This Was A Thing: The Retro Podcast

June's bustin' out all over, and we're bustin' out one last classic episode before we get back to some new episodes coming later this month. And since June is Pride Month and the month of the Tony Awards, we're serving up a "two birds, one stone" situation by reairing an episode that falls squarely in both categories: La Cage aux Folles!

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In honor of pride month, this week is a special episode focused on the franchise that began life as a landmark French boulevard stage comedy, and was then adapted into acclaimed films and musical. And even though the love story at the center of the story was between two men, it has captured the hearts of audiences from all sexual orientations. It also answers the age old question: what happens when you put the composer of Hello Dolly!, the director of West Side Story, and Edna Turnlad in a room together? The answer: Broadway magic.

Rob teaches Ray about the history of Jean Poiret’s play La Cage Aux Folles and its many adaptations; how competing producers (including ThWAT favorite Allan Carr) fought to secure the chance to both film and musicalize La Cage; Jerry Herman’s hummable, Tony-winning score and the anthem it provided the gay rights movement; Nathan Lane’s breakout movie performance; and all the ways in which this property has been and continues to be celebrated by audiences across the world.

If you like what we are doing, please support us on Patreon.

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

ARTICLES

EPISODE CLIPS

Mike Wallace The Homosexuals 1967 - YouTube

La Cage Aux Folles (1979) movie review - Sneak Previews with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel - YouTube

Epiphany - George Hearn (1982) - YouTube

La Cage aux Folles 2 Trailer

La Cage aux Folles 3 Trailer

"Color and Light" from Sunday in the Park with George

Columbo Pilot Episode - “Prescription Murder” costarring Gene Barry - Clips - YouTube

I Am What I Am - YouTube

Song on the Sand (La Da Da Da) - YouTube

Our final stop down defunct social media memory lane: take six seconds (give or take a few hundred) and give a listen to our classic all about Vine!

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Can you put together a meaningful thought or idea in six seconds or less? What about a moderately funny video? It’s hard! But there was some GOLD in them there Vine hills!

Ray teaches Rob about how Vine helped launch the careers of Shawn Mendes, King Bach, and yes, even Jake and Logan Paul. We also revisit some of our favorite Vines of years past including Rob’s favorite – a teacher’s reaction to having a piece of paper thrown at them. “Whoever threw that paper, your mom’s a…”

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.

TEAM:

Ray Hebel

Robert W Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

ARTICLES

The Verge

BBC

The Guardian

Pitchfork

Ad Week

Media Post

Medium

Next up in our social platform retrospective: Napster! TikTok may currently be the place where up-and-coming musicians are finding their audience and where labels like Universal have banned their artists from sharing music. But rewind a couple decades and there was one indisputable home of music on the internet: Napster. Only one problem: it was probably all illegal.

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Ah, to be 19 again. It's a time of possibilities, insecurities, of worrying about what adulthood is really going to be like. On the other hand, if you're Shawn Fanning or Sean Parker, your worries at 19 were a little bigger. As in, "multimillion-dollar legal battles with the entire music industry" bigger. And all because of a piece of software that let you listen to and download music from all across the internet...without paying the artists. What could go wrong?

Ray teaches Rob about how a crazy idea on an Internet chat forum grew into the software start-up Napster; how Ray can trace his love of Monty Python to the early days of digital music downloads; how the music industry was forced to reckon with the reality that physical media had become a relic of the past; why pissing off Lars Ulrich is a bad idea; and why Napster's brief and shining moment in the world of online music streaming was the beginning of a trend that completely changed the way the world listens to music.

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

ARTICLES

The Guardian

Time

Vanity Fair

EPISODE CLIPS

With all this hubbub about TikTok possibly getting banned, we're revisiting three of our episodes about social media platforms that burned bright and burned out fast. And up first - MySpace!

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Friendster, SixDegrees, Makeoutclub - if you're a 90s kid, then you probably remember at least some of those websites (and may they all rest in peace). But there could only be one top dog, and MySpace was it. Hillary Duff, Harry Styles, Kim Kardashian - everyone had a MySpace page, and you better pray your friends put you in their Top 8. So with all the hype, how did the site go from being a 12-billion-dollar gorilla to an Internet has-been?

Rob teaches Ray about how this small, music-centric social site evolved into a global behemoth; why "the honor system" isn't exactly an enforceable privacy policy; the tragic betrayal of Tila Tequila; and why we could all use a little more Tom in our lives.

If you like what we are doing, please support us on Patreon. 

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

ARTICLES

Tom Anderson's Instagram

AUDIO/VISUAL

Episode Clips

Tom Anderson Interview

SNL MySpace Sketch

"Leave Britney Alone" Video

Music & Sound Effects

Additional Sound Effects from Final Cut Pro, iLife, and Logic Pro

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Rob teaches Ray and Daniel about the storied biography of Mr. Carlos Irwin Estevez, better known as Charlie Sheen, including: Sheen’s origins as a child star and teen heartthrob; his breakout role in “Platoon”; Sheen’s struggles with substances and his highly publicized firing from the sitcom that revitalized his career; and how the news media all seized on Sheen’s apparent mental collapse as an opportunity to drive ratings, regardless of the impact it might have had on his state of mind.

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media. 

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Natalie DeSavia

EPISODE CLIPS

Charlie Sheen On Alex Jones

Sheen’s Korner

ABC Interview with Charlie Sheen (02.28.11)

Charlie Sheen Rants Compilation

Chuck Lorre on Replacing Charlie Sheen on "Two and a Half Men”

ADDITIONAL MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS

“This Was A Thing” Theme Songs composed by Billy Recce

"Happy Bee,” “Light Awash,” “Study and Relax” • Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

• Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Additional Sound Effects from Final Cut Pro, 

It's Earth Day and we want to celebrate one of the finest gifts that this pretty planet has to offer. No, not Fred Silverman - everyone's best bud, cannabis! But things haven't always looked as bright for MJ as they do nowadays with modern legalization efforts, and so we're looking back at a time when the hype around marijuana was more about the insanity it caused than its many benefits. And that insanity had a special name - Reefer Madness!

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REEFER MADNESS! It’s taken over this fine country, so we decided it was time to cover it! Run for your life, marijuana is polluting the minds of America’s youths!

“Reefer Madness”, originally titled “Tell Your Children”, was an exploitation and propaganda film released in 1936, 1938, or 1939…. Seriously, they didn’t keep an accurate record of the film’s release. It was meant to teach about the dangers of grass, dope, ganja, that sticky icky icky icky… And the film worked! People were terrified!

What’s even more interesting than the film is The Marihuana Act of 1937. (Yes, that’s how it was spelt.) Passed by the government and backed by William Randolph Hearst, it was the first step in making cannabis as illegal as illegal could be!

This week Ray teaches Rob all about the history of hemp and its many uses, how this film fell into public domain, which ultimately led to some of the first midnight screenings and opened the door for showings of movies like “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “The Room”

…and how that wacky tabacky could make you go insane and beat your acquaintance with a stick. (It’s in the movie.) Be careful out there, folks.

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.

 TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

 WEBSITES

IMDb

Rotten...

In our glorious age of streaming services, we never need to worry about recording anything ourselves - we just click “Continue Watching” and chill. But in the sad, not-too-distant past, you couldn’t always just open up Netflix and binge all nine seasons of Suits whenever you felt like it. Instead, if you missed your favorite soap, tough noogies. That is, that was the way things were until the magical VCR entered the American household. Out of the house? No problem! Just pop in a cassette and you’re golden. The only problem was that two companies wanted the glory of becoming the standard format on which people would record their shows - and neither was going down without a fight. 

Daniel teaches Rob and Ray about the infamous format war between Sony’s Betamax systems and tapes, and JVC’s competitor, the VHS; how the history of recorded and broadcast video on recorded tape media took some strange twist and turns involving World War II and Bing Crosby; Rob’s and Ray’s favorite streaming services; the legal challenges Sony faced from studios terrified that home recording would be the death knell of movie distribution; and why home recorded media is no longer something consumers really seem to want or even have access to.

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media. 

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Natalie DeSavia

SOURCES

Podcasts

Everything 80s Podcast 

Everything Everywhere Daily

Tech Stuff

Articles

Quench your podcast thirst by listening back to this Season 1 favorite all about the little soft drink that couldn't - Crystal Pepsi!

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Right Now! You’re reading a description for this week’s episode, Crystal Pepsi. Right Now! This particular episode is a little different, let’s be CLEAR. Right Now! Crystal Pepsi was a flash in the CAN (and bottle!) and we’re going to teach you all about it! Right Now! They also ran a Super Bowl commercial for it that featured a Sammy Haggar lead Van Halen, singing their hit song, “Right Now!” Right Now!

Crystal Pepsi was released to the public in 1992 and (SPOILER WARNING!) was off of store shelves by early 1994. It was part of the “Clear Craze” trend of the early 90’s. Consumers were introduced to all sorts of products that you could see right through… Including Zima! Such innovation!

This week Ray teaches Rob all about the history of Pepsi Cola, how rival Coca Cola tried answering back with Tab Clear, why they spent $40 million on the ad campaign, and how Pepsi wasn’t happy with SNL’s “Crystal Gravy” commercial parody.

Crystal Pepsi – You’ve never seen a taste like this!

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia 

WEBSITES

Crystal Pepsi Product Information 

ARTICLES

ABC News

Bloomberg

We all get mad about things sometimes, and during the Cold War, the U.S. government was mad about “M.A.D.”. That’s because “M.A.D.” “Mutually Assured Destruction” - was a global concern on everyone’s mind. And the fear that foreign countries (/cough/** Russia cough) would use nuclear weapons wasn’t only causing chaos in the Oval Office. Hollywood and TV studios were just as interested in it, because where there’s fear, there’s an audience. And one studio - and one movie in particular - took that fear of nuclear engagement and decided to make a movie that showed exactly how horrible things could get if those missiles started flying.

Rob teaches Ray and Daniel about the 1983 T.V. movie “The Day After,” which depicted the immediate and devastating fallout of a nuclear war; how Nicholas Meyer, the movie’s director, went behind ABC’s back in order to make film as realistic, and realistically graphic, it would be in reality; why Ronald Reagan himself said the movie made him “greatly depressed”; the fact that “The Day After” may have played a role in ending the Cold War; and how pieces of art and media, even if they’re fictional, have the power to change global politics.

If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media. 

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W. Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Natalie DeSavia

EPISODE CLIPS

Abc Fall Promo Reel 1983

”The Day After" Abc Movie Intro 1983

The Tv Movie That Destroyed Lawrence, Kansas and May Have Saved the World

Family Reacts to the Movie the Day After

The Day After (1983) & Abc News Viewpoint Original Wpvi-Tv 6abc Broadcast 11–20–1983

ADDITIONAL

Nostalgia is our podcast's bread and butter (that and actual bread and butter, which is delicious). And if one episode perfectly encapsulates that feeling, it was our deep dive into the talent show that came before any of the modern shows like "Britain's Got Talent" or "American Idol." So sit back, turn on that public access channel, and listen back to our episode on Frank Masi's legendary "Stairway to Stardom"!

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Turn your dials to station Manhattan Neighborhood Network station 13 because we are going to explore the confidentially, untalented denizens of Stairway to Stardom.

Learn about the most optimistic master of ceremonies, Frank Masi, who unwittingly gave birth to America's obsession of televised shock and awe.

Rob gives Ray a lesson in the history of public access television and how the Government's attempt to connect communities went horribly awry, the dreams of Frank Masi, the song stylings if Lucille "Hairdresser" Cataldo, debating if Star Search stole Frank's idea, and why YouTube took over the realm of public access.

 If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.

TEAM

Ray Hebel

Robert W Schneider

Mark Schroeder

Billy Recce

Daniel Schwartzberg

Gabe Crawford

Natalie DeSavia

 AUDIO/VISUAL

Stairway To Stardom YouTube Channel

ARTICLES

NPR Interview

Dangerous Minds

The AV Club