The Retroist

My grandmother loved Raisin Bran. That was the cereal she preferred, and if you were in her kitchen, that was the cereal she was going to offer you. But I knew there was a box of Product 19 somewhere in that kitchen, because I had seen it. I thought it tasted better than Raisin Bran and that meant breakfast usually turned into a small negotiation. How long could I hold out before she gave up on pushing the Raisin Bran and reached for the other box. Most mornings when I was with her, I won.

Why would I fight for it? Product 19 was not a fun cereal, exactly. But I liked the taste and to me it was a lot better than what I was being offered. Yes, the box looked serious, and the name made it sound more like something from a lab than something you ate for breakfast. But that may have been part of the appeal.

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Kellogg’s began rolling out Product 19 in the spring of 1966, starting along the Pacific Coast. A small press item in the Tacoma News Tribune that April described it as “crisp, bubbly flakes blended from 4 nutritious grains” and said the unusual name was “selected by Kellogg’s in keeping with the uniqueness of its newest ready-to-eat cereal.”

That was Kellogg’s public explanation, or at least the one that made it into newspapers, and it does not really explain much. The more familiar story is that Product 19 was the nineteenth product Kellogg’s had in development around that time. MrBreakfast gives that version, saying it was the nineteenth product Kellogg’s began developing in 1966. That date can’t be right since it was being sold early that year. Another version says it was the nineteenth formulation of the cereal itself before Kellogg’s landed on the one it wanted to sell.

I have not found Kellogg’s confirming any of those versions directly. What can be confirmed is that the company was already using the Product 19 name in commerce by March 15, 1966, and filed the trademark that May. So the name almost certainly came out of Kellogg’s development process, but the exact meaning remains a little fuzzy. For a cereal called Product 19, that seems about right. It sounded official, but somehow explained almost nothing.

What is not in dispute is why Kellogg’s built it. General Mills had launched Total in 1961, billing it as the first cereal to deliver 100% of the minimum daily vitamin requirements in a single serving. Their most famous advertising showed towers of competing cereal bowls stacked comically high, making the point that you would need an absurd number of the other guy’s product to match a single bowl of theirs.

Kellogg’s had Special K, but that was not quite the right answer to what Total was selling. So they started developing something that could go head to head with it. Product 19 was that something. Flakes made from corn, oats, wheat, and rice, fortified to deliver 100 percent of the officially established daily adult requirement for vitamins and iron in a single one ounce serving. The original slogan made the pitch very clear. “Instant Nutrition. New cereal food created especially for working mothers, otherwise busy mothers and everybody in a hurry.”

The cereal itself followed that same idea. It was not built around a cartoon animal or a prize in the box, and it was not trying very hard to make breakfast feel like a treat. Product 19 was selling usefulness. The early boxes and ads leaned into that, with charts, nutrition claims, and blocks of copy that made the whole thing feel almost medicinal. Red and white, plain, and very sure of itself. This was “the Common Sense Cereal.”

By early January 1967 you could find it at Safeway for 29 cents a box, bundled in a grocery circular alongside Lucerne milk and cottage cheese. No fanfare. Just there on the page the way sensible things are.

Then the summer of 1970 happened.

In July of that year, a consumer advocate named Robert Choate testified before the Senate Consumer Subcommittee and presented a nutritional ranking of 60 major breakfast cereals. Two thirds of the cereals he evaluated ranked below 100 on a scale that went to 700. Popular brands across the board landed in that lower tier. He told the committee that many of them “fatten but do little to prevent malnutrition.” Ranked best were General Mills’ Total and Kellogg’s Product 19.

Stores could not keep it on the shelf. In Portland, one grocery buyer told the local newspaper that Product 19 sales had jumped 50% on both 8 and 12-ounce sizes the week the story broke. He was moving 130 cases a week and could have sold more. Kellogg’s, he said, was struggling to keep up with production. He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that Product 19 “wasn’t a big seller before.” In Rochester, the Times-Union reported similar scenes. Entire store stocks gone in three hours.

It was a strange and very American moment. A cereal that had spent three or four years being overlooked became briefly famous because someone in Washington confirmed what it had been saying on the box all along. One store’s nutrition expert, quoted in the Portland coverage, offered a useful note of skepticism amid the excitement. The actual nutritional value of cereal, he said, “consists of what is put into it by the diner, such as cream, or bananas, or strawberries.” He was not wrong. But the rush was already on.

The advertising Kellogg’s ran through those years leaned on credibility rather than personality. The first commercials in 1967 featured Peter Marshall, then the host of Hollywood Squares, jogging around a large cereal box in grey sweats. Earnest and a little stiff, but it set a tone. By the early 1970s they had found a better fit in Tom Harmon. Harmon won the Heisman Trophy in 1940 at the University of Michigan, flew combat missions in World War II, and was a well-known sports broadcaster by the time Kellogg’s put him in front of a camera for Product 19. He was in his fifties during the campaign and still looked the part. He presented the cereal as part of how he stayed active, which was exactly the kind of pitch that worked on a certain kind of adult in the early 1970s.

A 1972 commercial brought in Tom’s son Mark, then quarterbacking at UCLA, for what was reportedly one of his first television appearances. Father and son, a bowl of cereal between them. Mark Harmon eventually spent twenty years on NCIS. It is one of the stranger footnotes in Product 19’s history.

By 1977 the advertising had moved toward something more suburban and lightly comic. The “Vitamins that taste too good to forget” campaign was warmer than anything involving the Harmons. By 1983, print ads running in papers across the country were calling it “the new Kellogg’s Product 19,” describing it as “flaky, bumpy, crispy, crunchy vitamins,” which is actually a pretty good description if you ever ate the stuff. The word “new” suggested a reformulation somewhere along the way, though Kellogg’s was never specific about what changed.

Through all of it, the box stayed red and white and Product 19 never really tried to become something else. Kellogg’s could adjust the pitch around it, but the cereal kept the same basic personality. It was plain, serious, and useful, which was not the worst place for a breakfast cereal to be. Not every cereal needed a mascot or a gimmick. Product 19 seemed perfectly fine being Product 19.

When Kellogg Canada launched Product 19 in January 1972, it did so quietly at first. A notice in The Globe and Mail reported that advertising would not begin until mid February, so the company could give stores time to get the cereal on shelves. Kellogg also had a small advantage going in. Research before the launch found that many Canadian consumers already knew the name, thanks to American advertising that had drifted north. The Canadian campaign was handled by Leo Burnett Co. of Canada, part of the same agency network long tied to Kellogg. That connection gives the launch a nice footnote. Years later, a future Kellogg CEO told the Battle Creek Enquirer that his first brand assignment at Leo Burnett had been Product 19.

The decline of the brand came slowly enough that it almost did not register as a decline. By the 2010s, Kellogg’s had quietly pulled back distribution. In 2014, a fan posted on the company’s official product forums pleading that the cereal not be pulled. A company representative responded that Product 19 had moved to limited distribution. Facebook groups with names like “Bring Back Kellogg’s Product 19” appeared around the same time. People posted photos of the last boxes they found in stores, the way you photograph something you sense you will not see again.

In November 2016, Kellogg’s made it official. The statement read in part, “We are sorry to announce that Kellogg’s Product 19 cereal has been discontinued. Unfortunately, sales of this cereal were not strong enough to support continued production.” Nearly fifty years on shelves. The comments on MrBreakfast.com filled in steadily after that. One person wrote that his mother had always called it “19s.” Another said Kellogg’s did not need twenty-five flavors of Special K. It needed Product 19. Someone else had been eating it for twenty years and had gotten their granddaughter hooked on it too.

Total, the cereal Product 19 spent nearly five decades chasing, is still on shelves.

My grandmother is gone now and Product 19 is gone too, so I suppose it makes sense that those mornings come back to me more often than I would have expected. She liked Raisin Bran and usually tried to steer me toward it. I knew there was another box in the kitchen, and most mornings, I held out for that one instead. Product 19 was not a cereal anyone was supposed to get sentimental about. It had no mascot, no prize, and not much of a personality beyond the strange name on the box. But it tasted good to me. I remember getting the bowl I wanted. I remember being happy with it in front of me.

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On the May 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:

• Weatherstar 4000

• Dune Board Game

• McDonald’s Leaps and Bounds

• Peak McDonald’s in Print

• Go Ape for a Day

• Game Genie Podcast

• Perfect Strangers Podcast

• Perfect Strangers Bonus Video

• …

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Turbo Teen only lasted thirteen episodes, but it has managed to hang around in a way that a lot of short lived Saturday morning cartoons did not. Some of that is because of the premise. It is a show about a teenager who turns into a car. What could be better!

I watched Turbo Teen as a kid, and at the time it didn’t seem bizarre. It felt like a Saturday m…

I only played Atmosfear once, at a friend’s house, and I liked it while but also felt like I had arrived a little late. I was old enough to issues with the game, but not so old that I could ignore what the game was trying to do. The Gatekeeper shouting from the television, the clock running, everyone getting a little louder as the tape kept going, it was a great setup. If I had played it at twelve, that would have been perfect. I would have been nervous, excited, and completely sold on it.

Atmosfear had its roots in a game called Nightmare, released in Australia in September 1991 by a production company called A Couple ‘A Cowboys. The company was founded in 1983 by two television producers, Brett Clements and Phillip Tanner, who had met the previous year. They spent two years developing and testing Nightmare before taking a pilot to Village Roadshow, Australia’s largest video distributor at the time. Village Roadshow signed a marketing and distribution agreement within 24 hours and soon the game launched with advertising on television and movie theaters.

The VCR board game was not a new idea in 1991. Parker Brothers had released the Clue VCR Mystery Game in 1985, which sold nearly 500,000 copies and briefly landed on the Billboard videocassette charts, becoming the fourth best-selling video title of that year in the United States. Over the next decade, board game companies would release a variety of VCR games that included adaptations of existing games as well as games original to the format. Most of them used the tape passively, as a kind of theatrical backdrop. Nightmare used it differently. The tape ran continuously during play, counting down from sixty minutes, and an on-screen character would interrupt the game at irregular intervals to punish, reward, or mock the players. The tape wasn’t just there for atmosphere, but it did add a lot. That was mainly because of this guy.

That character was the Gatekeeper, played by Wenanty Nosul. Nosul was born in 1949 in the Byelorussian SSR and came to Poland as a child. He spent 1979 to 1995 in Australia, where he studied acting at the Sydney Acting School. The Gatekeeper’s character, as Brett Clements conceived him, was based on the cemetery gatekeepers of the 17th and 18th centuries, people who literally guarded graveyards from grave robbers. What Nosul brought to that concept was a controlled malice, a performance that balanced genuine menace with just enough absurdity to keep the whole thing from curdling. He called you a maggot. He banished you to the Black Hole. He sighed, audibly, when he was forced to release a player he would rather keep trapped. If you played the game as a kid, this is what you remember about the game.

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Nightmare sold two million copies by the Christmas period of 1993. Three expansion packs followed, each hosted by a different character from the game’s roster of monsters. Baron Samedi the zombie hosted Nightmare II in 1992. Anne de Chantraine the witch hosted Nightmare III in 1993. Countess Elizabeth Bathory the vampire hosted Nightmare IV in 1994. A fourth expansion, featuring Khufu the mummy, was announced and then cancelled. The reason was a problem with the format itself.

Because VHS is linear, the Gatekeeper’s interruptions were always identical. Every game of Nightmare played out the same sequence of events at the same times. Once you had played it a few times, you knew what was coming. The tension that made the first few sessions electric gradually flattened out. Sales began to decline, and Clements and Tanner went back to work on something larger.

What they built would be called Atmosfear: The Harbingers, which was released in 1995. The name change from Nightmare was already in use in Europe, where a trademark conflict with an existing product had forced the rename. The Harbingers was a complete redesign rather than an expansion. Clements and Tanner brought in J.W. Spear and Sons, the British game publisher that had distributed Nightmare and done extensive market research on its reception, as a development partner. Spear wanted input into how the new game was built, which they had not had with the original. By the time The Harbingers reached stores, development costs had reached approximately six million dollars.

The board itself was a significant upgrade. Six two-sided hexagonal provinces fit together around a central hub, and since the provinces could be assembled in any order, the physical layout of the game could change from session to session. Each province was ruled by one of six Harbingers: Gevaudan the werewolf, Hellin the poltergeist, Khufu the mummy, Baron Samedi the zombie, Anne de Chantraine the witch, and Elizabeth Bathory the vampire. All of them except Hellin were drawn from history or mythology. Hellin was the one character Brett Clements created entirely from scratch, conceived as a childlike figure whose fury escalated when she did not get her way.

Players started each game as Numb Skulls and had to land exactly on a Harbinger’s headstone to transform and begin collecting the six differently colored Keystones needed to win. If you failed to reach a headstone within the first ten minutes, you became a Soul Ranger instead, one of the skeletal scavengers who couldn’t collect Keystones by landing on them but could steal them from other players. Clements had originally designed the Soul Rangers as a punishment, something players would dread becoming. He found out quickly that many players preferred it.

Mattel launched The Harbingers with a marketing campaign that included spots on MTV, cross-promotions with soft drink brands, and a website, which was notably the first website any Mattel product had ever had. The game sold above industry predictions in Australia and reached the top ten best-selling games in both the United States and the United Kingdom within months of its release. The US retail price was $34.99. In Britain, copies went for £27.99 each. It was a genuine commercial hit on two continents.

Scary game for kids? You can guess what happened next. In November 1996, the Independent Television Commission in the United Kingdom received 21 complaints that a TV commercial for Atmosfear was too frightening to air during children’s programming. Eight of those complaints specifically mentioned that their children had been scared by it. The ITC ruled the commercial could no longer run in children’s time slots.

There was also a SNES game that almost happened. Beam Software, an Australian developer responsible for titles including Shadowrun and Radical Rex, developed a prototype of an Atmosfear game for the Super Nintendo. Rather than adapting the board game, they turned it into a platformer in which the Gatekeeper would randomly interrupt gameplay at the level, much as he did on the tape. The game was mentioned in magazines in late 1993 and in 1994 but was never formally previewed or reviewed. A prototype dated July 12, 1994 exists. The game was cancelled for reasons that have never been publicly explained.

The franchise shifted formats in 2004 when A Couple ‘A Cowboys released Atmosfear: The Gatekeeper on DVD. The DVD format solved the replayability problem that had eventually eroded Nightmare’s appeal. Unlike the linear storytelling format dictated by videotape, the larger size of DVD allowed for more than 300 storylines and responses from the Gatekeeper. So rarely does a game truly plays the same way twice.

The game sold 60,000 copies in its first six months and eventually reached 600,000 worldwide. A sequel, Khufu the Mummy, followed in 2006. The DVD Gatekeeper was played by David Whitney, and the general consensus among longtime fans was that the performance, whatever its merits, was not the same thing as Nosul. With a game driven by one featured performer, they make all the difference.

The DVD version also lost something physical. The original Harbingers board had bone-colored plastic pieces that matched the game’s aesthetic. The DVD edition updated them to a more boring plastic, and the board provinces were redesigned. People who had played the original found the revision noticeably flatter and cheaper seeming.

An app version launched in 2019, licensed by Creata IP and released first in Australia, Spain, and Portugal. It used a smartphone or tablet in place of the disc, with a new Gatekeeper played by Jacek Koman. In 2021, a 30th anniversary edition launched on Kickstarter, raising AU $491,581 from 3,884 backers against a goal of AU $90,000. That edition replaced the tape with streamed video, added new cards, redesigned the playing pieces, included a Baron Samedi expansion, and came with a graphic novel called The Lore of the Other Side, which explored the Gatekeeper’s origins. Rewards began shipping to backers in January 2023.

Nosul, who had returned to Poland after the Atmosfear productions concluded in the mid 1990s, went on to appear in European film and television productions including Anna Karenina and War and Peace. He is now in his mid seventies. In the context of his overall career, the Gatekeeper is a footnote. For a large number of people who grew up in Australia, the UK, and North America in the early 1990s, it is the role they know him for. A man on a tape, barking orders from a television, somehow became the part of the game that lasted longest.

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I don’t normally post videos, but this one felt worth trying because it is such a visual thing.

During the first season of Perfect Strangers, there is a short scene in the opening credits where Larry gets into his car and says goodbye to his family. Everyone is waving and smiling, and then there is this guy on the far right in sunglasses, giving Larry a …

I begin this podcast episode by talking about the strange timing of television in our lives. Sometimes a show arrives at just the right moment, and for a while it feels like part of your weekly routine. Then you get older, your habits change, and without really deciding to, you stop watching. Years later, you come back to it and realize there was a whole stretch of the story you never saw. Perfect Strangers was one of those shows for me.

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Then I talk about Perfect Strangers, including its creation, the people in front of and behind the camera, its place as one of the anchors of ABC’s TGIF lineup, and the full run of the series from its mid eighties debut through its final season in the early nineties. I also talk about how the show changed over time, how Balki and Larry grew from mismatched roommates into family, and how Perfect Strangers helped lead to one of television’s most successful spinoffs, Family Matters.

Perfect Strangers worked because Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn Baker were so right together. The show could be very broad, and sometimes very silly, but their chemistry kept it grounded. Balki and Larry were funny because they were opposites, but the show lasted because you believed they cared about each other. That friendship gave all the physical comedy, misunderstandings, and catchphrases something warm to hang onto.

Metagirl is also back this week with a Top 5 list of the best episodes of Perfect Strangers. If you watched the show years ago, it is a nice reminder of why people loved it. If you never really watched it, it might give you a good place to start.

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.

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• This is the 365th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 16 of Season 18.

• Perfect Strangers is one of those shows I was very excited about when it started, and then somehow I just stopped watching it. I did not turn against it. I did not get tired of it. Life just changed and it fell out of my routine.

• I think that happened to a lot of shows for me around the end of the 80s. I was still watching television, but I was also working more, seeing friends more, renting movies more, and suddenly the shows I liked were not automatic anymore.

• Coming back to Perfect Strangers years later was a strange experience, because the early episodes felt familiar, but the later seasons felt like new television from the past.

• The thing that surprised me most when watching the full run is how much the show changes while still feeling like itself. It starts as a very simple odd couple show, then slowly becomes a workplace show, a friendship show, a relationship show, and eventually a family show.

• Bronson Pinchot and Mark Linn Baker really make the whole thing work. The writing is often funny, but the show lives or dies on whether you believe in Balki and Larry together, and I do.

• I always remembered the catchphrases, but watching the show again reminded me how much physical comedy they were doing. Some of those bits are closer to stage routines than normal sitcom scenes.

• The Dance of Joy is one of those things that could have been unbearably annoying if the performers were not so committed to it. Instead, it feels like something the show earned.

• I like that Balki is not usually the fool in the show. He misunderstands America, but he is often the one who sees a situation more clearly than Larry does.

• Larry is a great sitcom character because he is not just uptight. He is a great combo anxious and ambitious.

• Perfect Strangers helped make TGIF feel like TGIF. It was not just another show inside the block. It moved to be its initial anchor.

• The spinoff connection to Family Matters is still funny to me. One elevator operator at a fictional newspaper leads, eventually, to Steve Urkel becoming one of the biggest sitcom characters of the 90s. I should eventually do a Family Matters podcast.

• I wish Perfect Strangers and Family Matters had crossed over properly. It feels like the sort of thing TGIF should have done, especially since the two shows were so closely connected.

• The ending of Perfect Strangers is odd. It does get a final episode, but it also sort of disappears. For a show that ran eight seasons, it deserved a more public goodbye.

• The final scene with the cast taking a bow is sweet, especially when you remember that these actors had spent years doing very physical comedy in front of live audiences.

• The baby name Robespierre is one of the strangest choices in any family sitcom. I am not sure how many TGIF viewers were expecting a French Revolution reference.

• The theme song is still hard to skip. It is one of those TV themes that does a lot of emotional work before the episode even starts.

• There is a version of this show that never becomes Perfect Strangers. Different title, different names, different actor opposite Bronson Pinchot, maybe no Dance of Joy, maybe no catchphrase. It is always interesting how much television history can turn on a few changes.

• I did not do a Perfect Strangers tour when I lived near Chicago, and now I regret that a little. I could have at least looked for some of the locations from the opening credits.

• Metagirl is back with a Top 5 list this week, which is especially useful for a show like this. Eight seasons can be a lot to take on, and sometimes a good episode list is the easiest way back in.

• 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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Planet of the Apes was already a successful film series by 1973, but Fox found a new way to sell it. Instead of treating the first five movies as separate releases, they turned them into an event. One ticket. One theater. One very long day. On Tuesday, June 12, 1973, the Warfield Theater in San Francisco ran all five Planet of the Apes films back to back, one day before Battle for the Planet of the Apes opened to the public. The marquee read “Go Ape for a Day.” Two thousand, two hundred people formed a block long line for a dollar ticket. The complete showing ran nine hours, longer than a back to back pairing of epics Ben Hur and Gone With the Wind. James Sutton, district manager for National General Theaters, watched the crowd pour in and said, “We ought to sell a lot of hot dogs.”

The theater sold four thousand of them.

The San Francisco Chronicle found Kris Lewellen and Lane Lees, both thirteen, who had gotten out of bed at 7am to be first in line. A seventeen year old told the paper he had already seen the first four films four times each and did not think that was unusual. Eva Paz had seen the first film eleven times and was near the front. She explained simply that she loved it. One person in line mentioned that the films would not be on television until 1978, which was reason enough to come.

The San Francisco Examiner ran a follow up piece the next day titled “The Funny Things Humans Do for Apes.” It noted that more than 90 percent of the audience had stayed through all nine hours, and that a second full showing was held that same evening. Bob Wilkins, host of KTVU’s Creature Features, had given away 500 free tickets after receiving 5,300 requests. Writer Michele Lomax compared the fan culture forming around the films to the Star Trek phenomenon and noted that there was already a French magazine dedicated entirely to the franchise.

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Marathons spread to San Diego, Sacramento, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. At the Embassy Theatre in New York, the event was repeated twice more during the second week alone. In Los Angeles, Fox staged a promotional stunt outside the Hollywood Cinema and the Beverly Theatre, where costumed figures carried picket signs reading “Apes Opt for Equal Opportunity” and “No Watergate in Simian Society.” In June of 1973, that one did not need much explanation.

By mid July, the format had reached suburban New Jersey and Long Island. Ads for drive ins and indoor theaters show the same pattern, all day Apes programming, extra dates, and crowds large enough that some locations had to add more screenings. The marathon was no longer just a San Francisco stunt. It had become a repeatable event.

What happened the following year was more organized. Fox vice president Ben Barron told the Los Angeles Times in June 1974 that the 1973 events had been “basically a publicity stunt” and that “the idiots were waiting in line all day to see the films.” However he meant it, Fox had clearly learned something from the turnout. The studio had not just sold tickets. It had found a format.

The five films were being presented as a numbered sequence, known around the Fox lot as Apes 1 through 5. Three hundred licensed products were in preparation. The CBS television series starring Roddy McDowall was set to premiere that September. The slogan tying it all together was “Go Ape for a Day.” The theatrical marathons had started as a stunt, but by 1974 they were part of a much larger push.

A 1974 Daily News ad shows Toys R Us offering 1,500 free movie tickets through a drawing during in store appearances by Cornelius, Geoffrey, Gigi, and Baby Gee at New Jersey and Long Island locations (see you in Paramus). Individual theater ads from the period show how the format spread and changed from market to market. A Mountain View, California ad from November 1974 advertised all five films from 9am to 5pm at two dollars a seat, with free color Apes photos and an actual Planet of the Apes makeup demonstration thrown in. A Roanoke, Virginia listing from June 1974 shows only three films under the Go Ape for a Day banner. A Waco, Texas ad from July 1974 runs all five films with individual start times, the last beginning at 9:15pm.

Not every market ran all five. Not every version looked the same. Local exhibitors took the idea and adapted it to what they could manage.

The newspaper coverage captures the scale of the promotion, but the memory of the marathons survived in a different place. Decades later, people were still turning up in blog comments and message boards to say they had been there.

John Busser, writing on the Space 1970 blog in 2012, remembered going to the Parma theater, which originally had more than a thousand seats. It was packed for the first film. By the time Battle for the Planet of the Apes started, there were maybe thirty people left. He was one of them.

Other memories follow the same pattern. Someone who went to the Times Square showings remembered two full cycles in one day, the first from 10am to 6pm and a second from 6pm to 2am. He walked out into Times Square after 2am and still had an hour commute home on the 7 train. Another account describes a family piling into a station wagon for a dusk to dawn drive in showing. The dad and the twelve year old stayed awake for all of it. The seven year old did not.

That is the part the ads cannot really capture. The campaign was built around a simple dare, could you sit through all five Planet of the Apes movies in one day. For the people who did it, the endurance became part of the memory.

The theatrical marathons had a second life almost immediately on television. In September 1973, CBS bought the broadcast rights to the first three Planet of the Apes films for one million dollars and aired them in prime time (guess it wasn’t 1978). The result was a 33.6 Nielsen rating and a 57 percent audience share, the highest ratings recorded for a science fiction broadcast up to that point, and the number one spot for the week. CBS ran the films again in its Friday Night Movie slot.

Those numbers, together with the theatrical turnout, helped convince the network to move forward with a weekly series. The CBS live action Planet of the Apes series premiered on September 13, 1974, and ran fourteen episodes before cancellation. Why? Well, it had the bad luck of going up against Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man on NBC.

The Go Ape format stayed useful on television well past the series. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, stations began programming Go Ape weeks, running the five films on consecutive nights. Those blocks drew well enough that ten episodes of the 1974 TV series were repackaged as five two hour films, giving stations more Apes material to run.

New prologue and epilogue segments were filmed with Roddy McDowall returning as an older Galen, looking back on the adventures of Virdon and Burke. Those segments gave the series a little more closure than it had received during its original run, including an explanation that the two astronauts had found their computer in another city and disappeared into space. The wraparounds do not appear to have been included on the later DVD release. So we still can look forward to maybe getting that one day.

Of all the licensing that followed the Go Ape push, the Mego toy line may have the best origin story. Marty Abrams, president of Mego Corporation, had never seen a Planet of the Apes film until his son Kenny brought him to one of the 1973 marathons. According to the Mego Museum, Abrams spent much of the day watching the audience. The turnout told him there was something there beyond another science fiction movie series.

The next morning, Abrams contacted Fox about the toy rights. Mego outbid rival toy company AHI and introduced its Planet of the Apes line at Toy Fair in February 1974. It was Mego’s first movie based toy line, and it became one of the company’s biggest successes. The marathons had shown Fox that the series could still draw a crowd. They also showed Mego that kids might want to take that world home.

The 1974 CBS series failed to hold an older audience and was gone within a season. The animated Return to the Planet of the Apes followed on NBC in 1975. The Go Ape television weeks kept the films visible through the early 1980s, but without new theatrical entries, the momentum eventually ran out. The franchise went quiet for a while.

That all changed when Tim Burton’s 2001 remake brought people back briefly, and the Caesar trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011 gave the property a real revival. Each time a new entry arrives, someone programs a marathon somewhere, whether in a revival theater or at home. The five original films still run in order, from afternoon into night.

The original Go Ape Days belonged to an era when wanting to see all five films meant giving up most of a day in a theater. In 1973, the five Apes films were still recent, but most people had seen them one at a time. The marathon changed that. For nine hours, the films became one long strange story, with the world ending, starting over, and then ending again.

Fox had found more than a way to sell older movies. It had found a way to make Planet of the Apes an event. The idea spread from city to city, moved onto television, and helped feed the licensing push that followed. For the people who sat through it, though, the appeal was simple. They spent a day in a theater, watched all five Apes movies, and could say they made it to the end.

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In 1976, the McDonald’s on La Tijera Boulevard in Los Angeles celebrated its twentieth anniversary with this newspaper insert. The restaurant had opened in 1956, which places it very early in McDonald’s history. Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois on April 15, 1955, and McDonald’s says the company was still in its first big wav…

I had heard of Leaps and Bounds, but for years I could not have told you exactly what it was. I knew the name in that vague way you remember a place you saw advertised, or maybe passed in a mall, but never actually visited. I was too old to be the target audience when the first location opened in 1991, and too young to care about what McDonald's was doing as a business. It was only much later that I realized Leaps and Bounds was not just another indoor play place. It was McDonald's attempt to build an entirely separate chain around indoor play for children. Once I learned that, the whole thing became much more interesting to me.

McDonald’s had been in the playground business long before Leaps and Bounds. In 1972, the company debuted its first outdoor Playland at the Illinois State Fair, with equipment designed by Setmakers, a Hollywood set design firm, and built around the McDonaldland characters. Kids could climb on a Hamburglar swingset or crawl through an Officer Big Mac jail. It was a direct line from the television commercials into the physical world, and it worked. The Chula Vista, California location that installed an early version reported a jump of more than 60 percent in business after its playground opened.

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By 1987, McDonald’s had moved the playgrounds indoors and rebranded them as PlayPlaces. By 1991, McDonald’s had become America’s largest playground operator with 3,000 PlayPlaces. The playgrounds had become so central to the brand’s appeal to families that someone, at some point, asked the obvious question. If kids love this so much, why limit it to thirty minutes after grabbing a Happy Meal?

McDonald’s spokesperson Terri Capatosto framed the whole idea in terms of the company’s existing tagline. “Instead of ‘Food, Folks and Fun’ with the emphasis on food, it’ll be ‘Fun, Folks, and Food’ with the emphasis on the fun part of it,” she told the Associated Press. The concept had a name, and it had a slogan. Leaps and Bounds. Play with Purpose.

The first location opened in September 1991 at Tower Crossing Mall in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. It was not attached to a McDonald’s restaurant and it would not carry the McDonald’s name. That was a deliberate decision. Kate Moran, an image consultant quoted in the Washington Post at the time, put it plainly. If the concept failed, it would not damage the golden arches. If it succeeded, it could stand on its own.

The play equipment had a credentialed designer behind it. James Rippe, a Massachusetts cardiologist and Harvard-trained physician who had spent years studying exercise physiology, designed the equipment with the goal of developing and challenging children’s motor and muscular skills while encouraging play and imagination. McDonald’s apparently wanted the developmental angle to have some credentials behind it.

Leaps and Bounds centers were built around large padded play areas, with some locations offering as much as 11,000 square feet of space. The layout was divided by age. Toddlers had their own area with rubber steps, domes, small slides, and ball pits. Younger kids had more interactive play pieces, while older kids could climb through larger tube mazes with multiple exits. Parents got in free, and admission for kids was $4.95. There was food, but it wasn’tt McDonald’s food. The concession stand served things like fresh fruit, turkey hot dogs, and pizza, which made the whole place feel intentionally separate from the parent company.

The nineties were a good moment to be in the children’s entertainment business, and McDonald’s knew it. With about 4 million children being born in the United States annually, Leaps and Bounds was aimed directly at an emerging market. Baby boomers were having children, and those parents were looking for structured, safe, supervised places for their kids to play. Public playgrounds were being dismantled across the country over liability concerns, leaving a gap that indoor pay-to-play centers were well-positioned to fill. Sallie Westheimer, executive director of Comprehensive Community Child Care, confirms this in an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Stating that McDonald’s had started Leaps and Bounds because parents were looking for a lot more productive things to do with their children. “There is a huge market for this, particularly when you consider the number of baby boomers with children,” she said.

There was also fear. These indoor playgrounds capitalized on the real fears of parents concerned about bad thing happening to children who might frequent playgrounds or parks. Many parents had come to view paying for a safe place for their kids to play as simply a fact of life in the nineties.

McDonald’s was not the first company with this idea. Discovery Zone had been doing something very similar since 1989, and it had a head start. By 1993, Discovery Zone had 70 centers and was still growing fast. It was a franchised operation, which gave it a different growth trajectory than Leaps and Bounds, which McDonald’s ran as an entirely company-owned chain. Both concepts offered tube mazes, ball pits, and age-segregated play areas. Both charged kids for admission and let parents in free. Both leaned on the same parental desire for safety. The meaningful difference was branding and backing. Discovery Zone was an independent company. Leaps and Bounds had one of the most recognized brands in the world quietly behind it, even if that brand’s name wasn’t on the door.

The expansion plan was ambitious from the start. By the end of 1993, McDonald’s planned to add 20 to 25 new Leaps and Bounds locations, and in 1994, another 40 to 50 were expected to follow. The Cincinnati location, opening in December 1992 in a former Hyundai auto dealership at 13,000 square feet, was chosen partly as a test. Vice president of operations Keith Magnuson told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “We want to test it in Cincinnati because it has strong family values. If it’s successful there, that could give us an indication of how well it might be accepted in other cities.”

The architecture firm Archiplan Ltd. designed the original Naperville location and a handful of others before BSW Inc. took over the national rollout. Designer Brian Kendrick, who worked on the project for both firms, later noted that the team developed four different freestanding prototypes for the concept as the chain grew. The buildings were hard to miss. Colorful exterior design elements of tubes, blocks, and circles were meant to resemble the tube mazes inside, advertising the experience from the parking lot.

Inside, Leaps and Bounds offered about 40 activities for children twelve and under. Kids could use turbo slides, suspended tube mazes, trolley rides and a club house for toddlers. There was merchandise for sale. There was also a “Plenty Quiet” room, which offered parents somewhere to sit.

Security was a major part of the pitch. Adults received bar-coded security badges and a sticker indicating how many children they brought. Kids got identification bracelets. No adult was allowed in or out without a child, and no child was allowed in or out without an adult. Alarmed doors alerted staff when someone made an unauthorized exit. Parents could not drop off kids. The play equipment itself had been supplied by SoftPlay Inc., the same company that had designed equipment for McDonald’s restaurant PlayPlaces, making Leaps and Bounds essentially a supersized version of what parents already associated with the brand, even if the connection was never advertised.

By mid 1993, Leaps and Bounds and Discovery Zone were no longer just testing an idea. They were moving into the same markets at the same time, and other companies were starting to circle the same business. George Lazarus of the Chicago Tribune wrote that new competition would make it harder to win entertainment dollars from both parents and children. Brunswick Corp., better known for bowling and billiards, had opened its own kid recreation center in Sandy, Utah, called Circus World Pizza. Brunswick’s chairman had even flown out to see the Leaps and Bounds prototype, and later told his team that he wished he had thought of it first. Indoor play had become a business that larger companies were taking seriously.

That helps explain why the next move was so surprising. In 1994, Blockbuster Entertainment announced that it was taking control of the combined operations of Discovery Zone and Leaps and Bounds as part of a three way deal. On paper, a video rental chain taking over indoor playgrounds did not seem like an obvious match, but Blockbuster was looking for ways to expand beyond movies, and Discovery Zone was trying to grow fast. As part of the deal, Discovery Zone said it would purchase its 57 franchised FunCenters for 4.5 million shares, then valued at about 90 million dollars. The combined company would operate more than 130 indoor play centers for children. McDonald’s framed the move as a way to stay focused on its global restaurant business, with chairman Michael Quinlan saying the deal would let the company keep its attention on food service. Discovery Zone bought 48 Leaps and Bounds locations from McDonald’s in August 1994.

The locations that McDonald’s had built were handed over and rebranded. In Manassas, Virginia, for instance, the Leaps and Bounds at 7730 Streamwalk Lane became a Discovery Zone FunCenter with new menu items, colorful employee uniforms, and new signage. The regional marketing director told the local paper that while the name had changed, the same commitment to safety and fun would remain. Families with existing Leaps and Bounds coupons, gift certificates, and annual passes were told they would be honored through September 30, 1995. The kids using these places probably didn’t notice much of a difference.

Discovery Zone, however, was not long for the world. The chain filed for bankruptcy on March 26, 1996 in Wilmington, Delaware with debts of up to $366.8 million. The company that had seemed unstoppable just a few years earlier had overextended badly. By June 1999, it had closed half its locations. In July of that year, Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company CEC Enterprises acquired most of the remaining Discovery Zone assets for $19 million. These included the name, logo, 13 fun centers, two parcels of undeveloped real estate, and the rights to seven leased properties. The spaces that McDonald’s had built had passed through two sets of hands and ultimately ended up as footnotes in the Chuck E. Cheese story.

After selling Leaps and Bounds, McDonald’s did not abandon the idea that kids wanted somewhere to play. It just kept that idea inside its own restaurants. More PlayPlaces continued to sprout up, and by 2013, the total reached 5,500. The standalone experiment ended, but the underlying concept had always been correct. Parents wanted safe, supervised places for their kids to play. McDonald’s just ultimately decided that place should come with a Happy Meal.

Leaps and Bounds lasted about three years as a McDonald’s venture. It never reached its own ambitious targets. The chain topped out at around 48 to 49 locations before the sale to Discovery Zone, well short of the 90-plus that had been projected for 1994 alone. But it was not a failure in any straightforward sense. McDonald’s entered a new market, built dozens of locations, and exited on its own terms. The concept was sound enough that a major competitor paid to take it over. And the indoor pay-to-play category it helped popularize did grow into a real industry, even if Discovery Zone ran it into the ground.

For the kids who went to Leaps and Bounds in Naperville, Cincinnati, Altamonte Springs, or anywhere else, none of the business story would have meant much. They were not thinking about McDonald’s trying to move beyond restaurants, or whether indoor play was becoming the next big family entertainment category. They were climbing through tubes and coming home tired.

I think that may be the best way to remember Leaps and Bounds. It was a short lived McDonald’s experiment, but for the kids who were the right age, it was probably just a great place to spend an afternoon. The business disappeared into Discovery Zone, and then Discovery Zone had its own problems, but the memory of places like this tends to outlast the company names.

Do you remember Leaps and Bounds? Was there one near you? I would love to know what you remember about it.

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I first saw the Game Genie at a friend’s house just after Christmas in 1991. We were doing the usual thing, seeing what everyone got, trying out games, handing controllers back and forth. Then he brought out the Game Genie and plugged it into the Nintendo. The second I saw what it could do, I wanted one of my own. It was that simple. If you spent enough time with games, you knew their rules pretty well, and this thing seemed to step right past them.

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On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk about that first time seeing the Game Genie in action and why it was such a revelation the moment it was plugged in. Until then, games felt locked. They were hard in the ways they were hard, and if you could not get past something, that was that. Then this little cartridge adapter shows up and suddenly you can start with extra lives, make impossible jumps easier, or see parts of a game you had never been able to reach on your own. It did not feel like a normal accessory. It felt like you were getting access to something you were not really supposed to have.

From there I get into how the Game Genie actually worked, by changing the values a game was reading without permanently altering the cartridge itself. I talk about where the device came from, how Codemasters developed the idea, how Galoob brought it to the United States, and how Nintendo saw it as a real threat almost immediately. A big part of the episode is the court case that followed, with Nintendo arguing that the Game Genie created unauthorized derivative works and Galoob arguing that players were only changing the experience temporarily on games they already owned. It is a fascinating fight because the whole thing turns on a question that sounds simple but wasn’t clarified at the time.

What still makes the Game Genie worth talking about is that it sits right at the point where childhood excitement, technical ingenuity, and corporate control all ran into each other. For user, it was a way to bend games that had always seemed rigid and unforgiving. For Nintendo, it looked like somebody else stepping in between them and their product. And for anyone looking back on it now, it is a good reminder that this odd little device was tied to much bigger questions about ownership, software, and who gets to decide what a game is once you bring it home.

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• This is the 364th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 15 of Season 18.

• The Game Genie has always fascinated me.

• I wanted to try something a little different and follow the court case. This is my first legal-heavy podcast. I hope people find it interesting.

• I am a fan of Nintendo and I appreciate their point of view, but I think they were wrong and I am happy they lost this case.

• Still not sure why they don’t build this functionality into a console. Just let people hack around and then you hit off and it all goes away. Its not for everyone, but a lot of people would get a lot of extra hours on games. In today’s ecosystem that sort of meta-use of games would probably be popular to view online.

• Back to the Future coverage is sort of over. I recorded some bonus tracks, but not sure if they are worth releasing.

• 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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