The Retroist

Growing up, the Yankees were not exactly welcome in my family's house, even though we lived so close to New York City. My family had been New York Giants fans, and when the team moved to San Francisco they shifted their loyalty to the Mets. Rooting for the Yankees was viewed as a personal failing and said something suspect about your character. Like maybe you thought you were better than everyone else.

And yet, sometime in the early 1980s, I found myself genuinely excited about something with Yankee Reggie Jackson’s name on it. The Reggie Bar slipped past my carefully maintained anti Yankee defenses, and I didn’t even feel guilty. There was something about the hype, the nerve of naming a candy bar after yourself, and the fact that it was actually good, that made it hard to resist. Even for a kid who was supposed to be rooting against everything that wrapper represented.

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The origin story for the bar is great. Reggie Jackson, then still with the Oakland Athletics, once remarked to reporters, “If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.” It was the kind of thing only someone with a high opinion of their own greatness (and media savvy) would say out loud. Jackson signed with the Yankees after the 1976 season for 2.96 million dollars over five years, and the candy wheels started spinning almost immediately. Curtiss Candy Company, a division of Standard Brands and the maker of Baby Ruth and Butterfinger reached out and suggested they do exactly that.

What followed involved plenty of anticipation before a single bar hit a shelf. AP correspondent Hugh A. Mulligan, writing his “Mulligan’s Stew” column in November 1977, described the development process in mock secretive terms, claiming the bar contained everything from marshmallow to rum butter. The ingredient list was a joke. Mulligan was having some fun. But the column ran in papers across the country and helped build national curiosity for a candy that did not yet exist in stores (or did it).

The bar’s actual composition was far more straightforward. At its core, it was just a repackaged Wayne Bun. Which is a delicious round disc of caramel and peanuts coated in milk chocolate that had been made at the Wayne Candy Company plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana since the 1920s. Curtiss acquired Wayne Candies through Standard Brands in 1973 and, a few years later saw an opportunity to give the old formula a new identity. They put Jackson’s image on a bright orange wrapper with REGGIE in bold blue letters and placed collector baseball cards inside each package. The bar sold for a quarter.

The official unveiling took place in February 1978 at the Plaza Hotel in New York, with club owner George Steinbrenner on hand and Jackson biting into the bar for the cameras. He admitted the commercials made him nervous, but he was characteristically unbothered about release. “This is serious, big business,” he told reporters. “It’s corporate planes and meetings and millions of dollars. It’s not going to spend all this money on a joke.” The bar was introduced in five cities, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. These were identifies as markets where candy sold best. In other places, distribution lagged while machinery was still being tooled up, and local distributors were warned not to count on receiving stock immediately.

The thing about the Reggie Bar is that it didn’t need perfect day one distribution. It just needed Reggie doing his thing on Opening Day.

It was April 13, 1978 at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were raising their championship banner, saluting Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, and welcoming 44,667 fans who had each been handed a free Reggie Bar at the gate. The team had started the season 1 and 4 on the road, so the crowd was ready for something to celebrate. In the bottom of the first inning, Jackson took a couple of balls from the Chicago White Sox before sending a three run home run into the right center seats. The crowd exploded. Then, in one of those great live sports moments, fans began throwing their Reggie Bars onto the field. Hundreds of orange wrapped candy bars sailed through the air. The game stopped for several minutes while the grounds crew cleared them away. It made national news. That image did more for the Reggie Bar than any commercial.

Jackson later admitted that when fans threw the bars onto the field in 1978, he briefly worried that they didn’t like how they tasted. What he came to quickly understand was that the moment wasn’t really about flavor. It was a celebration of prowess.

When they did run commercials they showed Jackson hitting his three World Series home runs before turning to the camera to taste the candy. They worked. But candy raining down on Yankee Stadium was the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. Standard Brands’ public relations team later acknowledged that sales were meeting expectations in the initial markets, though specific numbers were not released. Jackson would later say the bar generated 11 million dollars in the New York area alone during its first year.

The bar expanded to additional cities through 1978 and into 1979. In Baltimore, where Jackson had once played briefly, it was reported to be doing surprisingly well. For a few years, the Reggie Bar was a real presence in ballparks, supermarkets, and candy stores across the country.

Then the pieces that had assembled it began to shift. Jackson signed with the California Angels after the 1980 season. Standard Brands merged with Nabisco in July 1981, becoming Nabisco Brands Inc. The Wayne Candy plant in Fort Wayne, the only facility producing Reggie Bars, was slated for closure that October. There was discussion of moving production, but it never materialized. A sizable inventory remained in warehouses for a time. Then it ran out. The bar was gone.

The first comeback attempt came in 1993, just in time for Jackson’s Hall of Fame induction. Clark Candy Company, operating out of the same Fort Wayne plant under new ownership, revived the Reggie Bar with a modified recipe that replaced the caramel center with peanut butter. It retailed for over 50 cents and returned briefly to shelves following Jackson’s induction and the retirement of his number 44 by the Yankees. The revival didn’t last.

The most recent return began in 2021. Crystal Westergard, a Canadian physiotherapist who had previously revived the discontinued Cuban Lunch bar, became interested in the Reggie Bar after seeing a television segment about it. Curtiss was long gone, and Jackson retained his likeness rights, which made a licensing deal possible.

Working with a chocolate manufacturer, Westergard developed prototypes and sought Jackson’s feedback. He wanted more peanuts. She insisted the caramel be gooey and amber colored, the way it appeared in the old commercials. Around six thousand bars were produced in the first 2023 run. Within a year, the candy was available in roughly two thousand locations nationwide and online. You can still buy them today!

Back in my family’s house, where rooting for the Yankees wasn’t acceptable, I didn’t know anything about mergers or Indiana factories. All I knew was that this man had hit three home runs in a single World Series game, that fans had showered him with candy, and that the bar with his name on it was everywhere. Reggie was bigger than life. You could dislike the Yankees all you wanted. The Reggie Bar didn’t care. It was loud, unsubtle, and surprisingly good. Just like the man himself.

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On the February 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:

• Back to the Future Revisited

• Laverne & Shirley

• My 50s theme (not expected)

• Back to the Future taking longer than I expected. Part 2 is up next and will be followed by P…

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Laverne & Shirley was a big hit in its day and for a while it felt like it was always on somewhere. Over time it has slipped a bit out of the regular conversation, which is strange considering how huge it once was. So on today’s show I want to spend some time with it, and try to remind people why it connected in the first place and why it still works.

I …

My mother swore it existed. There was a sit-down restaurant (maybe somewhere near the Jersey Shore) that sold Mister Softee ice cream alongside hamburgers and steaks. Not just a truck with a walk-up window, but an actual building with tables and booths where families could have dinner and end with that signature swirl of soft serve. She mentioned it so casually, as if everyone remembered these places, but when I pressed her for details, the specifics dissolved like ice cream on a hot summer day. Where was it exactly? What was it called? When did it close?

By the time I got curious enough to start searching, whatever restaurant she remembered had long since vanished. No one else I asked seemed to know what I was talking about. It became one of those family mysteries, tantalizing precisely because it couldn’t be verified, made more special by its elusiveness. If Mister Softee restaurants had existed, they had disappeared so completely that they felt almost mythical. Which, of course, made me want to learn more about them and confirm they were real.

Turns out, my mother was right.

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In 1964, something unusual appeared in the pages of New Jersey newspapers. An advertisement announced the grand opening of “The first Mister Softee Snack House” on Route 30 in Magnolia, complete with a photograph of a handsome mid-century building with a peaked roofline and those iconic Mister Softee signs out front. The tagline promised “a fun-filled new adventure in eating.”

Brothers William and James Conway had founded Mister Softee in Philadelphia just eight years earlier. They were pioneers in the concept of soft-serve ice cream sold from specially designed trucks. Their innovation was transforming the soft-serve machine (which had been confined to stationary soda fountains and diners) into something that could roll through neighborhoods, bringing treats directly to customers. By the early 1960s, Mister Softee trucks had become a familiar sight across the Northeast, their distinctive jingle announcing the arrival of creamy vanilla and chocolate swirls. They were a highlight of my summer growing up.

But trucks, it seems, were only part of the vision. At some point in the mid-1960s, the Conway brothers decided to expand into brick-and-mortar restaurants. The franchise brochure for the “Mister Softee Snack House” laid out an ambitious pitch: franchisees could open “Quick Service Drive-In Restaurants” that would serve not just ice cream but a full menu of food. The business model promised high profit margins, approximately 70% on soft ice cream and 60% on food items. A mobile franchise cost $2,500 in 1967, while a restaurant franchise would be ten times that amount.

The Magnolia location (that first Snack House, which might be the one my mother remembered) offered all the classic Mister Softee treats plus “an all-star cast of the most delectable characters in the history of snack-ery,” according to the December 1964 advertisement. The star of the show was “Mister Beef,” described as “four-and-a-half ounces of choice ground beef (100 per cent beef) broiled over a glowing fire of seasoned hickory charcoal and served on a big, toasted ‘n buttered bun.” They also advertised fish fry specials on Wednesdays and Fridays and a barbecue beef sandwich for 55 cents.

The menu reflected that curious mid-century confidence that a single restaurant could be all things to all people: ice cream parlor, burger joint, and fish fry rolled into one cheerful package.

By 1967, something had changed. The same Route 30 location in Magnolia began advertising under a different name: “Jimbll’s,” proudly mentioning food was from the famous Jimbll’s Kitchen. The apostrophe suggested a possessive, but who or what was Jimbll? It’s an odd name, but the concept was clear. Jimbll’s was positioned as a family restaurant with moderate prices. They would offer everything from Mister Softee ice cream to steak dinners. An article in The Cincinnati Post from March 1968 explains that “Jimbll’s is the name of the venture, taken from James and Bill Conway, the two brothers who founded the New Jersey-based soft ice cream franchising firm 14 years ago.” So the mystery resolves itself in the most obvious way: Jimbll = Jim + Bill, the Conway brothers themselves.

The evolution from “Snack House” to “Jimbll’s” seems to have been part of a broader franchising push. By 1968, Jimbll’s locations had expanded well beyond New Jersey, with restaurants opening in Cincinnati (Fairfax), Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Glassboro, New Jersey.

Not a lot of info exists about the chain, but its did get a mention in a 2006 article. They state, “at one point, Mr. Softee branched off into a small chain of ice cream restaurants called Jimbll’s, three of which were in South Jersey.” A member of the Conway family, reminiscing about childhood trips, recalled, “We would often go there and have dinner. Their deal was gigantic sundaes called Tummy Busters.” So my mother’s hazy memory was likely of one of these South Jersey locations, where families could settle in for a real meal and cap it off with an absurdly oversized ice cream creation.

The menu had grown more ambitious. Jimbll’s featured “charcoal sirloin steaks,” “Big Jim Beef” sandwiches (described as “sliced roast beef piled high on a toasted bun”), fried chicken, seafood platters, and shore dinners. The Cincinnati location’s steak platters ranged from $1.50 to $2.19, while dinners from appetizer to dessert cost between $1.85 and $2.35. And yes, dessert was still Mister Softee ice cream. Multiple flavors and “a couple of dozen styles from plain dishes to the $2.25 Tummy Buster that consists of everything in the shop piled on half a gallon of ice cream.”

A 1969 advertisement for the Wilkes-Barre location emphasized the casual, come-as-you-are atmosphere: “Although the outside of Jimbll’s gives the impression that you have to get ‘dressed up’ to go there, this is not the case... part of the ‘charm’ of Jimbll’s is that it’s the come-as-you-are place to eat.” They served full dinners from $2.20, and children’s meals for $1.75. It was affordable family dining with the added draw of legitimate Mister Softee treats for dessert.

As the Jimbll’s brand developed, they introduced a mascot character (a cheerful figure in a striped vest and bow tie, styled like the Mister Softee mascot but distinct to the restaurant concept) that appeared prominently in their advertising by 1969.

Each location seems to have adapted slightly to its market, although this could just be discrepancy in their approach to adverting. Some locations emphasized take-out service. While others had contests, giveaways, two-for-one offers, and special prices for kids .

While Jimbll’s appears to have been the primary restaurant brand, newspaper records point to at least one additional Conway connected venture. In Lancaster, Ohio, a restaurant called Larry’s Dawg House appears in 1977 coverage, described as serving soft ice cream and sandwiches. That same year, local reporting noted that a former gas station at the corner of Eastwood and East Main Street was being converted into Larry’s Dawg House, which would “serve soft ice cream and sandwiches.”

A 1982 lawsuit filing further clarifies the connection. Mister Softee, Inc., based in Runnemede, New Jersey, and Larry’s Dawg House, Inc., based in Athens, Ohio, jointly sued a Carroll, Ohio man over unpaid rent on the property. The suit identified James Conway, co founder of Mister Softee, as a partner with Larry Young of Athens in the ownership of Larry’s Dawg House.

Beyond these records, little documentation has surfaced about the concept. What is clear from the available newspaper and court filings is that Conway was directly involved in the venture, and that Mister Softee, Inc. was formally tied to it in legal proceedings in the early 1980s.

What’s striking about this history is how thoroughly it’s been forgotten. If you search online for Mister Softee, you’ll find endless coverage of the trucks (their distinctive jingle, their role in American nostalgia, their surprising persistence into the 21st century). But the restaurants? They’ve all but vanished from the record outside of a few social media mentions.

The economics probably explain why. As I mentioned earlier, according to the franchise documentation from the 1960s, a restaurant franchise cost $25,000 compared to just $2,500 for a mobile unit. Restaurants required buildings, leases, full kitchens, more staff, and longer operating hours. They were competing not just with other family restaurants but with the emerging fast-food giants (McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken) whose streamlined operations and aggressive expansion were redefining casual dining.

Meanwhile, the Mister Softee trucks were thriving. Mobile, low-overhead, perfectly suited to seasonal operation, they could go where the customers were. At the company’s peak in the late 1960s, there were over 1,000 trucks operating across 15 states. The trucks were the business. These restaurants were an experiment.

By the late 1970s, the Jimbll’s name disappears from newspaper advertisements and business directories. The last references I can find are from around 1978. The Larry’s Dawg House venture would continue until the early 1980s, but Jimbll’s as a brand might have already been gone. So, no grand closing announcements and no retrospectives that I can find. The buildings were just repurposed, the signs taken down and the concept quietly shelved. Unlike the Mister Softee trucks, which remain part of the cultural landscape, these restaurants left almost no trace.

One last thing, while I was not able to find a complete menu. I was able to put together my own based on various ads I found online. It turned out pretty good.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. After more than fifty years, Mister Softee is trying the brick-and-mortar experiment again. But this time, they’re being smarter about it.

In 2015, franchisee Jeff Hiller, who had driven a Mister Softee truck in the late 1980s, opened a standalone Mister Softee store in Old Town Camarillo, California. It was one of the earliest modern attempts to give the brand a permanent home again. Unlike the ambitious Jimbll’s restaurants of the 1960s with their steaks and shore dinners, this location stayed focused on what Mister Softee has always done best, soft serve ice cream. Cones, sundaes, shakes, banana boats. No charcoal grilled hamburgers, no fish fries. Just ice cream.

That West Coast storefront was not alone for long. In late 2023, two former employees from the Camarillo shop opened a second California location in Santa Barbara⁸. These were independent franchise efforts, not a large national campaign, but they showed that a permanent shop built around soft serve could work.

Back on the East Coast, the company has more recently begun expanding storefronts in its traditional Northeast territory. In March 2025, a brick and mortar shop opened in East Islip, New York, described in local coverage as the first of its kind on Long Island. Additional locations have since opened or been announced in the region. The marketing frames this as an expansion into storefronts across the Tri State area, with no mention of the restaurant ventures of the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s worth noting the timing. The truck fleet has shrunk considerably. At the company’s peak in the 1960s, over 2,000 trucks operated across 38 states. Today, there are around 625 trucks in 21 states. Rising costs, competition, and changing neighborhoods are making the mobile model harder to sustain. A permanent storefront starts to make more sense when you can’t rely on trucks alone.

So Mister Softee is returning to stationary locations, but with a crucial difference. In the 1960s, they tried to become something they weren’t. In 2025, they’re doubling down on what they’ve always been. They are the Mister Softee brand, just in a building instead of a truck.

The Mister Softee restaurants show how far the Conway brothers were willing to stretch their brand beyond the trucks that made them famous. In the mid 1960s, they put their name on full service locations that served steaks, seafood platters, and fried chicken alongside soft serve. It was a larger bet, with higher startup costs and permanent buildings instead of seasonal routes. Other chains had already proven that ice cream and comfort food could anchor a restaurant business, so the idea was not outlandish. Still, it is striking to think of the Mister Softee brand associated with a sirloin steak instead of an ice cream sundae.

Sadly the gamble didn’t pay off. The trucks were too good at what they did, delivering exactly what people wanted from Mister Softee, ice cream. The restaurants tried to be something more, but they couldn’t carry over their success.

The modern storefronts suggest that maybe, just maybe, there was a good idea buried in the Jimbll’s experiment. But it took fifty years and a complete rethinking of what a Mister Softee location could be to find it. No steaks, no seafood dinners, no Mister Beef. Just soft-serve ice cream, the way it was always meant to be.

Still, for a brief period in the late 1960s, you could walk into a Jimbll’s on a Friday night, order a shore dinner or a sirloin steak, and finish with a Tummy Buster sundae. And my mother, wherever she was, remembers it happened. That’s good enough for me.

If anyone reading this has photos of a Jimbll’s interior, an original menu, or memories of eating there, I’d love to hear from you. These places may be gone, but their stories deserve to be remembered.

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I don’t know if you knew this, but Back to the Future is kind of a big deal. Its known as a big hit, but that wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Robert Zemeckis was not yet a household name, and while Michael J. Fox was a TV star, translating that to movie stardom was far from guaranteed. Many studios had already passed on the project, and time travel comedies weren’t exactly in demand. But sometimes a movie arrives at exactly the right moment, and this was one of those times. It became one of the highest-grossing films of the year and launched one of the most cherished franchises Hollywood has ever produced.

On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk all about Back to the Future. I start off talking about what its like returning to your hometown after some time has passed. There’s something genuinely disorienting about walking streets you know by heart but finding them subtly wrong. The layout is familiar but the details have shifted. You catch yourself navigating toward a store that closed a decade ago, or slowing down in front of a building that used to mean something. Your feet are in the present but your memory keeps insisting otherwise. It’s about as close to time travel as most of us are ever going to get.

From there I dig into the film itself, starting with how Bob Gale cooked up the idea after stumbling across his father’s old high school yearbook. Seeing it, he wondered whether the two of them would have even gotten along back then. It’s a surprisingly simple premise for a story that became so sprawling. After that I cover the development, the casting situation that saw Eric Stoltz replaced by Fox after weeks of actual filming, the production, the release, and the reception. Which was pretty positive.

The music deserves its own podcast. Alan Silvestri’s score is one of those rare things that makes you feel the emotion of a scene before the actors do anything. And then there’s Huey Lewis and the News, whose contribution to the soundtrack sent “The Power of Love” to number one and functioned almost like an advertisement for the movie playing on every radio station in the country. The two things fed each other in a way that felt effortless but was almost certainly not.

For a while there, the film was a mania. It wasn’t just a movie people saw and enjoyed. It was something they returned to at the theaters, then on home video, then on television. Each new viewing of it reminded people why they loved it in the first place. On this episode I try to trace how that happened.

I first covered the movie on a podcast way back in 2011. This is a re-recorded version that has new material and better equipment. It is also the start of a larger visit to the franchise. I hope you enjoy it.

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• This is the 359th episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 8 of Season 18.

• Not only is this album one of my top 5, but the soundtrack and the score are also in that grouping.

• Longish episode, but it was actually much longer. I needed to separate that stuff because I will be re-using it in upcoming episodes.

• I might revisit the movie in a few bonus tracks on Patreon.

• I had a more details look at the soundtrack, but without playing all the songs I don’t think it works.

• Was able to keep the retro audio small. I had a bunch of other stuff I wanted to play, but will save it for the future.

• The format of this episode is a bit of a hybrid. I wanted it to bridge my older format and newer format.

• The older version of the show will be disappearing.

• Still amazed we haven’t seen a reboot attempt. Its going to happen eventually, but I don’t want it to. Hold!

• 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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In May of 1984, something changed in Birmingham, Alabama that would ripple through supermarket aisles across America. Shoppers in the Magic City became the first in the nation to see massive plastic bottles of Pepsi towering over the then familiar two-liters. They held 101 ounces of soda, an amount so large it seemed almost absurd. These were three-liter bottles and they arrived with a promise printed right on the packaging. You would get more soda for your money. For families throwing parties or just trying to stretch a dollar (like mine), it was an offer too good to pass up.

If you were buying groceries in the mid-eighties, you probably remember the moment these soda-filled titans showed up. They were impossible to miss. Taller than a two-liter but not quite as unwieldy as you might expect, the three-liter bottle became a fixture at public events and family dinners. For a few years, they were everywhere. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, they started to fade. But the story of how they got here in the first place is a tale of innovation, fierce competition, and an Alabama bottler who was willing to take a chance. So where does this all start?

The path to the three-liter bottle began decades earlier with a much more impactful innovation, plastic itself. Before the 1970s, soda came in glass bottles or cans. Glass was heavy, breakable, and very expensive to ship. Cans were convenient but came in small sizes. The soda industry needed something lighter, cheaper, and capable of holding more liquid without shattering if you dropped it.

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Enter Nathaniel Wyeth, an engineer at DuPont who came from one of America’s most famous artistic families. While his brother Andrew Wyeth was painting masterpieces, Nathaniel was solving a different kind of problem. In 1967, he wondered why plastic was not used for carbonated beverages. The answer he got was simple. They would explode. Carbonation creates pressure, and the plastic bottles of the day couldn’t handle it.

Wyeth was not convinced. He went to a store, bought a plastic detergent bottle, emptied it out, filled it with ginger ale, and put it in his refrigerator. By the next morning, the bottle had swollen so much it was wedged between the shelves. But instead of giving up, Wyeth saw potential. He began experimenting with different plastics, eventually settling on polyethylene terephthalate, better known as PET. The key was a process called biaxial orientation, which aligned the plastic molecules in two dimensions, making the material strong enough to withstand carbonation without deforming. He received a patent for the technology in 1973.

Pepsi was the first to take advantage of Wyeth’s invention. In 1970, they introduced the two-liter bottle. It was not an instant hit. For years, Pepsi had to convince consumers that buying soda in bulk made sense. A commercial from around 1978 featured a teacher explaining the economic benefits of the two-liter to skeptical students. Slowly, the format caught on. By the early eighties, two-liter bottles were standard in American homes. They were cheaper per ounce than smaller bottles, easier to store than six-packs, and resealable. This meant the soda would not go flat as quickly.

The larger size would eventually gain acceptance. Larger size, because of selling on value had a history. Pepsi had built its reputation on offering more drink for less money. During the Great Depression, when Coca-Cola was selling soda in small 6.5-ounce bottles, Pepsi offered 12 ounces for the same price. Their jingle made it clear, “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that’s a lot!” It worked. Customers appreciated the value and Pepsi carved out a loyal customer base by being the affordable choice.

By the early 1980s, Pepsi was still chasing Coca-Cola in overall market share, but it had pulled ahead in the take-home market, which included supermarkets. The cola wars were in full swing. Pepsi’s “Pepsi Challenge” blind taste tests had rattled Coca-Cola, and both companies were looking for any edge they could find. Packaging was one of those edges.

That is where Birmingham comes in. The city had been a testing ground for Coca-Cola the year before when they introduced Diet Coke with the artificial sweetener NutraSweet. Now it was Pepsi’s turn. Buffalo Rock Company, the local Pepsi bottler, had a long history of innovation. Founded in 1901 as a grocery business, Buffalo Rock had shifted to beverage bottling in the 1920s with its own ginger ale. In 1951, James C. Lee Jr, known as Jimmy, took over the company and secured the Pepsi franchise for Birmingham. He expanded aggressively, buying up Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew rights and building one of the most advanced bottling plants in the country.

Lee had a track record of bold packaging moves. In 1967, Buffalo Rock became the first company in the industry to market a 10-ounce non-returnable bottle with an easy-open spin-top. That innovation set the stage for what came next. In 1984, working closely with Pepsi headquarters in New York, Lee helped bring the three-liter bottle to market. Birmingham was chosen as the test site, and on May 14, 1984, the first three-liter bottles of Pepsi hit store shelves.

The marketing pitch was simple. For about the same price you would pay for a four-pack of 16-ounce bottles, you could get 101 ounces of Pepsi in one convenient container. The bottle itself was designed to be manageable. It was only about an inch taller and a half-inch wider than a two-liter. It also had a larger opening to make pouring easier. Research had shown that the three-liter bottle would have a longer shelf life than the two-liter because of its larger volume-to-surface-area ratio, which meant it would stay carbonated longer. Which in my experience wasn’t true.

Pepsi executives were optimistic. Roger Enrico, president of Pepsi-Cola USA, credited Buffalo Rock chairman Jimmy Lee Jr. as the driving force behind the introduction. In announcing the Birmingham test, Enrico said Lee had turned back the clock, allowing consumers to buy soft drinks at roughly the same price per ounce they paid a decade earlier. Jim Reddinger, a vice president at Buffalo Rock, compared the three-liter bottle to the economy-sized containers of detergent and other goods that had become common in supermarkets. He called it revolutionary.

It was a real value and the test was considered a success. By September, Pepsi was ready to roll out the three-liter nationally. An article in USA Today on September 17, 1984, noted that Coca-Cola USA said it would follow Pepsi’s lead and introduce three-liter bottles across the country. The 101.4-ounce bottles were expected to be in 60 percent of the country by the end of the year. Coca-Cola’s first three-liter bottle was sold on September 1, 1984, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Barbara Langlinais bought it at Broome’s Market, and Coca-Cola officials were there with cameras to mark the occasion. It was billed as the first three-liter Coke sold anywhere in the world.

From there, the bottles spread quickly. By late 1984, both Pepsi and Coke were running ads and offering coupons to promote the new size. Coke called theirs “The Thirstbuster,” tying it to the blockbuster movie Ghostbusters. The bottle even featured prominently in a promotional campaign that included tie-ins with the film in 37 countries. Ray Parker Jr., who sang the Ghostbusters theme, appeared in Coke commercials singing assorted new lyrics to the tune, “When you come in first with a real big thirst, who you gonna call? Thirst Buster.”

Pepsi countered with its own ads, emphasizing value and economy. One ad declared it the most economical way to enjoy Pepsi, with coupons offering 40 cents off. The bottles were available for all the major Pepsi products including: Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Pepsi Free, and Diet Pepsi Free. Other smaller brands of soda also got in on the action. My family frequently picked up the 3-liter of RC Cola.

For a time, the three-liter bottle worked exactly as intended. It delivered value, scale, and a sense of abundance that consumers at the time wanted. But it never replaced the two-liter as the default. Three liters was simply a lot of soda (maybe too much) for most households. If it was not finished quickly, and despite the claims, it went flat. Refrigerator space was another problem, especially in smaller kitchens. And while the price per ounce was lower, the higher shelf price could still slow a purchase.

By the early 1990s, the size began to retreat. It didn’t vanish overnight, but it stopped being heavily advertised. Some bottlers dropped it entirely. Others kept it around as a regional or occasional offering. At the same time, the industry’s priorities were shifting. The focus moved away from bulk and toward portability. The 20-ounce single-serve bottle, designed for convenience and cup holders (maybe we just need bigger ones), fit changing habits far better than any oversized take-home package.

Packaging innovation didn’t stop, but it pointed in a different direction. Smaller bottles, more flavors, and more individual choices replaced the push for sheer volume. Still, the three-liter bottle left its mark. It showed how far plastic packaging had come since the days of glass and cans. It proved that consumers would embrace larger formats when the value made sense. And it gave Buffalo Rock Company a place in soda history as the bottler willing to test the idea in Birmingham, before anyone knew how it would play out.

It was an interesting moment in packaging. Nathaniel Wyeth’s work with PET plastic made large carbonated bottles possible. Jimmy Lee Jr. and Buffalo Rock took a calculated risk and helped turn an experiment into a national product. Pepsi’s leadership saw an opening in the cola wars and pressed the advantage. Even the first Coca Cola customer to buy a three liter became part of beverage history, whether she meant to or not. In the end, the three liter bottle wasn’t a revolution. It was a step along the way, shaped by technology, competition, and changing habits. For a brief stretch in the mid 1980s, bigger really did feel better, and that towering plastic bottle was pretty convincing. For those who remember seeing it for the first time, it recalls a period when soda companies were willing to push size, value, and spectacle as far as the shelf would allow.

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In the summer of 1985 I was at my cousin’s house in upstate New Jersey. We had just wrapped up a long morning of playing outside when his mom called us in for lunch. Sandwiches were already out, and next to them sat a row of bright green soda cans I did not recognize. The logo said Slice, with the dot on the “i” shaped like a lemon. On the front of the can it promised something I had never seen before on a soda, 10 percent real fruit juice. What the??

I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but my cousin cracked one open and took a drink. He said it was better than Sprite, and he was right. It was sweeter, sharper, and had a citrus bite. You could almost convince yourself it had come from an actual lemon at some point. For a while after that, Slice felt new in a way soda usually didn’t. It felt like a glimpse of what the future of soda might taste like.

So what was Slice? Where did it come from? And why did it disappear? Slice makes more sense once you move past memory and into its history.

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Slice entered the market on June 28, 1984, positioned as a fruit forward soda at a time when the lemon lime category was crowded and predictable. Introduced by PepsiCo as the replacement for Teem, Slice was meant to compete directly with Sprite and 7 Up, but with a clear point of difference. It contained real fruit juice, ten percent in the original lemon lime formula, and that fact sat at the center of its identity. Pepsi leaned hard into it, using the juice both as a flavor distinction and as a marketing hook. The slogan said it plainly, “We got the juice.” That framing shaped how Slice stood out on the shelf in 1984 and how it tends to be remembered now.

The timing turned out to be perfect. This was the mid eighties, when people were starting to glance at labels and notice ingredients, even if it had not changed many habits yet. The juice thing hit home. It made Slice appear healthier, even if it was still a soda loaded with sugar and sitting next to all the other sodas on the shelf. Perception helps move product, and Slice had it.

Slice was a hit right out of the gate. By May of 1987, it had captured over three percent of the soft drink market, which is actually pretty impressive when you consider how dominated that space was by Coke and Pepsi. Test markets in places like Rochester, New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma showed that people really did prefer a carbonated drink with juice in it.

According to articles from the time, Pepsi’s research indicated that seventy-five percent of regular lemon-lime drinkers would choose a carbonated beverage with fruit juice if given the option. This put some wind in the their sails. They expanded the line in 1986, adding Mandarin Orange, Apple, and Cherry Cola flavors, all with diet versions. Each one had that same ten percent juice content and the same promise that you were getting something a little bit better, a little bit more “real.”

Slice showed there was money in the juice adjacent soda idea. Coke and Cadbury already had the fruity brands and the distribution. Once they decided to compete directly, Slice lost the advantage. By the summer of 1988, just a year after hitting that high point, Slice’s market share had dropped to around two percent. The New York Times ran an article in July of 1988 calling it a case study in how difficult it is to create a new consumer brand, especially when competitors can just copy what you are doing and have bigger marketing budgets to back it up.

Pepsi started making changes. The juice content was quietly reduced. Packaging that used to say “10% fruit juice” now just said “with fruit juices,” no percentage mentioned. The slogan changed too, from the confident “We got the juice” to the more defensive “Either you got it or you don’t,” which felt less like a boast and more like Pepsi trying to convince people that Slice was still cool. The Apple and Cherry Cola flavors were discontinued around this time because they were the most low-performing flavors

I remember noticing the change, even if I did not recognize it at the time. Slice stopped feeling different. It still tasted good, but it no longer felt connected to fruit. Which it wasn’t. Whether the formula had changed almost didn’t matter. What faded was the clearness of the message. Slice had been built around a small but specific distinction, and once that slipped away, it blended back into the shelf with everything else.

By 1990, Pepsi had redesigned the packaging again and dropped the juice content entirely. At that point, Slice was just another flavored soda, no different from Crush or Fanta except for the name. They tried to expand again, adding Grape, Strawberry, Pineapple, and Fruit Punch to the lineup. They even brought in Fido Dido, a sunglasses-wearing cartoon character that was associated with 7-Up in international markets, to be the mascot. The new slogan was “Clearly the One,” which sounded good but didn’t mean much. By this point, Slice was coasting on name recognition and whatever shelf space it could hang onto.

The cans themselves went through a string of redesigns that mirrored how unsettled the brand had become. The original green can, most closely associated with lemon lime, gave way in 1994 to black cans with loud, colorful fruit graphics. They were kind of cool, very nineties, but they also marked a shift away from the clean fruit first identity. In 1997 the look changed again, this time to blue cans with swirled graphics, and even the flavors started to wobble. Mandarin Orange was renamed Orange Citrus with the slogan “It’s orange, only twisted,” then quietly reformulated again and returned to being Orange Slice. It felt less like refinement and more like Pepsi trying different ideas without committing to any of them.

By the summer of 2000, the lemon lime version was replaced in most markets by Sierra Mist, which would go national a few years later. Other Slice flavors lingered into the mid 2000s before being folded into Tropicana Twister Soda. After that, Slice largely disappeared from American shelves, even as the name lived on elsewhere, most notably in India, where it was repositioned as a mango drink under the Tropicana Slice label.

For a while, you could still find Slice at Walmart. In 2006, Pepsi tried one more time with something called Slice ONE, a diet version sold exclusively at Walmart in orange, grape, and berry flavors, sweetened with Splenda. It did not last. By the late 2000s or early 2010s, Slice disappeared from Pepsi’s product locator entirely.

The name did get revived eventually. In 2018, New Slice Ventures acquired the trademark and relaunched Slice with a new formula “including prebiotic, probiotic and postbiotic ingredients.” It was a completely different product, aimed at a very different market. Beyond the name, it had little connection to the original soda, though the fact that it was brought back at all suggests the brand still carried some residual recognition.

The funny thing is, I think Slice lasted longer in people’s memories than it ever did on store shelves. Not just because it was a great soda, but because it felt like it was reaching for something different. It showed up at a moment when soda companies were starting to flirt with the idea of health, or at least the appearance of it, and Slice got there early. The ten percent juice hook was simple and for a brief window it gave the brand an identity that felt distinct.

I still picture that green can sometimes, the one with the lemon logo. I remember liking it, but what comes back first is not the taste. It is how it was presented. On the shelf, with its juice claim, it felt slightly out of place. It wasn’t better, but it was different enough. That impression is what stuck with me. Long after the cans changed and the formulas shifted, the idea of Slice lingered, even as the soda itself quietly slipped away.

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On the January 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:

• Fruit Burple

• My Buddy

• WPIX Superstar Station

• Sha Na Na and Punk

• Grease

• Stranger Things

• Video Store Podcast

• Film Criticism

• When Social Media is Rewarding (It Happens)

• Back to B…

In the 1980s my family got cable. I had heard about things like HBO, but really wasn’t sure what we might get through that magic wire. The afternoon that we got it, I was flipping through the channels and I landed on something that looked like a regular local station, except it wasn’t. There were commercials for car dealerships I had never heard of, and the weather forecast was for a city hundreds of miles away. It took me a while to understand what I was looking at. What I was seeing was a superstation, and at the time I had no idea that what I was watching was one of the reasons cable television existed in the first place.

So what was a superstation? Where did it come from? And why does it matter that a handful of local TV stations in the late 1970s ended up in living rooms across the country?

A superstation was a local independent television station, one that was not affiliated with NBC, CBS, or ABC, that ended up carried by cable systems far outside its home city and delivered nationwide by satellite. The word had been used before to describe powerful regional broadcasters, but this was something different. This was a local station deliberately redistributed on a national scale. It sounds simple enough, but the way it happened was not simple at all. It took a stubborn businessman, a quirk of copyright law, a satellite, and a movie called Deep Waters to get the whole thing started.

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The story begins in Atlanta, with a man whose name would become a household word, Ted Turner. Turner had bought a struggling independent UHF station in 1969, channel 17. It wasn’t a station with lofty goals, just a normal local station. It aired old movies, reruns of older shows, and local sports. Turner renamed it WTCG, for Turner Communications Group. They were barely able to keep the lights on. It got so bad they ran a telethon to raise money to keep it going. But Turner wasn’t a quitter, and by the early 1970s he had started to see something that most other people in broadcasting hadn’t noticed yet. There were a lot of cable systems out there in smaller towns and rural areas that had almost nothing to watch. Three network affiliates if they were lucky. Sometimes just two. And there was no independent station anywhere near them. Turner thought, what if you could get an independent station into those cable systems without laying any new wire?

The technology that made it possible was already out there. HBO had figured out in 1975 that you could use a communications satellite to send a television signal to cable systems across the country instead of running microwave relays from city to city. HBO used this to distribute its premium movie service nationally, and it worked. Turner saw what HBO had done and realized there was no reason a regular local station couldn’t do the same thing. He just needed someone to actually uplink his signal to a satellite and a legal framework that allowed cable systems to carry it.

The legal piece was the tricky part. Federal copyright law at the time required cable systems to pay royalties when they carried programming from distant stations, but it didn’t actually require those stations to give permission. There was a compulsory license built into the Copyright Act that let cable systems retransmit broadcast signals as long as they paid the fee. Turner didn’t need WTCG to be invited onto cable systems. He just needed to get the signal up to a satellite, and cable systems could pull it down on their own.

On December 17, 1976, WTCG became the first nationally distributed superstation in the United States. At one in the afternoon Eastern Time, its signal was relayed via the Satcom 1 satellite to four cable systems. They were in Grand Island, Nebraska, Newport News, Virginia, Troy, Alabama, and Newton, Kansas, a strange little map that only made sense if you were thinking like a cable operator. The first thing those subscribers saw was a 1948 film called Deep Waters, already thirty minutes in. The movie almost didn’t matter. The surprise was the channel itself, a signal from somewhere else that had slipped into their lineup.

Within two years, WTCG was available to cable systems in all fifty states. Turner changed the call letters to WTBS (Turner Broadcasting System) in 1979, and by then the station was reaching millions of households. People kept it on for simple reasons. WTCG, and later WTBS, carried Atlanta Braves baseball, Atlanta Hawks basketball, and a steady stream of classic movies. For cable systems with no local independent station, that mix filled a real gap.

Turner was aggressive about his superstation in a way the stations that followed him were not. He promoted it nationally, invested in programming, and even bought the Atlanta Braves in part to guarantee sports content for the channel. Cable systems embraced WTBS because it filled hours that would otherwise have gone unused. Much of the programming had been licensed at local station rates, because the contracts were written for a time when a station like WTCG was only expected to reach Atlanta. For a few years, Turner was paying local prices for programming that was suddenly being seen nationwide, and the industry was slow to catch up.

The second superstation arrived less than two years later. On November 9, 1978, WGN TV in Chicago was approved for satellite distribution, opening the door for its signal to reach cable systems nationwide. Unlike Turner, WGN had not set out to become a national channel. The push came from satellite carriers, including United Video, which applied to retransmit WGN’s signal under the same rules that had allowed WTCG to go national.

The decision was widely seen as new competition for Turner. Contemporary reporting framed WGN’s satellite approval as a direct challenge to WTCG’s growing reach. Turner’s operation did not object to the ruling. Instead, it dismissed the idea that WGN would pose a serious threat. Turner’s cable division argued that WTCG already had the advantage, citing its programming and its acceptance within the cable industry, and expressed confidence that it would continue to outpace any new superstation entrant.

That response says a lot. Ted Turner did not try to shut the door behind him. He saw another superstation as competition, not a legal threat. By the late 1970s, he was confident that WTCG’s early start and national push would keep it ahead, even as others copied the idea.

WGN became a superstation for the same reasons WTCG had, but with a different flavor. Where WTBS was Atlanta, WGN was Chicago, and Chicago meant the Cubs. WGN had been carrying Cubs baseball since 1948, and because the Cubs played most of their home games during the day, their telecasts became something you could watch after school. When WGN went national, millions of kids across the country suddenly had Cubs games to come home to. Harry Caray, the Cubs’ announcer on WGN, became a national figure almost overnight. People who had never set foot in Wrigley Field started following the Cubs because of what the superstation had done. It is not an exaggeration to say that WGN turned the Cubs into a national team during the 1980s, and it did it without any help from Major League Baseball. In fact, baseball was furious about it.

The sports leagues did not like superstations. The Cubs on WGN, the Braves on WTBS, and New York teams appearing on WOR were suddenly being watched far beyond their home markets, and league officials worried this diluted the value of national television contracts with ESPN and NBC. Major League Baseball responded in the mid 1980s with new fees and restrictions tied to superstation telecasts, while the NBA placed limits on how many games a superstation could air each season.

There were lawsuits and repeated petitions to the FCC. At one point MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth explored National League realignment in part to curb the Cubs’ national games on WGN. Tribune Broadcasting sued over the proposal, and the dispute became one of several high profile fights that defined the league’s uneasy relationship with superstations.

None of this killed the superstations. By the mid-1980s, WTBS was available to over 40 million cable and satellite households. WGN was not far behind. A handful of other stations followed the same path, including WOR-TV and WWOR-TV in New York/New Jersey, WPIX also in New York, and KTLA in Los Angeles. Each one carried a mix of movies, syndicated reruns, local news, and sports, and each one ended up in cable systems hundreds or thousands of miles from home.

They had a great formula for early cable TV success. Often it was the combination of things you could not get anywhere else. A Cubs game at 2:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. Wrestling on a Saturday night. A newscast from a city you had never visited. An old movie at midnight that your local stations had never bothered to air. Superstations were messy, unpolished, and wildly varied in quality, and that was exactly what I loved about them. They were different from the big networks. They felt like something had slipped through the cracks, a channel that was not supposed to be there but was, and somehow that made it more interesting.

Their decline came gradually, through a combination of regulation and competition. The FCC reinstated syndication exclusivity rules in 1988, which required cable systems to black out programs on superstations if a local station held exclusive rights to the same show. This forced superstations to create separate national feeds with different programming schedules, which made them less like the local stations they had been and more like generic cable channels.

Then the launch of Fox in 1986 absorbed a lot of the independent stations that had served as regional superstations. By the 1990s, the rise of cable channels with their own original programming meant that superstations were competing against networks that had been built from the ground up for a national audience, and they were doing it with programming that had originally been put together for a single city.

WGN held on longer than most. It carried the Cubs into the 2000s and even served as an unofficial national feed for The WB television network during the mid-1990s. But in 2014, Tribune converted WGN America into a conventional cable channel and stripped away the local Chicago programming that had made it a superstation in the first place. It became a news network called NewsNation in 2020. WTBS had already transitioned to a national cable network back in 2007, spinning off the over-the-air Atlanta station under a different name.

The era was over.

It is hard to know exactly what to make of the superstation now that it is gone. It was an improvised product, shaped by copyright law and constantly challenged by sports leagues, studios, and regulators. The programming was uneven and sometimes chaotic. But it changed what cable was for. Before superstations, cable mostly extended the reach of local network affiliates into places antennas could not reach. After superstations, cable became a way to see programming that did not belong to your market at all.

I think about that sometimes now, scrolling through streaming services looking for something to watch. Hundreds of options, all of them curated and organized and recommended by an algorithm. It is nothing like flipping through channels on cable in the early 1980s and landing on a station from a city you had never been to, watching a Cubs game or an old movie or a newscast that had nothing to do with your life. That was the superstation. It was not supposed to work. Maybe not supposed to be there. And for about twenty years, it was one of the most interesting things on television.

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Logan’s Run did pretty well at theaters and over the years has developed a solid cult following. Still, it was released a while ago and those fans are getting harder to find and people aren’t checking out the film as much as they should. So on today’s show I hope to shine a spotlight on the film and encourage people to revisit or check it out at the fir…