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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the McFeast was not done. It just moved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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…

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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.

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 …

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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.

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Production Notes

• 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.

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.

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…

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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.

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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Production Notes

• 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.

My friend got the Dune board game as a Christmas gift. He was extremely excited about it and called us all over to play. We managed to work out the rules well enough, but the game was a lot more special to him than it was for the rest of us. He had seen the movie and loved it. Most of us had not see it yet. Without that connection, the game was just a board game, and as board games go it was fine but not revelatory. I still thought about it for years afterward. Especially after having seen the movie myself on cable. So when I found a copy at a thrift store a few years ago for four dollars, I bought it.

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The first thing worth knowing is that this game is frequently confused with another one. In 1979, Avalon Hill published a board game also called Dune, based on Frank Herbert’s novel. That is the one people usually mean when they call a Dune board game a classic. It was rereleased in 2019 by Gale Force Nine to considerable excitement. This is not that game. This game came out in 1984 from Parker Brothers, designed by Brad Stock, and it is tied entirely to David Lynch’s film adaptation. They share a name and a universe, and that is more or less where the overlap ends. The confusion persists across forums and comment sections to this day.

The film opened in December 1984 to mixed reviews. Made on a budget of over forty million dollars, it earned just over six million dollars in its opening weekend and was pulled from theaters after five weeks, with a total domestic gross of about twenty-seven million dollars. It premiered during the holiday season in direct competition with Beverly Hills Cop. Lynch has since said that not securing final cut was his biggest professional regret. The film eventually developed a cult following, but at the time, Dune merchandise was a bet on a movie the studio suspected was in trouble before it even opened.

What makes that merchandising bet stranger in retrospect is how aggressively Dune was positioned as a children’s property. LJN gave the film the full toy treatment, producing coloring books, bed sheets, and a line of action figures with battle-matic action features. There was a motorized Spice Scout vehicle and a poseable vinyl sandworm large enough to interact with the figures. The movie wasn’t exactly kid-friendly, and a lot Dune merchandise ended up in the clearance aisle.

Dune is a novel about things like political assassination, ecological devastation, and the danger of messianic mythology. It is not an obvious toy property. But 1984 was post-Star Wars, and any science fiction film with a cast that included Sting and giant worm monsters was going to get the full licensed merchandise treatment regardless of content.

The Parker Brothers board game was part of that same wave. A Meijer store circular from December 10, 1984 shows it priced at $13.97, flagged as “New!” and sitting alongside other great games based on popular IP, like the Cabbage Patch Kids. Parker Brothers positioned the Dune game as holiday competition alongside some of the most sought-after children’s toy of the year.

The game calls for two to four players, ages ten and up, and runs about ninety minutes. Each player controls a team of three characters drawn from the film. The four teams are the Atreides (Paul, Duke Leto, Gurney Halleck), the Fremen (Dr. Kynes, Stilgar, Chani), the Emperor’s faction (Shaddam IV, Princess Irulan, a Sardaukar Warrior), and the Harkonnen (Baron Harkonnen, Feyd-Rautha, Beast Rabban). Each character card carries a photograph of the actor who played the role in the film, and each character has individual strength and guile values tracked with a small clip that slides along the card. The goal is simple and blunt, eliminate everyone else’s team.

The board consists of two concentric rings. The outer represents the desert, with spaces for sandworms, duels, spice harvesting, sandstorms, and home bases. The inner represents the castle, where characters build strength and access different card resources. Players move between rings. On each turn, a player rolls two dice and decides how to distribute the result between characters, or apply the total to one. The decision of how to split a roll between characters who may be in very different positions on the board produces more options than the roll-and-move format suggests. A reviewer on BoardGameGeek noted that the board has 37 spaces, and that with reasonable positioning, players can often access a third of them on a given turn. You have to make pretty bad choices to run out of useful moves.

The component list includes 52 Kanly and Equipment cards, 70 red spice tokens (the same plastic pieces used in Risk, a fact noted plainly in the game’s own component documentation), 24 grey harvester tokens, and two sets of dice in different sizes and colors. Equipment cards include Swords, Shields, Poison, Lasgun, Stillsuit, Ornithopter, and Gom Jabbar. Kanly cards let you raid other players’ harvesters, dispatch a Hunter-Seeker, or plunder a Secret Silo. Players can also invest spice in a craps-like commodity market printed on the board that pays out when certain dice totals come up. It is a odd mechanic, and it gives the game flavor most licensed titles of the era completely lack.

What the game does that was unusual for a mass market release of its time is give each player a team of three distinct characters with individual stats, rather than a single pawn. That is closer to wargame design than to Monopoly. Experienced players quickly discover that the game rewards knowing the fiction. A character in the desert without a Stillsuit card is vulnerable to sandstorm and worm attacks that a protected character shrugs off. Poison cards can eliminate someone from across the board. Novice players can run into trouble, so I suggest that if you are introducing people to the game, you walk them through gameplay carefully.

The game catches consistent criticism for dice-heavy combat and for the player elimination mechanic that can leave someone watching the endgame from the sidelines. These are both true. It is also a game that plays brutal and fast. With four players who know the cards, it can get genuinely mean pretty quickly.

On BoardGameGeek, the game holds a community rating of 5.7 from 372 ratings. The most-read review, posted in 2015, describes it as something resembling Murder Monopoly, which is probably the most accurate summary available. Someone in the same thread called it “Little Dune” to distinguish it from the Avalon Hill version and mentioned running both versions in the same session. The consensus is that it rewards players who engage with the material and has little patience for those who do not.

That was part of what made our session as kids slightly flat. My friend was deeply sold on Dune. The rest of us were not, and the game leaned hard on the film for its atmosphere. The character photographs, the spice terminology, the sandworm threat, the kanly mechanics are all things that are helpful to know. Without that, you have a functional if unexceptional roll-and-move game with some interesting wrinkles. With it, you have something that feels like a genuine attempt to put Lynch’s version of Arrakis on a tabletop.

The game was published in the United States by Parker Brothers and in Europe under the Clipper label in a Dutch edition, with a German Parker Brothers edition as well. Copies have sold on the secondary market in the thirty to forty dollar range for complete used copies in good condition, with sealed examples reaching considerably higher. It has remained a modestly active trade item on BoardGameGeek, with several dozen users flagging interest in acquiring one.

The Polygon essential Dune games list includes it, describing it as a misunderstood relic, much like the Lynch film itself. That comparison is pretty good. Both the movie and the game arrived at the wrong moment, aimed at an audience that was not quite there, and built around a property that resisted the commercial form it was being pushed into. The film eventually found its people. The game found fewer, but it does appear to have found them.

I got mine for four dollars at a thrift store, which feels about right to me. The toys from the film have become collector pieces, especially the sandworm and the Spice Scout vehicle, but the board game has never quite made the same leap. Maybe that is because it was made to be opened, punched out, and played, not kept on a shelf. But that is also what makes it interesting. It survived the movie’s rough first life, survived the long years when 1984 Dune was treated like a punchline, and it is still out there waiting to be played. For a licensed game from a box office disappointment, that is not a bad legacy.

There used to be a comfort that came from watching the weather on television. Not the theatrical storm chasing coverage or the panicked breaking news scroll. I mean the old kind. The local forecast. Blue and orange graphics rolling through temperature highs, humidity readings, and multi-day outlooks, all set to early 90s light jazz. If you grew up watching cable in the eighties or nineties, you know exactly what I mean.

I spent a lot of time with that channel as a kid. Something about it was really calming. I could tune in before school, or late at night, and it would just be there, cycling through the current conditions, extended forecast, and local radar. There was no anchors, no opinions, just data rendered in that chunky digital typeface with the sun icon and the little cloud graphic. It made the world feel a little more organized.

It took me a few years to realize I missed it. By the time I noticed it was gone, it had been gone a while. But those screens stuck with me, and judging by how many people have tried to recreate them, I am not the only one.

The Weather Channel launched in May 1982, founded by meteorologist John Coleman and media executive Frank Batten. It was a cable novelty at the time, an entire channel devoted to nothing but weather. One thing that made it interesting at the local level was a piece of hardware called the WeatherStar.

The name is an acronym. STAR stands for Satellite Transponder Addressable Receiver, which sounds more complicated than it is. The idea is that a computer unit was installed at each cable system’s local facility, called a headend. That unit received weather data via satellite from The Weather Channel, then generated graphics and inserted them into the national broadcast at the local level. So when your cable system cut away from the national feed to show you the forecast for your town, that was the WeatherStar doing its job.

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The first generation, the Weather Star I, could only produce white text on colored backgrounds. Purple for current conditions, gray for the 36-hour forecast, red for warnings. No graphics, no icons. Just words. The Weather Star II followed in 1984 with better hardware, and the Weather Star III came in 1986 with more products but still no images.

Then in 1990, everything changed.

Above you see the first day that WeatherStar 4000 was used. Its still pretty basic, but if you were accustomed to the older version, you could see things were changing.

A year later and things are really starting to come together.

The WeatherStar 4000 was the first model capable of producing graphics. Developed in 1988 and introduced in early 1990, it was designed and built by a Canadian electronics company called Applied Microelectronics Institute. The 4000 gave the local forecast those recognizable blue and orange backgrounds, the weather icons, the radar map at the end. It also brought the music, that specific blend of smooth jazz and new age that became as much a part of the watching experience. A narration track voiced by a man named Dan Chandler rounded things out, introducing each segment in a tone that managed to sound both official and completely relaxed.

For most of the nineties, if you flipped on The Weather Channel during the local forecast, that was what you were watching. The 4000 was everywhere.

The WeatherStar 4000 also had its quirks. A small item in the Jackson Sun from July 1991 noted that Weather Channel viewers in Jackson, Tennessee had gotten quite a surprise on a Monday afternoon: the channel was reporting a 7-degree temperature and a wind chill of 11 below zero, in July. A company spokesman attributed it to a glitch in the WeatherStar computer (I am guessing some sort of user error). I bet readers were relieved.

The Weather Channel did not stand still. A budget model called the Weather Star Jr. arrived in 1994 for smaller cable markets, priced at $500 a unit. Then in 1998 came the Weather Star XL, an SGI-based machine that overhauled the graphics entirely. Modern fonts, new icons, and a cleaner look. It was sharper. It was also, for a lot of people, less interesting.

The IntelliStar followed in 2003, adding more data, more products, more localization. Traffic information, air quality indexes, school-day forecasts. The presentations got longer, then got cut back when The Weather Channel standardized all local segments to a single minute in 2013.

The WeatherStar 4000, along with the XL and the Jr., was retired on June 26, 2014, when The Weather Channel ended its analog satellite feed. Forty-two years after the channel launched, the hardware that had defined its local identity was switched off.

Around the same time, the channel itself was changing in ways that had nothing to do with hardware. Landmark Communications, which had founded The Weather Channel and owned it for 26 years, sold it in 2008 to a consortium of NBCUniversal, Bain Capital, and the Blackstone Group for a reported $3.5 billion. In 2015, IBM purchased the channel’s digital assets, including the website and app, for over $2 billion. The television network itself was then sold again in 2018 to Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios for a reported $300 million. That last figure says a lot about how the value had shifted.

The channel that once sold for $3.5 billion as a unified company sold its TV side alone, a decade later, for a fraction of that. Why? Because weather had migrated to phones and websites. The idea of sitting down to watch a dedicated weather channel began to feel like something from another era. For a lot of people, that was exactly the problem.

Appreciation for the WeatherStar 4000 never really went away. It went dormant and that led to nostalgia. YouTube channels dedicated to preserving old WeatherStar recordings accumulated quiet followings. The TWCClassics community catalogued decades of Weather Channel playlists and footage with the kind of passionate thoroughness you see applied to things that really matter to people. As it turns out this was just the beginning, because then the programmers showed up.

A developer named Mike Battaglia built the first substantial web-based recreation of the WeatherStar 4000 experience, reconstructing the graphics, the layout, and the general feel in a browser. In August 2020, another developer named Matt Walsh forked that project and began building his own version, which he called WeatherStar 4000+. Walsh’s project pulls live weather data from NOAA’s public API, so what you’re watching is not a recording or a simulation of old data. It is your actual local forecast, rendered to look exactly like it would have in 1993.

Walsh has been clear about what this is and what it is not. It is not a pixel-perfect recreation of the original hardware. Some screens have been added that did not exist on the real 4000, including an hourly graph display and a Storm Prediction Center outlook screen that Walsh designed to match the aesthetic of the original air quality display. Some original features are absent because the data simply is not available through modern APIs. The original music, which is all copyrighted, has been replaced with AI-generated tracks built to sound similar. For anyone who needs the originals, TWCClassics maintains a searchable archive of the actual playlist.

The project hit the front page of Hacker News in May 2025 and the response was, by Walsh’s own description, overwhelming. People sharing memories of watching the forecast before school, of parents and grandparents who kept The Weather Channel on in the background. The comment section filled up with people who had not thought about those blue and orange graphics in years.

A former Weather Channel systems engineer showed up in the comments of a related How-To Geek article published in February 2026 and wrote that he used to be the person who managed the systems that ingested all that data and pushed it out to local cable companies. “It was fun while it lasted,” he wrote. “Then they got bought.”

WeatherStar 4000+ is built around NOAA’s weather API, which covers the United States only. If you are outside the US, the international fork is the right starting point.

The project carries a disclaimer that Walsh is clear about: this should not be used as a primary source during dangerous weather. The internet is not a reliable infrastructure for emergency alerts, and the WeatherStar format is not designed for that. For actual severe weather information, the National Weather Service and a dedicated weather radio are the right tools.

The music that plays by default is AI-generated in the spirit of the original smooth jazz. It is fine. If you want the actual original music, which is all commercially licensed, the TWCClassics archive at twcclassics.com is where to look. You can also add your own MP3 files to the server version of the app if you have a collection in mind.

On mobile, both Android and iOS users can add WeatherStar 4000+ to their home screen as a web app through their browser’s share or install options. An Android app is in development. There is no iOS native app, and based on Walsh’s notes, there is unlikely to be one through his project given that he does not own any Apple devices.

While WeatherStar 4000+ is the most accessible version of this retro weather TV experience, it is not the only one.

The WS4000 Simulator, available at taiganet.com, is a separate project aimed at a much more faithful hardware recreation. Where WeatherStar 4000+ is a browser-based app built for ease of use, the WS4000 Simulator is a downloadable Windows application built with C++ and a custom rendering engine designed to replicate the exact visual behavior of the original unit. It supports the original “flavors” system (the term for the pre-programmed sequences of forecast screens), lets you build your own custom lineups, includes superprecise music scheduling, and uses National Weather Service forecast grids for its data. If WeatherStar 4000+ is for people who want to watch the weather in a nostalgic way, the WS4000 Simulator is for people who want to know how the machine worked and take control.

There is also an IntelliStar 2 emulator if you prefer the look of the later-era hardware, and a weatherstar.dev project that covers both the WeatherStar and IntelliStar formats. For viewers outside the United States, a fork of WeatherStar 4000+ called ws4kp-international adapts the project to work with non-NOAA data sources, since the original is exclusively tied to US weather data.

Because of all the discussion around these projects, The Weather Channel itself released an official WeatherStar 4000 emulator on April Fools Day 2026. Whether that timing was a joke or a tribute is genuinely unclear.

How Should You do WeatherStar 4000?

The simplest way to experience WeatherStar 4000+ right now is to open a browser and go to weatherstar.netbymatt.com. Type in your zip code or city, and within a few seconds you are watching your local forecast in the old style. That is all you need to. No account, no installation, no configuration required. If you want to save your settings or share a specific setup, you can generate a permalink from the page that captures everything.

If you want to run your own instance, the project is free and open source on GitHub at github.com/netbymatt/ws4kp. The quickest path there is a single Docker command that gets the whole thing running on any machine that has Docker installed. From there you access it through a browser at your local network address. For people who want to go further, there are options to run a full server version with caching for better performance across multiple devices, or to add your own music files in place of the default tracks.

Getting it onto a television takes one more step. The most direct method is to use a smart TV or streaming device with a browser, navigate to your WeatherStar address, and go fullscreen. There is also a project called ws4channels, available on GitHub, that converts the WeatherStar stream into a live TV channel that media servers like Plex or Jellyfin can pick up and add to their channel guide. Setup involves a bit more configuration, and based on reports from people who have tried it, the resource demands can be significant depending on your hardware.

For people who want WeatherStar on a TV without any of that setup, here was my very affordable solution.

I found a used Amazon Fire Stick at a thrift store for five dollars. These sort of finds aren’t uncommon, although prices may vary. Any media streamer with a browser will work though. I plugged it into an older LCD television that I keep on my desk, opened the browser that comes built into the Fire TV, navigated to weatherstar.netbymatt.com, typed in my zip code, picked my scanlines, turned on the music, and went fullscreen. That was the entire process. I now have a small screen on my desk that is permanently tuned to my local forecast in the old style, with the music running quietly in the background.

It is not always on. But I put it on when I am at my desk and want something calm in the background. There is something about that steady rotation of screens, the current conditions giving way to the hourly forecast, the radar coming up, the extended forecast, all of it moving at the same unhurried pace it moved when I was younger, that I find genuinely calming. Yes, I am aware that my phone can also tell me the weather, instantly and accurately and without any of this setup. But that isn’t the point.

I kept thinking about that comment from the former Weather Channel engineer. He was describing a system that hundreds of thousands of people interacted with every day for decades, mostly without knowing what was behind the scenes. Most viewers did not think about the WeatherStar. They just watched the forecast. The hardware was invisible the way all good infrastructure is invisible. You only notice it when it relays an error, or when it goes away.

The people rebuilding it now notice it plenty. Walsh has kept the WeatherStar 4000+ project actively updated and open source, with multiple contributors on GitHub and growing. The WS4000 Simulator community at taiganet.com continues its own detailed work. TWCClassics catalogs the music and archival footage. Together they are keeping something alive that the original network walked away from.

This isn’t just for nostalgia, although it is partly that. I think it is also that the WeatherStar format was genuinely well-designed. It gave you the information you needed, in a clear and unhurried way, with pleasant music playing. That combination is still great. It worked well enough that when Walsh posted about his project on Hacker News, people who had not thought about it in thirty years came flooding back to say so (I was one of them).

When I put it on, even bad weather feels a little comforting. The forecast keeps cycling through. The sun icon still looks the way I remember. The music is still playing. Whenever its on, it feels like the highwater mark of cable TV never really went away and I love it.

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On the April 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:

• Atari Computer Camps

• Club Med and Atari

• The Living Unicorn

• Back to the Future the Animated Series

• The DeLorean

• Car Podcasts?

• Bonus Scan thoughts

• Back to the Future: The Ride a…

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A few times in my life, I had the chance to go to Universal Studios, and every time I somehow talked myself out of spending much time there. I was a Disney person, probably to a fault, and when I was anywhere near Orlando or Southern California, my attention went straight to Disney. At the time that made sense to me. Now it feels a little foolish, becau…

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A lot of automotive history moves through eBay, from old license plates to oil company memorabilia, and everything in-between. But car brochures are some of my favorite. This brochure was produced when the DeLorean was still a new car and still had promise, still something you might actually walk into a showroom and buy. My uncle wanted one. He never go…

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Club Med always sounded like a place for relaxation and adult activity (certainly that’s what commercials hinted at). Sunny, relaxed, a little European, and just far enough outside my world that I had to imagine most of it. The name made me think of beaches, drinks, people with good tans, and long afternoons where nobody seemed to be looking at a clock. It did not make me think of an Atari 800 sitting under a palm tree. But for a strange and interesting stretch in the early 1980s, that was part of the story too, and before getting to the computers, it helps to talk a little about what Club Med actually was.

It all started in 1950 with a Belgian water polo champion named Gérard Blitz, who was fresh out of the WWII French Resistance and looking for a way to help people shake off the weight of postwar Europe. His idea was simple. Let’s gather people together in a beautiful place, take away the usual pressures of money and status, and let them rediscover the pleasure of being alive. Blitz officially founded Club Méditerranée on April 27, 1950, bringing the first group of vacationers to the northern coast of Majorca in the Balearic Islands. They slept in tents. They cooked together. Nobody wore a tie. Groundbreaking vacation stuff for 1950.

A better entertainer than businessman, Blitz went bankrupt in 1953. His main creditor was his tent supplier Gilbert Trigano, known as the French “King of Camping,” who took control of the club. Trigano was a builder. Under his leadership, the tents gave way to straw huts, the straw huts gave way to actual rooms, and Club Med grew into something no one had quite seen before. Guests paid one price covering transportation, lodging, three meals a day, wine and beer with lunch and dinner, most sports and leisure activities with instruction, and evening entertainment. No tipping. No extra charges. No decisions about money once you arrived.

The staff were called G.O.s, short for Gentils Organisateurs, or “gracious organizers.” The guests were G.M.s, Gentils Membres. Everyone was on a first-name basis. The whole thing was designed to feel like the best version of a vacation you had ever taken with as little friction as possible. By the time the 1980s arrived, Club Med operated 92 villages across 26 countries. It was one of the most recognized vacation brands on the planet. Club Med was thriving and they were about to make an unexpected partnership with the computer company, Atari.

In 1982, the home computer was breaking through. Atari, then a division of Warner Communications, was one of the biggest names in the business. The company had built its reputation in arcades and living rooms with games, but it had also released the Atari 400 and 800 home computers, machines capable of real work like word processing, spreadsheets, programming and music composition. Atari wanted people to think of these machines as more than just game consoles with keyboards. The problem was that a lot of adults were genuinely afraid of computers. They had heard about the computer revolution and were not sure they wanted any part of it.

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Club Med had noticed the same anxiety from a different angle. The resort reasoned that many people could overcome their fear of computers if instruction were offered in a non-threatening environment, without the intrusion of everyday urban life. The two companies found each other and discovered they were solving the same problem from opposite ends.

The partnership was announced publicly in late 1982. Serge Trigano, chairman and CEO of Club Med, Inc., said at the time that the home computer would become a major force in society, and that by offering workshops to members, the club would help demystify computers for its guests. Ray Kassar, chairman and CEO of Atari, added that Club Med villages offered a perfect setting for young people and adults to be introduced to microcomputers. The announcement came at a Warner Communications press event, and Atari projected at the time that 5.5 million home computers would be sold by the end of 1983 alone.

The idea was not invented from scratch. The first computer workshop had been held at Club Med’s Kamarina village in Sicily, using Honeywell, French PTT, Thomson, and IBM equipment, and it proved popular enough that Club Med expanded the concept to villages in the Caribbean. By the time the Atari deal was formalized, workshops were already running at Ixtapa in Mexico, Caravelle in Guadeloupe, and Eleuthera in the Bahamas. Atari secured the exclusive right to supply computers for all Club Med villages in the Western Hemisphere.

The early results from the Kamarina pilot were remarkable. During a ten-week period there, 12,000 vacationers participated in the computer program. Of those, 3,200 became proficient at using computers, and 1,500 went far enough to write their own programs. For a crowd that had rarely touched a keyboard before arriving at a beach resort, that was impressive.

The flagship of the whole operation would be Club Med’s Punta Cana village in the Dominican Republic. This was where the collaboration really got serious.

Starting June 11, 1983, and running thirteen weeks through September 10, Atari and Club Med launched what their brochure called a “21st century experiment.” The setup at Punta Cana was unlike anything else in computer education at the time. Atari installed 57 computers throughout the village, not locked away in a classroom but distributed across the resort, with a total of 83 computers and terminals in use when you counted every kiosk and station. Workshops ran from 11 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, with free time built in at the end of each day for practice. Instructors were available to answer questions and help guests go further with anything covered in the sessions.

What did you do while there? Mini-workshop topics covered everything from an introduction to microcomputers to budgeting and planning with VisiCalc. In addition to computer staples like BASIC language programming, word processing, and games, Atari provided things like painting, music, astronomy, astrology, and weaving software. That weaving program was particularly inventive. In it guests could blend 256 colors on screen as they would yarn on a loom, and when the mix was right, a printout would show them how to actually weave the design into a headband, belt, or carrying strap.

Atari also developed a tennis tournament organizer that operated in English, Spanish, and French, so players of different nationalities could be matched and compete together. Snorkelers had access to an interactive computerized slide show that identified the marine life they were likely to see on the reefs. Sailors could brush up on their rigging and knot-tying at a terminal. A computer bulletin board, the first at any Club Med village, displayed daily events and special messages for all guests on screens around the resort.

The kids were not left out. Computer instructors were assigned to the Mini-Club for children ages four to seven, and to the Kid’s Club for ages eight to twelve. The whole program was folded into Club Med’s all-inclusive price. Nobody paid extra to sit down at an Atari 800 and learn to compose music or design graphics. It was just part of what you got.

Bob Kahn, Director of Special Projects at Atari from 1982 to 1984, was responsible for the entire computer portion of the summer program, including curriculum, staffing, equipment, and materials. He had previously run the Atari Computer Camps that operated across the United States, and the Club Med collaboration was an extension of that educational mission into a very different setting.

What makes the Punta Cana program so interesting in retrospect is how much original work went into it. Atari did not simply drop off a box of machines and walk away. For example, the music curriculum was developed by Sterling Beckwith, a music consultant who wrote to Kahn from his home in North Salem, New York, in the spring of 1983 describing his frustration at not being able to find existing software that did what he needed. There was nothing on the market that addressed rhythm in a way accessible to complete beginners. So he wrote something himself.

The result was a program called RUMDRUMS, built specifically for the Atari/Club Med project and written in Atari Logo. The curriculum materials described it as a rhythmic exercise for novice composers. Users could input rhythm patterns using a simple letter code, hear them played back, build sequences, and eventually have the computer generate a semi-random melody to layer over their rhythms. Beckwith’s letters to Kahn show a genuine creative collaboration, complete with bug reports, debugging notes, and a closing wish that Kahn had survived his trip into what Beckwith cheerfully called “the wilds of Hispaniola.”

The music workshop also included demonstrations using the Atari Music Composer cartridge, lesson plans by educator Carolyn Pugh covering composition forms like ternary and rondo, and a note from Battlezone creator Ed Rotberg, who sent over sound synthesis disks he had personally developed. It was a more ambitious educational effort than the vacation branding suggested.

Linda Gordon, Atari’s vice president of special projects, called the Club Med experience a milestone in human relations for both companies, observing that places where people need computers the least are probably the best places for them to discover the technology.

The Miami Herald sent writer John Robson to the Caravelle village in Guadeloupe in 1984 to find out what the experience was actually like. He arrived as a committed skeptic. Not really seeming to realize that a computer was different from a typewriter, he described himself as a poor typist who spent 40 percent of his time typing and 40 percent correcting errors. What he found surprised him.

Classes were small, typically eight people, meeting in front of Atari 800s for one hour a day. His group’s instructor that week was someone called B.J., a blond refugee from Gulf Oil, filling in for the regular computer guru “Aladdin.” The first day was devoted to demonstrating that the computer was not an all-knowing machine but a fairly limited tool, which was a key part of the demystification strategy both companies were aiming for. Day two moved into Basic programming. Day three opened up graphics, where Robson watched the basic structure of video game design unfold in minutes. By day four the group was working with the Atari as a filing and note-card system. The final day brought AtariWriter, the word processing program.

By the end, Robson found himself staying after class to write, his speed increasing, misspellings flagged automatically. He left Guadeloupe a reluctant convert. His article ran under the headline “A Balmy Island Computer Class.”

The regular guru “Aladdin” at Caravelle was a Frenchman who had stumbled into the job almost by accident. His initial visit to Club Med’s Paris headquarters was simply to accompany a friend applying for a position. Overhearing a conversation about computer education, he stepped in to correct some misconceptions and walked away with the job of developing the computer program for the Club’s American operations. That was 1982. By 1983, the program had spread to Eleuthera, Ixtapa, Caravelle, and Punta Cana, with Copper Mountain, Colorado also in the mix.

The chef de village at Punta Cana, Gerard Barouh, framed the whole project in terms of communication rather than technology. He pointed out that people who do not learn about computers may eventually find it impossible to speak to their own children. The tennis and sailing programs that ran in multiple languages reflected his broader vision: computers as a social tool, not just a vocational one. He described the whole setup as a buffet. You choose what you want.

In 1983, a week at Punta Cana with computer instruction included cost $499 per person for the land portion, based on double occupancy. Children ages four to seven stayed free. Children eight to eleven paid half price. A full package from New York including air and transfers ran $879. From Miami, it was $719.

By 1984, a week at Caravelle in Guadeloupe with roundtrip Air France transportation came to $839. Land-only rates were $500 at Eleuthera, $530 at Punta Cana, and $490 at Ixtapa. Computer instruction was included in all of those prices, alongside meals, wine with dinner, sports, and evening entertainment. The Miami Herald noted that with the exception of excursions and bar drinks, everything, including computer instruction, was covered by the package price.

For context, an Atari 800 retailed for around $500 on its own in 1982. A week at one of the most celebrated vacation resorts in the world, with a dedicated instructor and a machine waiting for you on the beach, was not unreasonable.

The San Francisco Chronicle covered the Punta Cana program in August 1983, noting that while most Club Med villages had only a handful of computers, usually about 12, Atari had installed 57 at Punta Cana because the program there was serious about making computer training the major attraction. The ratio of instructors to computers made it possible to get as much training as you wanted.

The timing for the Club Med-Atari partnership was perfect. The home computer had arrived in living rooms and offices, but it still felt alien to most people. Making a mistake at a computer terminal at work had real consequences. Making one on a beach in the Dominican Republic, with a rum drink nearby and nothing on the schedule until dinner, felt like a completely different proposition. People find it easier to learn when they are relaxed, and Club Med had spent three decades building an environment engineered specifically for that. Atari brought the machines.

The program continued and expanded after 1983. By the time the Miami Herald article ran in the summer of 1984, computer workshops were operating at Punta Cana, Caravelle, Ixtapa, Eleuthera, and Copper Mountain. The Caravelle workshop had grown to 25 Atari computers. Club Med hoped to have computers in 45 villages within a couple of years. The Atari 400, with its easily cleaned membrane keyboard, was preferred for children. The 800 with its standard keyboard was used for adults. Instructors trained at Atari headquarters in California before arriving at their villages, and according to Serge Trigano, they were selected by computer.

Atari’s own fortunes shifted dramatically in the years that followed. Warner Communications sold the consumer division in 1984, the same year Atari’s losses nearly brought the company down. Even if the company itself lingered, the Club Med partnership did not. Which makes this product of a very specific window in Atari’s history, one in which the company had both the resources and the vision to pursue something this genuinely unusual.

Still, the partnership proved something that seems obvious in retrospect but wasn’t in 1982. People learn better when they are comfortable, and comfort is not incompatible with education.

Club Med eventually moved upmarket and away from experiments like this one. Atari eventually became something else entirely. But for thirteen weeks in the summer of 1983, on a beach in the Dominican Republic, you could sit down at an Atari 800 between windsurfing sessions and learn to program in BASIC, compose a piece of music, or weave a headband from a design you made yourself on a computer with 256 colors to choose from. Nobody made you. It was just there if you wanted it, which is very Club Med.

There were a few cars that could stop me in my tracks when I was a kid, and the DeLorean was near the top of the list. We had one in my town, parked outside a dentist’s office, and just knowing it was amazing. It was not something you expected to see in everyday life. It looked like it had landed from somewhere else, all sharp lines and brushed metal, like the future had somehow ended up next to where I got scolded for not brushing properly.

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On this episode of the Retroist Podcast, I talk about what it was like to grow up with that kind of local landmark, a car that felt larger than life before I knew much at all about how it came to be. Back then, the DeLorean was just the DeLorean to me, a machine that stood apart from every other car on the road. Later on, of course, I came to understand that behind it was John DeLorean himself, a figure who was just as unusual, ambitious, and complicated as the car that carried his name. That is part of what makes this story so interesting to revisit. You cannot really separate the man from the machine.

From there I get into both sides of that story. I talk about the car itself, why it looked the way it did, why it made such an impression, and how it managed to become iconic even though its actual time on the market was so short. I also get into John DeLorean, his rise in the auto industry, the image he built around himself, and the strange and sometimes messy path that led to the creation of the company. It is one of those stories where big ideas, personality, timing, and unexpected trouble.

What makes the DeLorean worth talking about now is that it carries two stories at once. There is the car people remember, and then there is the man who willed it into existence. One became a symbol, helped along by pop culture and memory, while the other remains a much harder figure to pin down. Bringing them together in one episode felt like the right way to do it, because the DeLorean was never just a car. It was a dream, a gamble, and for some of us, one of those unforgettable sights from childhood.

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Production Notes

• This is the 363rd episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 14 of Season 18.

• This might be the longest episode I have ever done.

• While we would get used to seeing a DeLorean in our town. I never got jaded seeing it. I sometimes think about how many towns exist in the world vs. how many DeLoreans were actually sold and how amazing we had one in our town.

• I could not pull the door down on my own when I was in the car.

• I have never done an episode about a car before and I am not super knowledgeable about cars naturally, so this was a lot of fun to do while a bit challenging. Please forgive any detail misunderstanding.

• I suggest a nickname for myself in this episode, but Bunky would also be a cool nickname.

• Being a celebrity version of anything must be addicting, but it seems to always lead to trouble.

• The National Alliance of Businessmen’s messaging doesn’t quite land nowadays.

• The term ethical or words like it were being use a lot in 1970s.

• Banshee really is an an amazing car name. I like mythological creatures as car names. Some other names that would be fun? The Ford Unicorn. The Chevy Cylcops. Honda Goblin. Toyota Hydra.

• Had to do a lot of cuts to get this under an hour. First cut was close to 75 minutes. So I took out parts on options, modifications, time machine versions, “other appearances,” merchandise, toys, and more.

• I sometimes like to think about “what ifs” around products. What if DeLorean had been a success? Could it have lasted longer? What might the newer models look like?

• Its not clear what DeLorean could have been done differently once he started to make a car like this at scale.

• So many movies from the time I haven’t seen.

• See you at Moonrakers.

• My first and only NY Giants Deep Cut.

• Mellow Cheese!

• I think one more episode in the BTTF coverage. It will be a Supporter Episode.

• 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.

When Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus started hyping its newest attraction for the 1985 season, I was exactly the right age to fall for it completely. I was a kid in New Jersey, and the ads were everywhere. A beautiful white creature with a single horn rising from its forehead, standing in a spotlight like something that had wandered in from another century. “Seeing Is Believing,” the posters said. My mother took me. I believed.

What I did not know then was that before long people would be arguing over what, exactly, they were looking at. The Living Unicorn had a creator, a backstory, and even a patent behind it. Beneath the spotlight and the circus language was something much stranger and much more earthly, with a goat named Lancelot at the center of the story.

To understand Lancelot, you have to go back a few decades before he was born, and a few miles north of anywhere the circus ever pitched a tent.

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In 1933, a biologist at the University of Maine named W. Franklin Dove decided to find out if a unicorn could be made rather than imagined. Dove’s research had revealed that at birth, the horn buds of animals were not yet connected to the skull but were independent, floating beneath the skin. That small anatomical fact opened a window. He took a day-old Ayrshire bull calf, removed the two horn buds, trimmed them flat so they would fit together, and repositioned them at the center of the animal’s forehead. As the calf grew, the buds fused. The experiment was successful: a single, massive horn grew from the skull, molded directly into the frontal bone. Dove published his findings in 1936 in a paper with the wonderfully earnest title “Artificial Production of the Fabulous Unicorn.” The bull became the leader of its herd and with his centered and very dangerous horn, he was rarely challenged.

Dove’s work sat largely in the scientific literature for decades. It might have stayed there, too, if not for a self-described wizard living on a commune in northern California.

Oberon Zell, born Timothy Zell in St. Louis in 1942, seemed almost destined to end up behind one of the stranger circus stories of the 1980s. He was a Neopagan religious leader, co founder of the Church of All Worlds, an early advocate of what would later be called polyamory, and founding editor of a publication called Green Egg. He and his partner, Morning Glory, were operating far outside the mainstream, but that only made them more likely to take the idea of a unicorn seriously.

In the 1970s, the two of them were researching a book on legendary animals when they came across Dove’s old paper. The idea lit something up in Zell. He studied the technique and using angora goats for their luxurious coats and cross-breeding them with Saanen goats to get slightly higher legs, he was able to successfully get his bleating patients to grow a single horn without complication. The procedure, just like with Dove’s bull, was done within the first week of a kid’s life while the horn buds were still loose under the skin. This left the animal with a single fused horn growing from the center of its forehead (again, just like with the bull). Lancelot was born in the spring of 1980. He was the first to get the procedure.

By 1982, Zell had five living unicorns and was taking them to Renaissance fairs, county fairs, pagan festivals, and schools. The 1982 Kilgore News Herald described Lancelot as “about three feet high and 150 pounds,” small enough to be handled easily, with a “white, bearded” appearance and a single horn growing from the center of his head. Zell told interviewers that he was convinced the real medieval unicorns of legend had come from the goat family, not horses, which is why they were described as small enough to rest in the laps of maidens. He carried a reproduction of the famous Unicorn Tapestries with him so people could compare the “real thing” to his animals.

In 1981, the Governor of Texas, Bill Clements, officially named Lancelot the State Unicorn of Texas. By 1984, Zell had produced nine unicorns total. He was granted US Patent #4,429,685, described as “a method of growing unicorns in a manner that enhances the overall development of the animal.”

That same year, a manager named Jeffrey Siegel, a graduate of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, negotiated a four-year licensing deal for four of Zell’s animals worth around $500,000. The four chosen were Lancelot, Galahad, Avalon, and Percival. The deal came with a condition that suited the circus perfectly. Zell was prohibited from discussing publicly how the animals were made.

The circus opened its 1985 season at Madison Square Garden in April. Lancelot made his entrance to the Rocky theme, parading through the arena on a hydraulic float trimmed in gold, a handler in sequins waving beside him. According to the official circus story, he had simply wandered up to the tent in Houston the previous July, his origin unknown. The circus had taken him in and given him a home. His keeper was a former dancer named Heather Harris, who was assigned the title Keeper of the Unicorn and who, to her credit, played the role with total conviction.

“He just appeared to us six months ago,” she told reporters. “I think it was in Houston. I don’t know whether it flew here, or walked or took a train.”

The circus programs were full of this kind of delightful mythology. He had appeared out of the blue and joined up with the Greatest Show on Earth because it felt like the right place for him. For kids, it worked beautifully. The program had a pullout poster. There were fact sheets answering questions like where unicorns come from and how old they were. The answer to age was “ageless.” The answer to origin was “from beyond myth and legend.” His favorite food was “rose petals.” The circus had trademarked the name “The Living Unicorn” and was not about to let a little thing like biological reality get in the way of a good show. Behind the scenes, Lancelot traveled with three understudies who were kept out of sight. Only one unicorn appeared in the actual show, but four were part of the touring troop.

With all this hype and news coverage, it took about five minutes for the ASPCA to get involved.

When the circus hit New York, animal welfare groups went to see for themselves what was going on. ASPCA president John Kullberg assumed they would find a prop. A chin strap. Something rigged. What they found instead was an animal with a horn that appeared to be part of its skull, which concerned them even more. If the horn was real, it meant something had been done to the animal while it was still very young.

Kullberg called the procedure “cruel and severely unethical” and urged a public boycott. The New Jersey SPCA threatened to block the circus from performing west of the Hudson (where I saw it). The Humane Society went on record. “I can’t believe Ringling Bros. has the nerve to insist it is a real unicorn,” said spokesperson Nancy Blaney.

Circus vice president Allen Bloom called the charges ludicrous and the boycott an “unfair and ill-conceived effort by Grinches to steal the kind of wholesome fantasy all too rare in today’s entertainment.” In the New York Times, the circus ran a full-page ad: “Don’t Let the Grinches Steal the Fantasy.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent veterinarians. Their conclusion was that Lancelot was a goat, and that he seemed fine. USDA chief veterinarian Dr. Gerald Toms speculated that a simple grafting procedure had been performed when the animal was very young, and that if anesthesia had been used, the animal would have felt no pain and suffered no lasting effects.

Ringling went even further with a press conference at Madison Square Garden. Circus president Kenneth Feld brought in two professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Charles Reid, a radiologist, held up X-rays showing clearly that the horn was fused to the skull. It was not an implant. It was not attached to anything. Dr. William Donawick, a professor of surgery at the university’s animal hospital, examined Lancelot and announced his verdict to the assembled press: “I am pleased to tell you this animal is a content, healthy, living unicorn. It’s a unicorn. That’s what you call an animal with one horn.”

Reporters were invited to pull on the horn. It did not come off. Lancelot ate some rose petals. Just like they said he would!

Mayor Ed Koch weighed in, saying that while he believed in unicorns, that “doesn’t mean they exist.” The New York Consumer Protection Board opened an inquiry into whether calling the animal a unicorn constituted false advertising.

None of it slowed the ticket sales. Circus attendance and revenue at Madison Square Garden soared. Siegel later claimed it was the largest publicity event in the history of American circus. Saturday Night Live brought it up on Weekend Update and even Johnny Carson mentioned it. Andy Warhol, according to Siegel, wrote about Lancelot visiting Studio 54.

The controversy quieted after New York, but it didn’t disappear. In February 1986, Lancelot was seized by sheriff’s deputies in Daytona Beach, Florida. The legal basis was a 1921 state law that prohibited the public display of malformed or disfigured animals for profit. The Florida chapter of the Humane Society had filed the complaint. Lancelot was X-rayed again. Another veterinarian examined him. He was found to be healthy. No charges were filed. He was returned in time for that evening’s performance.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel, covering a local stop on the tour in March 1986, ran a long feature asking the question directly: if the circus goat has one horn, is it a unicorn? The answer from local doctors was essentially the same one the New York doctors had given. It was a goat. The horn had probably been produced by moving the horn buds together in infancy. The animal was healthy and probably experiencing no pain.

The circus maintained throughout that the unicorn was exactly as advertised. “The Living Unicorn arrived at the circus exactly as it is seen today,” Bloom said. “The only difference in it now is that its horn has grown several inches since it joined the circus.”

Through all of this, Oberon Zell was largely absent. The contract with Ringling required his silence, and he honored it, retreating from public view while the media frenzy played out without him. He and Morning Glory had wanted to be part of the story, to explain the science behind the animals and share what they had discovered. Instead, they were cut out entirely.

“They wanted to control the publicity,” Zell later said. “We just assumed we’d be in on it. We were completely cut out of the picture.”

The circus had purchased the narrative along with the animals. They never publicly confirmed they had bought the animals from Zell at all, and several sources suggested the sale price was a six-figure sum. The circus stuck with the tale that the unicorn had simply shown up on its own, and that was the story they kept selling.

Zell’s patent, granted in 1984, technically gave him the sole legal right to the method until 1992 when it expired. After that, the technique was available to anyone willing to try it on a newborn goat within the first week of its life.

Ringling had negotiated a four-year contract, but Lancelot’s circus career lasted only two. Circus president Kenneth Feld had a philosophy of rotating attractions regularly, specifically to keep audiences from assuming they could always catch the same show next year. By 1987, the Living Unicorn was retired, replaced in the promotional spotlight by King Tusk, a twelve-foot-tall elephant. Lancelot went home.

The adjustment was not easy. “He was generally pretty depressed, because he loved being a show animal,” Zell later recalled. “I built a barn and corral just for him that we dubbed Fort Unicorn.” Zell cared for Lancelot until his death in 1991, at the age of eleven. By this time, Zell had stopped producing new unicorns. The last animal from his stock died in 2005. He kept the skull of his first creation in his home.

I remember standing in that arena in New Jersey as a kid and believing it. I do not feel foolish for that. I was a child, and the whole point was to make children believe.

What sits differently with me now is not the fact that the circus sold an illusion. It is that the illusion depended on surgery, secrecy, and a great many adults agreeing not to look too closely once the spotlight was on.

A lot of people decided Lancelot was a unicorn. I did too. What once felt magical now feels harder to separate from the work that went into making it.