The Unlikely World of "Sweepers"

"They spend hours a day entering sweepstakes..."

(While the applicable taxes on any winnings are mentioned in this NBC Nightly News segment from last night, the fact that they would total hundreds of thousands of dollars on the nearly $1 million in total winnings claimed by the 'master sweeper' interviewed went unremarked upon.)

Chuck E. Cheese Makeover - Surprise Atari Link

"The company that operates the chain of children’s pizza restaurants is retiring the giant rodent’s outdated image... CEC Entertainment Inc. says it plans to launch a national ad campaign Thursday with a revamped image of Chuck E. Cheese as a hip, electric-guitar-playing rock star,"  according to THIS article in The Washington Post today. (You can see the new version of the mascot in the Los Angeles Times HERE.)

This impending change sounds terrible to me.  But the last line of the article caught my eye anyway. "The chain was founded by Nolan Bushnell, who also co-founded Atari and Pong."  This revelation surprised me at first.  But the more I thought about it, it wasn't really a surprise at all. Atari turned 40 itself earlier this week, according to THIS article in the USA Today. "The Atari 2600, launched in 1977, was the first video game console in millions of homes, long before the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985), Sony's PlayStation (1994) and Microsoft's Xbox (2001)."

I'd never heard the name 'Nolan Bushnell' before.  Who is this genius of innovation? According to his Wikipedia article, he's still alive and is 69 years old.  It sounds like he had a great 1977.  That year he sold Atari, which he'd co-founded only 5 years earlier,  to Warner Communications (now Time Warner) for $28 million, the same year the iconic Atari 2600 was launched. He also opened the first Chuck E. Cheese that year.  But by November 1978, he was forced out at Atari and by 1981 he'd turned over day-to-day operations at Chuck E. Cheese. By 1984, the computer game market had crashed and Atari was split up and sold off.  Chuck E. Cheese declared bankruptcy later the same year.   Bushnell has continued to be a serial entrepreneur, apparently.  But he's never had another year like 1977.

Unintended Consequences of Extreme Couponing

I thought that THIS story from MSNBC.com was interesting in a couple of ways.  It details some unexpected problems that have emerged across the country as the trend of 'extreme couponing' (i.e. using dozens of coupons to cut grocery bills to near zero) continues to grow.

One unintended consequence, apparently, is a rash of thefts of stacks of Sunday newspapers from vending machines, as shoppers seek out more-and-more coupons. 

This article also revealed to me that most grocery stores apparently have detailed, if unwritten, policies limiting coupon use; like limits on the total number of coupons that can be redeemed at once, or a limit of one product per coupon.

Inventor of "Trivial Pursuit" Has Died

Charis Haney, a Canadian who co-invented the board game Trivial Pursuit, has died at the age of 59. He came up with the game one night in 1979 over beers in his living room with fellow journalist Scott Abbott. He was 29 years old. The game, introduced to the public in 1981, became a full fledged national phenomenon in America by 1984. Twenty million units were sold in that year alone.  It was even out-selling Monopoly, apparently. 


On hindsight, the game's popularity peaked that year. Though a TV game show based on the game, hosted by Chuck Woolery, was aired in the mid-1990s. (You can watch a clip HERE, but it's pretty bland.) The game has gone on to sell a total of 100 million units worldwide since it's introduction. The rights were sold outright to Hasbro in 2008 for $80 million. Not bad for a couple of guys who were dismissed initially at the Montreal Toy Fair as a couple of "con artists" according to Chris Haney's New York Times obit HERE. "But they needed more investors and turned to friends in their newsrooms. One problem, according to The Globe and Mail of Canada, was that people had heard they were 'con artists.' As an example, the newspaper pointed to a chain letter the men had started that proved profitable for the originators but not to those down the line. They nonetheless succeeded in raising $40,000 from 32 investors. Mr. Haney’s mother was not among them, however: he had talked her out of investing for fear she would lose her money."

30th Anniversary of Pac Man

It's the 30th anniversary of the arcade video game Pac Man, apparently.  I was never a big fan of video games myself as a kid; neither the stand-up ones in arcades that took quarters, nor the Atari-style home consoles.  But I definitely remember the "Pac Man Fever" that swept the country 30 years ago, which is recalled in this 2 minute piece from the NBC Nightly News last night.  If you don't remember all of this craziness, you can watch the 30 second intro to the Pac Man cartoon HERE, or a 30 second commercial for Pac Man cereal HERE, or one for Pac Man canned pasta HERE.  Or this one HERE for 7-Up pitched by Pac Man.

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Mount St. Helens Eruption Souvenirs

Mount St. Helens in Washington state famously erupted on this date back in 1980, killing 57 people. I mostly remember the event, however, for the torrent of merchandising that followed in its wake across the country.  For reasons I found as inexplicable then as I do now, this spectacular, if tragic, natural phenomenon somehow morphed within days into a sort of national obsession, at least for a time. I remember having a little bottle of 'souvenir' volcanic ash like the ones pictured above myself. I also remember seeing the t-shirts everywhere, too.  But who would hang a pennant on their bedroom wall commemorating a volcanic eruption that killed over 50 people?  That's the power of fads, I guess.

1939 World's Fair Opened On This Date

The New York World's Fair, held in Flushing Meadows, opened on this date in 1939. Staged just as the United States was emerging from the Great Depression, the Fair was an abject financial failure at the time.  But it's art deco design sensibility, exemplified by the Trylon and Perisphere at left, as well as its futuristic themes have made it an object of enduring historical and artistic fascination. While the United States did not enter into WWII until over two years later, the Fair nonetheless reflected the fact that Europe was already on the verge of war.  Nazi Germany was the only major country not to participate in the Fair.  And when the Fair re-opened for it's second (and last) season in 1940, the Polish and Czech pavilions did not re-open with it. 


Embedded below is 4 minutes of color home movies taken at the Fair. In addition to containing fascinating footage of some of the Fair's most famous attractions like "Elektro" the smoking robot and the Futurama exhibit (a massive diorama of the United States with miniature houses and skyscrapers, roads and highways on which tiny model cars and trucks moved in perpetuity), this is most noteworthy in some ways because of how 'normal' it all looks, in many respects very much like an amusement park today.

Remember "Wacky Packages"?

Do you remember Wacky Packages?   They were illustrated trading cards that parodied consumer products, mostly with Mad magazine-style juvenile irreverence. ("Crest" toothpaste became "Crust.")  They were for kids and were sold in convenience stores in the 1970s and 1980s, like baseball cards.  


Wacky Packages created a collective frenzy at my elementary school around 1979 or so.  Certain cards were quickly deemed to be more rare than others.  And a usurious (and ultimately disruptive) aftermarket sprung up, centered around a suddenly compassionless fourth grader from a  rich family who could produce a shoebox of the things from his desk if asked, but only for "serious buyers."   Suddenly, all the surrounding convenience stores in the area were totally sold out of them.  I can remember dashing off the school bus one afternoon and sprinting home,  breathlessly begging my mother, with the desperation of a junkie, to drive me to some random liquor store in a sketchy part of town about 10 miles away, based solely on a rumor which had swept the school that a new shipment of Wacky Packages was on sale there.


As it turns out, there was more artistic merit behind them than anyone might have thought.  They were actually created by a young man in his 20s named Art Spiegelman, the same Art Spiegelman who 20 years later won a Pulitzer prize for his illustrated Holocaust memoir Maus, and then went on to become the art director of the New Yorker magazine for 10 years. 


If you remember Wacky Packages too, then you might enjoy the 4 minute video embedded below, which features some of them, one after another, set to dance/trance music.

Fads: Bankrupt By Beanie Babies

Remember the Beanie Babies craze of the late 1990s? Embedded below is an 8 minute documentary that a college student made detailing how, when he was a younger kid, his father became caught up in the mania and ultimately bought 15,000 or so Beanie Babies at the peak of the craze as an "investment."

At one point, the mother (who is clearly a little embittered) says of her husband, "it was always, 'oh, this is for their college education.' And I used to joke, 'what are they going to do, take a basket full of Beanie Babies into the admissions office?'..... Probably for about 6 months from when we started buying them, we were able to kinda realize that we could buy them and then turn around and make a profit on them. Although that was plan, it never happened because we never sold them, we just bought them. We missed that boat. "

Fads: Rubik's Cube

When you think about it, national fads are fascinating in the abstract as social phenomena. Remember that sudden collective epiphany in December 1996 by seemingly every "loving" parent in America that they had to buy their child a "Tickle Me Elmo" for Christmas (leading to near riots at dawn at stores across the country)? Or when millions of Americans, young and old, found themselves compelled to wear t-shirts in the summer of 1980 proudly emblazoned with the phrase, "I shot JR"? There's something very intriguing about the unlikely combination of the mass hysteria created out of nowhere, and the utter triviality of the underlying cause. Perhaps counterintuitively, it seems to me that fads like these seem to sweep the country much less frequently today (in the internet age) than they did before.

But I'm not as interested in the sociology of fads as I am in just remembering the moments themselves. In that spirit embedded below is a 6 minute segment from an early 1980s episode of "That's Incredible!" The first 3 minutes feature a nationwide "Cube-A-Thon" tournament to find the person (well let's be honest: the teenaged boy) in America who could solve a Rubik's Cube the fastest. The haircuts and fashions in this clip are great. But could you imagine today thousands of people of all ages patiently lining up for hours in public for a chance to play with a little plastic cube whose solution is fundamentally mathematical? Those were the days...