The Retroist

My first Colorforms kit showed up when I was four or five years old, and I fell for it completely. The pieces were reusable, and the sets were affordable, which mattered a lot in a house where new toys could be kind of rare. This was years before computers and electronics filled every room, so a bag of sticky vinyl shapes felt like something close to magic to me. Of course at the time I never thought much about where they came from, and I decided to dive into their history.

Colorforms began as a bathroom remodel that got out of hand. Harry and Patricia Kislevitz met as art students, and in 1951 they were looking for a way to fix up their bathroom walls without paying for real paint. Several accounts place that bathroom in River Edge, New Jersey, instead of Manhattan. Always happy to see a NJ connection for things I like. A friend who worked with vinyl for pocketbooks gave the couple a few rolls of the thin colored material, and they discovered it stuck to glossy paint without any glue at all.

They cut the vinyl into shapes and covered a wall with a private little mural. Guests who came over wanted to try it too, so the Kislevitzes left out spare vinyl and a pair of scissors for anyone who wanted to add a piece of their own. Harry noticed how much fun people were having with a bathroom wall, and that observation turned into a business plan.

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The couple hand cut and assembled the first sets themselves, somewhere near a thousand of them, and brought the batch to FAO Schwarz in Manhattan. The store agreed to carry it on concept alone, with no guarantee the toy would sell. The stock disappeared almost immediately. Early mail orders went to an address on Hudson Street in the city, but production itself soon settled into a real factory in Norwood, New Jersey, not far from where the Kislevitzes lived.

A 1965 newspaper feature on that Norwood plant makes the whole operation sound very low tech. Workers peeled freshly stamped patterns off the press, and a production manager named Hy Moskowitz checked finished stock before it went out the door. Plant manager Pat Dinitto ran the die cutting unit that turned rolls of cardboard into the familiar Colorform base, while a full assembly line packed pieces for shipment.

Newspaper ads from the era sold the toy on simplicity. One ad from 1953 opens with the line “No need to putter with paint,” then promises 350 separate plastic shapes packed into a five-page spiral bound book, plus one black and one white plastic surfaced board to stick them on. The whole kit ran from three to five dollars depending on size. The basic idea might change, but something remained the same. Reusable plastic shapes that clung to a smooth surface, even as the sets, boards, and packaging changed.

By 1956, Colorforms ads were promoting the toy as seen on Romper Room, a beloved show in our house. The connection included a Willie the Weatherman set that let children dress its cartoon figure for the day’s forecast. I believe Willies original gimmick was that he was made of felt. So this was an all new take on him. A Buffalo ad from that year also shows how quickly the Colorforms line was expanding, with Picture Stix, a Dress Design Kit, Colorform Jr., and other sets selling for between $1 and $1.98.

The first big licensed character to appear on a Colorforms box was Popeye, in 1957, and it opened the door to a licensing strategy the company leaned on for decades. Mickey Mouse followed, then Peanuts, Star Trek, Batman, the Beatles, and eventually properties as far apart as the Three Stooges and Steve Urkel. If a character was popular enough to sell lunchboxes, there was a decent chance it eventually showed up as a Colorforms set too.

In 1959, Colorforms hired graphic designer Paul Rand to create a new trademark and packaging. Rand had begun working with IBM a few years earlier, though many of the corporate logos that would make him famous were still ahead of him. His Colorforms mark used the same simple geometric shapes found in the toy, arranging them into a playful figure that remained closely associated with the brand for decades.

Colorforms occasionally tried to move beyond the flat plastic pieces that had made the company successful. The most ambitious attempt was the Outer Space Men, a group of bendable alien figures created by designer Mel Birnkrant. He conceived them after seeing Mattel’s Major Matt Mason toys and noticing that the astronaut line had no alien opponents. The figures were developed during 1968 and reached Toy Fair the following year, where Colorforms had to introduce a product unlike anything its sales staff normally handled. Birnkrant recalled that many people inside the company resented the extra work required to sell something that did not fit the familiar Colorforms category.

Colorforms made another attempt to expand its place in the toy store in 1974. Its new Color n’ Play sets combined coloring activities with cardboard figures that could be used after they were colored. Birnkrant and Colorforms founder Harry Kislevitz rejected the cheap crayons commonly packed with activity sets and insisted on using genuine Crayola crayons. Birnkrant later believed the product helped awaken Binney and Smith to the possibilities of Crayola branded activity kits. The crayon company introduced a line of its own the following year, although the direct connection rests largely on Birnkrant’s recollection.

Other experiments were less successful. Popeye Puppetforms, also released in 1974, became what Birnkrant described as the worst selling product in Colorforms history. The company normally ordered printed materials for at least 50,000 sets, but only about 4,000 Popeye sets were sold. Roughly ten years later, Birnkrant asked Kislevitz if he could keep one piece of original artwork from the company archive. He chose the Popeye cover. According to Birnkrant, Kislevitz looked at him and replied, “You bastard!” He had apparently wanted it for himself.

By the end of the 1970s, Colorforms needed still more room and moved production into a much bigger factory in Ramsey, New Jersey, bringing Harry Kislevitz’s two sons into the family business. New Jersey stayed the manufacturing home of Colorforms for decades, right up until the company changed hands in the late 1990s.

By 1981, Kenner had turned Strawberry Shortcake into a major toy line built around small scented dolls and their accessories. Colorforms designer Mel Birnkrant later recalled that Kenner would not allow the company to produce a Strawberry Shortcake activity set, even though its reusable plastic pieces did not compete directly with Kenner’s dolls. Colorforms responded by creating Sugar and Spice, a candy themed character line deliberately modeled on Strawberry Shortcake. Kenner objected when it saw the first version at Toy Fair, and Birnkrant redrew the characters overnight before presenting a revised design the following morning.

The Sugar and Spice became successful enough that other toy companies shut out of the Strawberry Shortcake license came to Colorforms wanting to license Sugar and Spice instead. The same standoff with Kenner also kept Colorforms from ever landing an official Star Wars license, a franchise that I think all of us would have loved to see get the Colorforms treatment.

Colorforms found another use for its large collection of character licenses in 1981, when it acquired the rights to make and distribute Shrinky Dinks kits. The company eventually produced more than 50 of them, using properties from television, movies, comics, and other toy lines. Colorforms had not invented Shrinky Dinks, but its licensed kits are still well-remembered by anyone how lived through the eighties.

By 1986, more than 300 million Colorforms sets had reportedly sold since the company’s founding. That was also the year Colorforms moved into home video, releasing playsets bundled with VHS tapes through Scholastic and Lorimar, with titles like Journey to the Magic Jungle and Voyage to Mermaid Island. A newspaper review from that year praised the combination of a physical play board with a story you could watch alongside it, priced at $14.95 per tape and playset.

The format kept shifting with the technology available. By 1994, a company called Gryphon released My First Colorforms Computer Fun Set, a piece of software for home computers running Windows 3.1 that let kids build Colorforms scenes on a screen instead of on cardboard, complete with sound effects and a microphone for recording their own voice into the mix.

Ownership of the company changed hands several times beginning in the late 1990s. Toy Biz bought Colorforms in 1997, followed by University Games the next year. It later passed to Out of the Blue Enterprises in 2014. The following year, the company invited fans to suggest names for the little figure from Paul Rand’s logo and vote on a group of finalists. The character later emerged as Charlie. After 9 Story Media Group acquired Out of the Blue in 2018, it worked with DHX Media to make Charlie the star of the Netflix series Charlie’s Colorforms City, taking Colorforms from a toy advertised on television to a television property in its own right.

Colorforms picked up its share of awards along the way too. The Toy Industry Association named it one of the top ten toys of the century in 2000, and Time magazine included it on a list of the hundred greatest toys of all time in 2011. Patricia Kislevitz’s original hand cut set from 1951 sits today in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a strange but fitting place for something invented to cover up a bathroom wall. PlayMonster now makes Colorforms under license from 9 Story, and marked the toy’s 70th anniversary in 2021 with a special edition set.

None of that history was on my mind when I was four or five years old playing with my first Colorforms set. What I remember is exactly what the Kislevitzes had discovered in a New Jersey bathroom decades earlier. A handful of simple shapes on a shiny surface could hold a kid’s attention for hours, then do it again the next day. Colorforms would pass through new owners and new formats, but the pleasure of arranging those pieces on a board hasn’t changed at all.

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I want to start off by saying I don’t know much about soccer or as I think most of the rest of the world calls it football. But with the World Cup back in the United States I thought this would be a nice opportunity to talk about my time working security at the World Cup the first time it was played in America back in 1994. I was very young at the time, but it was great job to get. It might not have taught me much about how soccer is played, but I did finally get an idea of how rabid the fans are.

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On the show, I start by talking about my limited exposure to soccer growing up. I then move on to the 1994 tournament, how it was presented to an American audience, and some of the strange details surrounding it. This will be a little different than other episodes of the Retroist. Most of the episode is about how I got the security job at Giants Stadium, the different assignments I was given, the people I encountered, and what it was like to be close to such a large event without really understanding the sport being played.

The 1994 World Cup was far more successful than many people expected and helped establish professional soccer in the United States. I cannot claim that working there turned me into a fan, but it gave me a much better understanding of what the tournament meant to the people who traveled to see it. It was loud, chaotic, and unlike anything else I had worked before. Also it gave us a solid pinball machine and a great mascot.

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• This is the 367th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 18 of Season 18.

• I worked every match at Giants Stadium and still could not have told you which teams were expected to win.

• I had so many extra tickets that I could barely give away. That seems impossible now.

• Wish I had brought an autograph book or small camera with me.

• Speaking some German apparently helped me get hired, although I do not remember using it once. I also tried to speak some Norwegian. Europeans are much better at English.

• I gave away most of the World Cup memorabilia I collected because it meant more to people who actually followed soccer.

• Finding Andrés Cantor’s missing briefcase was probably my closest brush with World Cup fame or at least he was a person I knew about before the game. I probably walked by some amazing athletes. I just didn’t know who they were.

• My family lived near Giants Stadium and remembers almost nothing about the tournament beyond the fact that I worked there.

• Security in 1994 was mostly concerned with alcohol, bags, and people trying to get onto the field. It was a very different time.

• The World Cup paid me about twice what I was making at Suncoast, which certainly helped me appreciate it.

• The stamp controversy is such a New Jersey story. Always a bridesmaid.

• Bonus clippings will run a little late this episode, but 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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Before I worked at Suncoast, I worked at two mom and pop video stores in my hometown. That was how I first got paid to spend my time around movies. Those stores did rentals, with return bins, late fees, rewinding, and customers looking for whatever was still on the shelf on a Friday night. They were great places to work, but when a job opened up at Suncoast in my new local mall, I took it. It was still in the video business, which I had come to enjoy, but it payed more.

Suncoast felt different from those rental stores right away. Their business was built around ownership, not borrowing. People were not just looking for something to watch that night. These were videos people wanted to own, collect, and display. Work was a completely different game that involved more customer interaction and a greater ability to recommend movies and tv shows I loved.

Suncoast Motion Picture Company began in Roseville, Minnesota in 1986, though it was not called Suncoast yet. Musicland opened the first store under the name Paramount Pictures, using the studio name through a limited licensing arrangement with Bell and Howell Columbia Paramount Video. The store was still Musicland’s experiment, not a Paramount run chain, and the idea was simple enough. In 1988, Musicland dropped the Paramount Pictures name and rebranded the stores as Suncoast Motion Picture Company.

It was good timing. By the late eighties, the VCR had moved from expensive novelty to living room fixture. They were getting cheaper as were video tapes and people were getting used to the idea that a movie could be something you owned. Rental stores had already changed how people watched movies, but Suncoast leaned into the next step. I think a lot of people now think it was there to replace the local video store. While the audience overlapped, they we not always the same. Owning movies had been around for years, but it was not yet casual for everyone. Suncoast was built for the moment when buying a movie started to feel normal

The choice compared to a local video store could be overwhelming. Even early stores back in the 1980s carried between 6,500 and 7,000 titles. Early shelves were filled with movies aimed squarely at film collectors. But this wasn’t all that stores had. There were special interest videos, shirts, stuffed animals, and other movie collectibles. It was a burgeoning business and the parent company, Musicland was only going to push harder into the business in the 1990s.

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A Corporate Report Minnesota piece said Musicland might open as many video stores as music stores that year, and quoted CEO Jack Eugster saying sales and profitability had exceeded company plans. The same abstract said Musicland expected overall 1990 revenue to be more than 20 percent above the previous year’s 695 million dollars.

That growth showed up in the stores. A 1994 Daily Herald item about a new Suncoast at University Mall in Orem, Utah described a location with more than 8,500 VHS titles, including new releases and classics. It said special interest videos, such as instructional, travel, and sports tapes, made up 20 percent of the selection. The same article mentioned laserdisc, soundtracks, and show tunes on compact disc and cassette.

By the mid nineties, Suncoast was more than a place to buy movies. The tapes and discs were the center of the store, but the merchandise around them was part of the business. That made it broader than a simple video shop, and probably more useful as a mall store.

Having selection was part of the appeal and a core of the business. Suncoast wanted to catch the person who came in for a title, then keep them looking at everything else connected to it. That was a real difference from the rental stores I had worked in before. Those stores were built around what someone wanted to watch that night. Suncoast was more about the deeper feeling of movie fandom and desire to own a film.

I guess this is a good spot to mention price. Suncoast was not cheap. Even with a decent employee discount. But that selection gave the store a reason to exist even when another retailer had a lower price on the biggest release of the week. You went to Suncoast because there was a chance it had the thing you were not finding anywhere else in the mall.

There were ways to get better prices at the store. Customers could reserve movies before release date and be guaranteed the store’s lowest price for that film. We were always pushing pre-orders and that got pretty ordinary as the nineties wore on, but Suncoast really stressed it and incentivized it early. It was great for who customers wanted to plan around a title before it arrived.

Working the floor, you saw that kind of customer all the time. Some people came in to browse and left with nothing. Others knew exactly what they wanted before they walked through the entrance. Those recurring customer were our bread and butter between big releases and holiday seasons. They were usually also the most fun because they loved this stuff too.

Customers might not know this, but their were interesting rules around pricing. In 1996, Billboard Magazine looked at minimum advertised pricing, usually called MAP. These policies were set by the studios and limited how low a retailer could advertise a movie without risking the loss of cooperative advertising money. Specialty chains liked MAP on major new releases because it kept big box stores from advertising the same tape at a price smaller video retailers could not match.

Suncoast’s president Gary Ross wanted those protections to go further. At the time, Suncoast had 414 stores, and Ross argued that MAP helped specialty stores stay in business. He also wanted it applied to more older repriced titles, since a mass retailer could take a tape that had dropped from 19.99 to 9.99 and use it as a giveaway. Other retailers were less convinced. They supported MAP on big releases, but thought stores needed more freedom on older titles where the profit margin was already thin.

That was one of the tensions customers felt without always knowing the reason. Suncoast had selection, but Best Buy, Circuit City, and other large retailers could be cheaper on major releases. If you wanted the big title of the week, a big box store might win on price. If you wanted anime, a cult title, an older catalog release, a box set, or something that was not sitting in a discount bin, Suncoast still had a reason to exist.

The anime side of the store became one of the clearest examples of that. When people share memories of the store nowadays, anime comes up again and again. Things like Dragon Ball Z tapes, imports, and higher priced releases with only a few episodes loom large. These online comments are not hard business data, but they match the way many people remember the store. I personally remember how excited people were for the anime section. Suncoast was expensive, but for some categories it was also where people found things they could not get nearby.

If you have never seen a Suncoast storefront they were easy to recognize. They had a black mirror-like facade and a red neon sign. Later photos from remaining or recently remaining locations show how much that sign still carries the memory of the chain, even when the merchandise mix inside has changed.

The decline came through the same forces that hit a lot of entertainment retail. In December 2000, Best Buy agreed to acquire Musicland for 685 million dollars, gaining more than 1,300 stores under names including Sam Goody, Suncoast, Media Play, and On Cue. In January 2003, Best Buy closed about 110 Musicland division stores, including 90 Sam Goody stores and about 20 Suncoast stores, citing declining prerecorded music sales and slower mall traffic.

A few months later, Best Buy was already out. In June 2003, Sun Capital acquired all of Musicland’s liabilities, including lease obligations, and paid no cash consideration for the stock. That is one of those details that reads like an ending before the ending. Best Buy had paid hundreds of millions for Musicland, then moved it out of the company by having someone else take on the obligations.

Musicland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2006. Oak Point Partners, which later acquired remnant assets from the bankruptcy estate, says Musicland and related entities filed in the Southern District of New York on January 12, 2006. In March 2006, Trans World Entertainment completed the acquisition of substantially all of Musicland’s assets for 104.2 million dollars in cash and 18.1 million dollars in assumed liabilities. Its own press release named Sam Goody, Suncoast Motion Picture Company, On Cue, and MediaPlay.com as Musicland operations.

Suncoast did not disappear all at once. That is part of why its history can be hard to put together. Some stores closed under Best Buy, more closed during the bankruptcy period, and more were folded into or made to resemble FYE stores after Trans World took over. By the time people started taking pictures of surviving Suncoast locations as retail artifacts, the stores were already part old chain, part FYE, and part reminder of how long a mall sign can outlive the retail world that created it.

A Staten Island Advance piece from 2006 about record stores sums up the changes happening well and points to the future. It begins by noting that Tower Records was bankrupt and going out of business, then says that earlier that year Musicland, parent company of Sam Goody, had filed for Chapter 11 and closed Sam Goody and Suncoast stores. The piece frames the problem as customers moving to compact discs first, then iPods and downloads, with browsing replaced by convenience.

Video retail was not identical to record retail, but it followed a similar path. DVDs gave stores like Suncoast a strong final act by making movie collecting more mainstream. They also made the weakness of the mall store harder to ignore. Once customers knew what they wanted, online stores could offer more titles without asking anyone to drive to the mall. Downloads and streaming changed the business again. A store built around browsing physical movies had to survive in a world where more of that browsing was moving to a screen.

A few “Suncoasts” still survive, depending on how you count them. FYE’s current used media buyback page lists Suncoast Jacksonville Mall in North Carolina, while its Ohio list includes FYE Mall at Fairfield Commons in Beavercreek. The Beaumont, Texas store at Parkdale Mall was still being written about as one of the remaining full Suncoast stores in late 2023 and in later retail pieces, but current counts have shifted as locations close one at a time.

What I remember most about Suncoast is not its corporate timeline. It is the feeling of having a job that kept me close to movies after my time in rental stores, but in a different way. At Suncoast, I was not checking tapes in and out. I was helping stock a store built for people who wanted to own movies, talk about them, find them, and sometimes just stand there looking at what was new.

My Suncoast is long gone now. I don’t know what happened to the shelves, the registers, or the display pieces after the store closed. Most mall stores vanish that way. The fixtures are hauled off, the sign comes down, and the space becomes something else.

What stayed with me was the work itself. I had already been around movies in rental stores, but Suncoast was different. For a while, it was THE place built for people who wanted to own movies, talk about them, and wander the shelves longer than they probably planned. For me, that made it a good job, and one I still think about when I see the Suncoast name hanging on somewhere.

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Since today is the 4th of July and in most places the beaches are still open, I thought I would revisit, Jaws, with a bonus track. After trying to convince people that Mayor Vaughn wasn’t as bad as people make him out to be, I thought I would talk about someone else in the movie whose actions can also be looked at as villainous.

I am not sure I fully be…

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On the June 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:

• Atmosfear

• McFeast

• Mr. Mouth

• Action Park

• Jaws and Mayor Vaughn

• Amity the TV Series?

• XTeink (Tiny E-ink Tablet)

• Progress City Primer

• The Burger King

• The Planet of the Apes - A Com…

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Lode Runner was a big game in the 1980s, but it still feels like it gets left out of the larger conversation in retro gaming. People talk about Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and plenty of other early classics, but Lode Runner belongs in that group too. It was simple to understand, hard to master, and built around rules that made sense the more y…

My cousins had two games that never stayed on the shelf for long. One was Hungry Hungry Hippos, which everyone has heard of. The other was Mr. Mouth, which people remember less, if they remember it at all. We would rotate between them on the floor of their basement, and the noise level was about the same no matter which one we picked. We all played to win. The version of Mr. Mouth we played was the yellow head version, not the frog that came later. I didn’t think about it then, but both games had Japanese routes into the American toy market and reached kids in the United States within two years of each other. One became a household name. The other did okay. Eventually changing its face and becoming a part of an interesting court case involving Pac-Man.

Mr. Mouth was developed by Tomy Kogyo Co., Ltd. in Japan. The inventor named on the US patent is Takao Matsumoto. A Japanese priority date of July 4, 1975 appears in the patent record, and Tomy filed for US protection on June 23, 1976. The patent number is US4109914A, titled “Game structure employing a revolving target,” and it was granted on August 29, 1978. The mechanism it describes is the game in miniature, with a rotating receptacle, an opening and closing lid, and spring operated launchers that players use to send disks toward the moving target. Inside the same patent, a non patent citation reads “Mr. Mouth, TV, Tomy 1976 Catalog, p. 15,” which ties the patent directly to the product Tomy was already selling that year.

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Tomy was not a small operation by 1976. The company had been founded in Tokyo in 1924 by Eiichiro Tomiyama. Initially making tin toys, it had been exporting to the United States since the early 1950s when a B-29 Bomber friction toy became one of their first major international sellers. By the mid-1970s, Tomy was expanding into many overseas markets, exporting toys through department stores like Sears and under its own name through a new American distribution company. That same decade, the company developed a new specialty in hand-held skill-based toys. At first they were mechanical but they would increasingly turn towards electronics like so many other companies. Mr. Mouth fit right into that period. It was a battery powered mechanical game from a company that was becoming known for small toys with a lot of action built into them.

The game itself is easy to understand. It ran on a single C battery. A yellow head sat at the center of an X shaped plastic base and rotated, opening and closing its mouth as it turned. Four players, one at each arm of the X, used spring loaded hands to flip plastic chips toward the opening. The chips were color coded, ten per player in red, blue, green, and yellow. The first player to land all ten chips in the mouth won. It was basically tiddlywinks with a moving target, but that moving target is what made the game work. You were not just flipping a chip. You were waiting for the mouth to come around, open up, and give you the shot.

During the Christmas season of 1976, Mr. Mouth was already showing up in stores nationwide. A Ventura County Star advertisement from November 25 placed it among seven top toys, priced at $10.97, alongside Barbie, a deluxe pinball set, and a CB radio combo. A letter to Santa published in the Vacaville Reporter on December 5, 1976 listed Mr. Mouth alongside Stretch Armstrong, Connect Four, Jaws, and Monopoly and this was not an isolated letter. Up in Canada, the Waterloo Region Record in Kitchener, Ontario that same month listed Mr. Mouth among top sellers at a local department store, in an article noting that parents were steering away from gimmicks toward quality.

By the following Christmas it had not faded. A Garden City Telegram story from December 21, 1977, headlined “All I Want for Christmas Is Mr. Mouth,” described it as the most asked for game among several players at a local store. The piece ran on the front page. So popular, and still selling for about ten dollars. It was a solid game and had a steady presence on shelves. A few years later though, the Mr. Mouth story would take an interesting turn.

In 1982, Mr. Mouth was part of a copyright fight that had almost nothing to do with tabletop toys. The case was Midway Mfg. Co. v. Bandai-America, Inc., decided by the US District Court for the District of New Jersey on July 22, 1982. Midway was suing Bandai over handheld games it alleged infringed on its Pac-Man and Galaxian copyrights. Bandai, looking for prior art that might undercut Pac-Man’s originality, pointed to three things it claimed were precursors to the Pac-Man character, a Sega arcade game called Head-On, a Japanese cartoon ghost called Kyutaro, and Tomy’s mechanical Mr. Mouth. The court rejected the first two handily. Mr. Mouth received more careful treatment.

The court described Mr. Mouth as a yellow plastic mouth that opened and closed while the toy rotated and players flipped pieces into it. Then it added the strange part, saying the game was “apparently called Pac Man in the Japanese tongue.” That does not prove the Japanese box said Pac Man, but it does show that the name was part of the legal record. The court did not say Pac Man copied Mr. Mouth. It only said the resemblance was close enough that the question could continue in the case. The ruling also noted that Tomy had given Midway any rights it might have claimed to the Pac Man name and to what the court called “Tomy’s mechanical game of the same name.”

That language is the closest primary evidence I have found that the original Japanese version of Mr. Mouth may have had a connection to the Pac Man name before Pac Man existed as a video game. It is not the same as finding the original Japanese box or catalog listing, but it is a court record tying Tomy, Mr. Mouth, and the Pac Man name together.

Pac-Man, originally titled Puck Man in Japan, was released in 1980 by Namco. The character was a simple yellow figure with a V-shaped aperture that opened and closed like a mouth, and the name derived from the Japanese onomatopoeia “paku-paku,” describing the sound of chomping. The patent for Mr. Mouth’s mechanism had been filed in Japan in July 1975, five years before Pac-Man appeared in any arcade. Whether the designers at Namco knew the Tomy game, or whether two separate designers arrived at similar yellow chomping shapes from different directions, is not something the court resolved. What the court found was that the question was legitimate enough to put before a jury. The case was ultimately settled before a verdict, so no jury ever answered it.

The version I knew was the yellow head, but that is not the version many people remember now. By 1987, the game had a new publisher and a new face. Milton Bradley released its own version that year, and Tomy released a companion edition simultaneously. The yellow chomping head was gone. In its place was a green frog. The chips became plastic flies. The spring loaded hands remained, the X shaped base remained, and the rotating motorized center remained, but the thing you were feeding had changed entirely. The mechanism was still what Matsumoto had patented in 1976, but the theme had been rebuilt around it.

I guess the redesign made sense. A frog eating flies is easier to understand than a yellow head eating plastic chips. Children can accept both, but the former’s theme is understood before the box is even opened. Why the change? By the time Milton Bradley took on the game, the toy market around it had been saturated. A mechanical skill game still had plenty to offer, but the frog gave Mr. Mouth a refresh and I think they hoped it would make it stand out more to a new generation.

The frog version lasted a while. A 1999 Milton Bradley reissue appeared, keeping the same basic design. Tomy eventually reclaimed the game and currently sells it in the frog format under its games line. The product description on their site reads “catapulting insects has never been so much fun,” a sentence that would not have made any sense in 1976, when the thing being catapulted was a small plastic disc and the thing eating it was an abstract yellow face. The current version still runs on the same basic principle Takao Matsumoto filed for protection in 1975.

BoardGameGeek lists ten versions of Mr. Mouth across its publishing history, under names that include Greedy Green Frog, Rod Hull’s Emu Game, and Shrek Bug Bounce, the last of which was a licensed tie-in to the DreamWorks animated film. Each version put a new face on the same basic game. The emu version was sold in the United Kingdom. The Shrek version replaced the frog with an ogre. Underneath all these was still a rotating target, a set of spring loaded launchers, and the judgment call of when to flip.

Mr. Mouth never became a cultural landmark the way Hungry Hungry Hippos did. It has had a longer life than most toys from 1976 manage and it's been an interesting one. It changed when the market required it, found a clearer form as a frog, and is still available. The patent for the mechanism expired in 1996 after the standard twenty year term. So the game has already outlasted the legal protection for its own invention.

The frog version is not the one I knew at my cousin’s house. To me, Mr. Mouth was still the yellow head in the middle of the floor, turning in circles while we tried to flip chips into its mouth. I did not know about the patent, the Japanese name question, the Pac Man court record, or the frog version that would replace it later when I played it. I just knew it was fun, odd, and harder than it looked, which was enough to keep us playing.

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I begin this podcast episode by talking about my own trips to Action Park. I was so excited to go as a kid when I visited and got to go because it was close to where my uncle lived in Northern New Jersey. My mother was not a big fan of amusement parks unless they were connected to Disney, and she had started reading enough about Action Park to be worried. My uncle did not have the same concerns, so he took me there and I had a great time. I rode what I could, brought home brochures, talked about it all summer, and assumed I would keep going back. That didn’t happen.

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Then I talk about how Action Park came to be. The story starts with Gene Mulvihill, Great Gorge, Vernon Valley, and the problem of what a ski resort is supposed to do when the weather gets warm. The Alpine Slide came first, and from there the place kept growing into something much larger. Action Park was built around participation, which meant you were not simply strapped into a ride and moved along. You had some control, or at least the feeling of control, and that was a big part of what made the park so exciting.

Of course, that same idea also made the place dangerous. In the episode, I get into the rides people still talk about, including the Alpine Slide and the Cannonball Loop. I also spend time on the wave pool, Motor World, and some of the other attractions that helped make Action Park feel less like a normal amusement park and more like its own strange world. Looking back now, it is much easier to see how quickly excitement could turn into something else.

The darker part of the Action Park story is impossible to avoid. I talk about the deaths and injuries connected to the park, along with the lawsuits and insurance problems that followed it for years. Some of what happened there is shocking even if you already know the general reputation. The park has become famous as a place that probably should not have been allowed to operate the way it did, and there is plenty of truth in that version of the story.

But I did not want this episode to be only about the worst things that happened there. For a lot of kids from New Jersey and the surrounding area, Action Park was a summer trip people talked about afterward. It was a place that felt enormous, especially if you were young enough to believe you could eventually get to everything. The danger is part of the story, but so is the memory of wanting to go back.

That is what makes Action Park such a strange subject for me. The stories about the park are real, and some are worse than I understood when I was young. At the same time, my own connection to the place is still tied to being a kid who thought he had found the most exciting park in New Jersey. My last trip there had already happened before I knew it, which may be part of why the place stayed so large in my mind. Action Park does not fit neatly into one version of itself, and that is why it still feels worth talking about.

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• This is the 366th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 17 of Season 18.

• All my trips to Action Park came through my uncle who lived nearby. My mother had read enough to be worried, but I only knew it as this huge park in New Jersey that sounded more exciting than anything I was used to.

• Action Park was one of those places that was too big to finish in a day. That was part of the appeal. You went home thinking about what you had done, but also about everything you still wanted to try next time.

• I brought home brochures from Action Park because I wanted my friends to understand what I had been talking about all summer. That feels very much like being a kid before the internet, when a pamphlet from a place was proof that your story was real.

• My mother never sat me down and explained why she did not want me going back to Action Park. She had seen the headlines, and I think she knew more than she wanted to tell me. At the time, I just thought a return trip had been postponed.

• Gene Mulvihill is such a strange central figure for this story because Action Park really does feel like an extension of his personality. It was ambitious, stubborn, reckless, and somehow persuasive enough to keep going long after most places would have been stopped.

• I like that the whole thing started as a practical ski resort problem. You have lifts, hills, trails, and a lot of months with no snow. The answer most people would have found was probably modest. Action Park was not modest.

• The Alpine Slide is the perfect beginning for Action Park because it explains the whole idea in one ride. You were going downhill on a little cart with a brake, and the difference between fun and trouble depended partly on you.

• Action Park sold the feeling of control or that was the marketing. That was the hook. The park made you feel like you were not just a passenger, even when the amount of control you actually had was questionable.

• There is a version of Action Park that sounds almost impossible now, because so many of the rides depended on trust. Trust the equipment, trust the teenager running the ride, trust the person behind you not to crash into you, and trust yourself to know when you had gone far enough.

• The Cannonball Loop is the attraction that almost feels like a joke someone made after hearing about Action Park. Then you find out it was real, people tested it, and for years it sat there like a monument to the park’s entire way of thinking.

• The wave pool may be the scariest thing in the episode because it does not sound ridiculous at first. A wave pool feels normal until you understand how crowded it could get, how strong the waves were, and how often lifeguards were pulling people out. Luckily I survived it.

• Motor World is the part of Action Park that I wish I had experienced more fully. As a kid, the idea of driving tanks, cars, and other little vehicles around a separate section of the park sounded almost too good to be true.

• One of the strangest parts of the Action Park story is that the bad headlines did not immediately stop people from going. The park kept drawing huge crowds, which says a lot about the time, the area, and how differently people processed risk.

• The insurance story changes the way I look at Action Park. Ride accidents are terrible enough, but the idea of creating a fake safety net around the park makes the whole thing feel much darker.

• I do not think Action Park can be explained only through the documentaries and horror stories. Those stories are true, but they leave out the ordinary summer memory of going there and spending the ride home thinking about when you could return.

• For people from New Jersey and the surrounding area, Action Park became a shared reference. Even if you only went once, you understood why people kept talking about it. The place had a reputation even before it became a legend.

• The closing of Action Park feels strange because as a kid I assumed it was permanent. Places like that seemed too large to go away. Then one day you realize the version you knew, or thought you would get back to, is already gone.

• What makes Action Park interesting to me is that both versions of the story are true. It was dangerous in ways that should not be brushed aside, but it was also a place that gave a lot of kids memories they still talk about decades later.

• Bonus clippings can be found over on Patreon 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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My mom loved tell me about food that didn’t exist anymore. I was a fast food kid from a fast food family, so I always wanted the details. What was it. Where did she have it. Why did it go away. The McFeast came up more than once in these talks, and for a long time it was mysterious since my mom was light on the details. All I know is that it was a sandwich from before I was born that some people remembered fondly, but didn’t catch on.

It turns out the McFeast had a longer and stranger life than I expected. The sandwich started as a quiet experiment in Montana, became a genuine weapon in the burger wars of the late 1970s, and lingered in pockets of Texas into the 1980s before more or less vanishing from the United States. Except it never actually disappeared. The McFeast moved to the other side of the world, where it has been showing up and getting pulled off menus again for almost forty years.

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In November of 1975, the Billings Gazette ran a short piece under the headline “McDonalds test sandwich here.” Billings, Montana was one of the spots chosen to try out a new “giant sized McFeast,” a deluxe hamburger with mayonnaise and tomatoes packed into a yellow styrofoam box. According to Milo Richards, a company supervisor overseeing the local franchises, the sandwich was sold nowhere else in the world but the three Billings locations. The article noted that twenty two owner operators from McDonald’s restaurants in New York had flown out on a private company jet just to see how the McFeast was doing. One local owner put it bluntly. “They want it, but they aren’t going to get it,” he said, explaining that new products got tested for years before they made it onto national menus.

That same article mentioned something else being tested in the Midwest at the time, a new item called McDonald’s chicken. It would be years before that became Chicken McNuggets, but it is a reminder that McDonald’s was running a lot of these little experiments at once, and most people only ever heard about the ones that worked.

The McFeast kept moving through test markets over the next year. By the spring of 1976, it had reached Irving, Texas. An ad in the Irving Daily News from April of that year promised that your first McFeast will be delicious, paired with a free quart of sugar free 7 Up. The copy described it as everything you want in a hamburger sandwich, with a big juicy man sized beef patty, crisp lettuce, fresh tomatoes, pickles, onions, mustard, and creamy mayonnaise, all on a fresh roll like you get in a bakery. The offer only ran for two days at two specific Irving locations.

People who worked at McDonald’s around this time remember it well. Former employees from Minneapolis, San Diego, and the Bakersfield area have described a quarter pound patty served on a kaiser roll, loaded with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, and pickles, and one person who tried it as a kid in the late 1970s nicknamed it the McMess because of how much fell out of the sandwich with every bite. Reflecting on it years later, that same person said it seemed like McDonald’s was testing out their version of the Whopper to compete with Burger King. A Minneapolis worker from the 1976 to 1977 school year remembered it the same way, calling it “essentially a Whopper, but the Kaiser roll made it better.”

That comparison was not just a customer’s guess. By January of 1978, McDonald’s locations in Eau Claire, Wisconsin were running newspaper ads with a guy in a hard hat holding the sandwich like a trophy, under the line you’re gonna love our new McFeast a lot. The tagline that ran through this whole era was simple. McFeast. It’s a lot to love. By the fall of that year, the comparison to Burger King’s flagship sandwich became official. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis ran a Wall Street Journal piece in April of 1978 with the headline Burger King declares war to head off Big Mac attack. Buried in that story was the detail that McDonald’s counterattack was already being mapped out. To complement its Big Mac, the company was testing in more than 400 stores a Whopperlike sandwich called the McFeast, loaded with lettuce and tomato slices and nicknamed the Whopper Stopper inside the company.

The nickname traveled. A Toronto Star feature from July of 1978 profiled George Cohon, the head of McDonald’s restaurants in Canada, and used the same phrase. The article described a lettuce and tomato concoction being tried in test markets, called the McFeast, and noted that at what the piece called Hamburger Central, it was known as the Whopper Stopper. Cohon would not say much about it directly, though he did admit the company was experimenting with onion rings around the same time, as if the McFeast was just one of several things being thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

McDonald’s would return to some of this same territory in the 1990s with the Arch Deluxe, another quarter pound burger with lettuce, tomato, a different bun, and its own sauce. But the Arch Deluxe was trying to be the grown up McDonald’s burger. The McFeast seems more straightforward, like McDonald’s taking a swing at the Whopper with the pieces it already knew how to use

Back in the United States, the McFeast was still rolling out city by city. A reader question in the Abilene Reporter News from September of 1978 explained why a new arrival in town had not been able to find a McFeast at the local McDonald’s. The paper’s answer was that the sandwich was still in the experimental stages, approved for only three test markets, and that the reader happened to have moved from one of them. To get a McFeast at that point, the answer said, you had to go to the Dallas Fort Worth area. The same answer described the McFeast as a little bigger than a Quarter Pounder, with lettuce, tomatoes, mustard, mayonnaise, and onions.

By 1980, the McFeast was still hanging on in parts of Texas, even as it was fading elsewhere. The Orange Leader ran a full page ad in October of that year showing an enormous illustrated McFeast and offering a month of weekly coupon deals at McDonald’s locations across the Golden Triangle area near the Louisiana border. Buy one McFeast and get another free, or get a large fry or a Dr Pepper thrown in, depending on the week. The ad called it nothing like the goodness of a McFeast, with tomato, lettuce, and one hundred percent pure beef.

And yet, somewhere in this same stretch of years, McDonald’s corporate had quietly decided the experiment had not worked. The clearest evidence comes from October of 1983, in the Rockford Register Star. The story was actually about a different failed product, a breakfast product called the McCrescent (coming soon) that was being pulled from test markets around Rockford, Illinois. In the course of explaining that decision, the local operations manager for McDonald’s, Eric Miller, ran down a short list of other items the company had tried and dropped in that area, including a steak sandwich and, before that, the McFeast, which he described as a quarter pounder on a sesame seed bun with lettuce and tomatoes. Miller also pointed out that this kind of pullback was not unusual, since McDonald’s tested plenty of products regionally before deciding whether they were worth keeping. In the same breath, he mentioned that Chicken McNuggets, the descendant of that mysterious McDonald’s chicken from the 1975 Billings article, had become one of the company’s most successful products.

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A year before that, in May of 1982, an Atlanta Constitution piece about the launch of the McRib made the McFeast’s fate even more explicit, if a little unkind. The story quoted a local McDonald’s franchise group president expressing confidence that the McRib would sell well, unlike what the article called the doomed McFeast of the late 1970s. By the time high schoolers in Archdale, North Carolina ran a burger preference survey for their school paper in January of 1985, the McFeast was still familiar enough as a name to include as one of the options, alongside the Whopper, Wendy’s Triple, and Burger King’s Big Deluxe, even though it was gone from menus by then. That is often how these things go. The name outlives the product by a few years in the public memory before it fades for good.

So that is roughly the McFeast’s North American story. It started as a quiet test in Montana in 1975, then crawled through Texas, Minnesota, California, Wisconsin, and Canada over the next several years. For a while it had a starring role in the burger wars of the late 1970s as McDonald’s answer to the Whopper. Then it died a fairly ordinary corporate death by the early 1980s, confirmed almost as an afterthought in a newspaper story about a completely different sandwich.

But the McFeast was not done. It just moved.

By the early 1980s, the McFeast had landed in Australia, where it would go on to have a much longer and more complicated career than it ever had in the United States. A Sydney Morning Herald restaurant column from November of 1982 described ordering a McFeast at a McDonald’s near Central Station in Sydney. The reviewer called it the nearest thing to a traditional Australian hamburger, since it contained tomato, though they found it bland and not hot enough. For the record, it contained a slice of tomato, two pickles, tomato sauce, lettuce, a meat patty, and cheese, all stacked between two pieces of a toasted sesame seed bun.

From there, the Australian version took on a life of its own, eventually becoming known as the McFeast Deluxe, with a sauce blend built around mustard, ketchup, and the chain’s McChicken sauce. According to a 2024 retrospective from the food site Mashed, this version stuck around through the 1980s and 1990s before being discontinued. It returned in a slightly revised form in 2009, vanished again, came back in 2011 for another limited run, and was pulled in 2021. As of May 2023, the McFeast was on the menu once more, although still only for a limited time. That 2023 return was covered by delicious.com.au, which framed it as the resurrection of a cult favorite. The writer described the McFeast as having been quietly removed from the menu in 2021 without warning, leaving what she called a hamburger shaped hole, and noted that McDonald’s marked the comeback with a lunch deal pairing the McFeast with small fries and a small soft drink for $5.95, available daily between half past eleven in the morning and half past two in the afternoon.

Australia also flirted with a homegrown variation called the McOz, built around the distinctly Australian addition of beetroot, alongside lettuce, tomato, onion, cheddar, ketchup, and mustard. According to the food history site Australian Food Timeline, the McOz was discontinued in 2008, briefly reintroduced in 2011, and then revived again in 2018 as part of a five dollar lunch deal, but it never became a permanent fixture and was eventually replaced on the regular menu by the McFeast.

The McFeast name became enough of a fixture in Australian pop culture that a television personality borrowed it. The comedian Libbi Gorr created a character called Elle McFeast for the ABC series Live and Sweaty in the early 1990s, later hosting her own talk show under the same name. It is a strange kind of immortality for a hamburger, getting turned into a parody of a brash Australian celebrity persona, but it suggests the McFeast had genuinely worked its way into the culture there in a way it never managed in the United States.

The McFeast also crossed into South Africa, though in a different form (so more in name). The South African version, as described by Mashed, uses two beef patties instead of one, includes onions but not pickles, and is topped with McChicken sauce alongside something called braai sauce, a tomato based condiment flavored with brown sugar, mustard, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, and peach chutney. Braai is the Afrikaans word for barbecue, and the sauce is apparently common enough in South Africa that the McDonald’s menu there does not bother explaining what it is.

Versions of this same sandwich, sometimes built on slightly different recipes, have also turned up under other names entirely. In Sweden, a McFeast has reportedly been on the menu since the middle of the 1980s, built around a quarter pound patty, lettuce, a modified mayonnaise, onion, and tomato, without ketchup. Much of continental Europe got a similar burger under the name Big Tasty. In Canada it became the Big Xtra, or the McXtra in Quebec. Mexico and Latin America got something called the McNifica. New Zealand had its own version for a while called the Mega Feast. It is the same basic idea, a bigger beef patty dressed up with lettuce, tomato, and a distinctive sauce, repackaged under a different name for each market, the way a touring band might play the same set under a different name in every country.

Which brings us back to my mom, and to the question of why any of this matters. The McFeast was never the Big Mac. It never got its own jingle that stuck around for decades, and most Americans under fifty have probably never heard of it. But for a few years in the late 1970s, it was McDonald’s best answer to a real competitive threat, tested carefully, advertised aggressively, and then quietly shelved when it did not catch on the way the company hoped. That alone would make it a forgotten footnote, the kind of thing that shows up in old newspaper ads, vintage commercials, and nowhere else.

Instead, the McFeast kept going, just somewhere else. It became a beloved, repeatedly resurrected fixture in Australia, the subject of online petitions and nostalgic articles every time it disappeared again. It became a quietly persistent menu item across parts of Europe, Africa, and Latin America under names most Americans would not recognize. The sandwich my mom remembered from somewhere in the 1970s never really went away. It just went international.

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Below is a cleaned up transcription of this Jaws Bonus Track for those who prefer to read. Make sure to check out the Retroist Jaws Podcast. (I did a whole series).

Every summer I watch Jaws again, and every summer something different seems to move forward in the movie. Sometimes it is the pace of it or the way Amity feels like a real place before the s…