bears remains one of my favorite sports movies because it understands how strange youth sports can be. The kids behave like kids, the adults frequently make everything worse, and Walter Matthau never tries to make Buttermaker more respectable than he is. The film does not need a conventional victory to make you feel good about the Bears. What they accomplish together is maybe even better.

You can support the Retroist by joining my Patreon. Supporters will get member-only shows and audio extras associated with the show. Click the giant button below to check out the Patreon Page.

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If you have a moment, please stop by Apple Podcasts or wherever you might download the show and perhaps give the show a quick rating. It is very much appreciated.

Maybe I will release this Podcast on Cassette? Join Patreon for a chance to get a mixtape.

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• This is the 368th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 19 of Season 18.

• I went through a phase after buying this VHS where I watched it almost every weeked for months. Then I took a pause before coming back.

• The kids use a lot of bad language, which doesn’t go over well with some modern audiences, but its a very important part of the plot.

• The sequels are okay. At least interesting and not bad like some people might say.

• The fact that they made two sequels should give modern audiences and idea of how well-received these were.

• Would love to have seen them go to Cuba.

• The movie understands that the adults can be much worse than the kids.

• I like that Buttermaker is never cleaned up enough to become an inspirational coach. He improves, but he remains Buttermaker. Walter Matthau looks completely at home sitting in a dugout with a beer, even though almost everything about that sentence would be impossible in a family movie now.

• Carmen should be much too grand for a Little League movie, yet the music fits almost perfectly.

• I am glad my own coaches were nothing like Roy Turner. Even as a kid, you knew there were adults who cared far too much about winning.

• I cut out a part where I gave a special callout to Brandon Cruz as Joey Turner. His moment shines brighter every time I rewatch it.

• Growing up, I need several kids who were like Tanner. Foul-mouthed and angry, but they could be great friends.

• See Mikey and Nicky.

• I messed up while talking about the soundtrack especially a part about the 50th anniversary release. It is availble to buy and has been posted and streaming online. Worth checking out if you are fan of the film.

• Would love to be a kid exploring the tunnels under the Astrodome.

• “The Wings of Man”

• Sports movies that are just about winning the big game is boring.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.

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