In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 144: The Crow 30th Anniversary; 1970s Diet/Exercise Fad Fails, Forgotten 80s MTV Shows, First McDonald's Restaurant(5-15-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 144

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The 30th anniversary of the movie The Crow. Some amazing diet and exercise fad fails of the 1970s. MTV shows that came and went in the 1980s. The very first McDonald's restaurant.
Episode 144 will super-size your nostalgia cravings.
It kicks off with a look back at the movie The Crow on the week of its 30th anniversary. Marred somewhat by the tragic on-set death of star Brandon Lee this movie is a captivating story with a perfectly 90s soundtrack. We'll look at all of that and more in this segment.
Most people in their lives will struggle with their weight or overall health. Diets and exercise are the cure but can be boring at times. That being said some fitness fads of the past are not recommended for anyone. We go way Back In the Day this week to look at some diet and exercise fads that failed during the 1970s. You won't believe some of these were real.
Not all television shows can be hits. For every show that changes the entertainment landscape, countless fade away into the annals of history. As MTV was developing into a cultural phenomenon it tried many different show types. Some made it big, but on this week's Top 5 we'll look at those MTV shows that came and went in the 1980s.
The brand-new This Week In History and Time Capsule will look at the behemoth known as McDonald's as it celebrates the anniversary of the opening of its very first location.
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Speaker 00:

Hello world, and welcome to the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 144. The Crow, Its Legacy, and People of My Age We're going to go way, way back in the day and look at some failed weight loss and exercise fads of the 1970s. Some of these I can't believe were actually real things that real people tried. There's going to be a brand new top five. We're going to look at some of the forgotten MTV shows of the 1980s during those early days of music, television, shows that came and went. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule series centered around the very first McDonald's restaurant that opened. All of that is coming up right now on episode 144 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we going to talk about this week? My notes app on my phone is filled with a lot of fun stuff. Old movies, MTV, weight loss fads, McDonald's. Boy, that's a lot of... Differing topics. Thank you so much to everyone for tuning in to the In My Footsteps podcast. We're here in mid-May, staring down Memorial Day weekend. How is it where you folks are, wherever you're listening from? How's the weather? This is a great time of year on Cape Cod as the weather starts to really get good, but it's before the tourist season begins. So all of us locals get to visit the beaches and all the other attractions on the Cape, and they're not as crowded as they will be in a few weeks. Coming up at the end of this month, I'm going to be doing a segment on the podcast that are the most underrated cities and towns in New England. Kind of something that's now a throwback to the older days of the podcast, travel, road trip stuff. So for any of you that missed that sort of thing, I'm going to bring it back just to give you ideas of places maybe to visit if you're coming up to New England, Cape Cod in the summer. Of course, I want to thank my Patreon subscribers, Leo, Laurie, Mary Lou, and Ashley. If you want to become a Patreon subscriber, $5 a month, patreon.com at the end of my footsteps podcast gets you access to members only bonus podcast episodes, early access to the main podcast. So subscribers will get one of the segments from this show that I'm doing right now a week ahead of time. It's a great way to support what I do, the podcast, my content creation, all of my writing, the initial impressions blog 2.0, with all of the wackiness from my daily life. Of course, if spending money each month on Patreon is something that's not feasible, I totally understand. And luckily, there's a lot easier way to help me out, and that's sharing the podcast, word of mouth. Sharing the podcast once on social media is better than a thousand times liking my stories on Instagram. I mean, that really doesn't help anything when it comes to content creators. It would be sort of like if somebody was offering guitar lessons and they had a sheet of paper with their info on it. And at the bottom, the little strips of paper you could pull off that had a phone number or an email address. Liking an Instagram post with my info is sort of like walking up to that sheet with the guitar lesson info and just giving it a thumbs up and walking away. It's pretty useless. But enough of the intros here. Let's dive into the meat of this sandwich. 30 years ago this week, a very influential movie came out. It was huge during my high school days. So I'm going to go into the movie and kind of the impact that it had. So let's look at the 30th anniversary of the movie The Crow coming up right now. My years in high school were 1992 through 1996. During that time frame, there were a lot of influential movies that came out. Movies like Singles, Scream, Empire Records, Reality Bites. Offbeat ones like Tommy Boy and The Sandlot. There's a lot of movies that I associate with that time of my life, and one such movie is celebrating its 30th anniversary this week, and that is The Crow. The Crow was an action, fantasy, kind of dark gothic movie based on a comic book series. The comic books were written by James O'Barr, with the movie being directed by Alex Proyas. Now, if I was to sit back and just ask you, any of you out there, when you think of the movie The Crow, what's the first thing that pops into your mind? And I'm betting the vast, vast majority of you are going to say that's the movie where Brandon Lee died on the set. And that is very true. I think it kind of adds to the legend surrounding it. The movie itself is so much more. The mood to it. Like I said, it's very dark and gothy. As I said last week on the podcast, I wasn't going to really make this just a movie review, because honestly, I would want any of you that haven't seen it to watch it after I talk about it. But the gist of it is, it takes place in Detroit, and on the eve of their wedding, rock musician Eric Draven is murdered, thrown from his apartment window, while his fiancée Shelly is raped and assaulted. eventually dying from her injuries at the hospital. On the one-year anniversary of their deaths, this young girl, Sarah, that they had been caring for because she didn't really have a mother, her mother was absentee, she visits their graves, and at that point in time, a crow lands on Eric Draven's grave, and he's resurrected to get revenge on the gang that murdered them. What happens after that is a systematic... stalking, hunting, and killing of these gang members by Eric Draven with the help of Sergeant Albrecht, played by Ernie Hudson. He accompanied Shelly to the hospital when she was dying of her wounds, so Eric Draven is naturally drawn to him. Ernie Hudson, if his name doesn't ring a bell, he was Winston Zedmore in the Ghostbusters series. The crow itself is kind of the guide that brings Eric Draven to find each of the gang members. Brandon Lee's performance as Eric Draven, it reminds me a little bit of Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight, where he's so captivating and charismatic in his delivery and how he acts that it's hard to take your eyes off of him on the screen. I don't want to spoil the ending of this movie for anyone that hasn't seen it, but I can say the good guys win just to give you that much. The nuts and bolts of this movie is that it was released May 13th, 1994 in the United States. It grossed $94 million on a budget of $23 million, making it a hit movie, and its popularity has only grown over the years. I think partially because they had three sequels to it that weren't really good, so people naturally fall back on the original. Rumor has it that they're going to make a reboot of this movie in 2024. I don't know where you people fall as far as reboots go. I think they are so overdone in Hollywood, like they don't have any new ideas, so they just take old movies and just remake them, which is so lazy. On March 31st, 1993, during filming of this movie, Brandon Lee was shot on set. It's one of those one in a million things that happened. The scene itself where he was shot is at the beginning of the movie. Naturally, the footage of that is not in the movie. So if you look, you won't find it. Michael Massey's character Fun Boy shoots Brandon Lee, Eric Draven. after he witnesses the rape and assault of his fiancee. A lot of times these prop guns use dummy cartridges, so fitted with bullets but no primer or powder, because it just looks more realistic. The issues came with time and money constraints, so rather than purchasing commercial dummy cartridges, the film's prop crew created their own by pulling the bullets from live rounds, dumping the powder charge but not the primer, then reinserting the bullets. The issue came with having not removed the primer, that the primer could then detonate with enough energy to launch a bullet and lodge it in the barrel. So in this fatal scene in the movie, which called for the revolver to be actually fired at Brandon Lee from a distance of about 12 to 15 feet, The dummy cartridges were exchanged for blank rounds. They featured live powder charge and primer, but no bullet, thus allowing the gun to be fired without the risk of an actual projectile. That all sounds well and good, but the production company had sent the firearms specialist home early. The responsibility for the guns was given to a prop assistant who wasn't aware of the rule to inspect all firearms before and after any handling So that meant the barrel was not checked for obstructions when time came to load it with the blank rounds. Since there was a bullet from the dummy round already trapped in the barrel, which they call a squib load, this caused the .44 Magnum bullet to be fired out of the barrel, virtually the same force as if it was a real gun really loaded and really shot, and it struck Brandon Lee in the abdomen and mortally wounded him. Brandon Lee died not too long after, and there was the talk of maybe just scrapping the movie altogether. Miramax Studios picked up the movie and they wanted to release it in theaters, so they gave $8 million more to complete the production of the movie. And since most of Brandon Lee's scenes were done, they used his stunt double and they actually used digital face replacement to superimpose Brandon Lee's face onto the body of the stunt double. Brandon Lee's death on the set of the movie The Crow naturally harkened back to the strange circumstances surrounding the death of his father, legendary martial artist and actor Bruce Lee. And this led to talk of a curse on the Lee family. That has actually helped give this movie more of a mythical feature to it. For me, I found the story fascinating, captivating. I didn't even know of the Crow comic book series. And I only knew of Brandon Lee from his previous movie, Rapid Fire. I'm not going to lie. In my, I think it was sophomore year that this movie came out, the legend behind what happened to Brandon Lee made me want to see it more because I was grunge. I was grunge alternative with the long sleeve flannel shirts and the torn jeans and listening to that type of music. I wasn't so much goth. Maybe to those out there that grew up in that time that weren't either. Maybe you see grunge and goth as kind of two halves of the same whole. Maybe that'll be a segment for a podcast in the future. What the hell was the difference between being grunge and goth in the 90s? That was part of what drew me to The Crow. Grunge. The music. The soundtrack itself has a lot of big time, big heavy hitters of 90s music. Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Helmet, Pantera, Violent Femmes. For me, though, I was and still am a huge Stone Temple Pilots fan. Their song, Big Empty, is kind of the one that's most associated with the Crow soundtrack because it became the biggest hit from that soundtrack. A fun little story about the Crow soundtrack. When the movie was first being released, worked on in 1993. Stone Temple Pilots, they had only released their album Core in 1992. Big Empty, the song, wasn't a thing. They actually had a song they had written when they were first getting started. They weren't even called Stone Temple Pilots. They were called Mighty Joe Young, and they had written a song called Only Dying, which is a great song. It's underground, having to Try to find it back then in the mid to late 90s for me was pretty hard. I got a lot of viruses on my mother's computer trying to find it from different music download sites. This song, Only Dying, was originally going to be the Stone Temple Pilots' contribution to the Crow soundtrack until Brandon Lee's death. Then they said it was kind of too on-the-nose music. So Stone Temple Pilots wrote another song, Big Empty, which became an even bigger hit. Even though Brandon Lee only had a few film credits to his portfolio before his death, he's still remembered. Another movie that I highly recommend if you haven't seen it is Dragon, The Bruce Lee Story, which was kind of a biopic about Bruce Lee. It came out a month after Brandon Lee's death in April 1993. In doing some research for this segment of the podcast, I was looking to see if there were any roles that Brandon Lee was being considered for at the time of his death. All I know is he was contracted for sequels to The Crow, so the 1996 sequel City of Angels, he would have been in that. I think ultimately The Crow was to be Brandon Lee's breakout role, which would have led to more He was not really unknown at the time, but he only had a few movies and TV credits. The Crow is a movie I could watch over and over again, and I remember renting it several times from Blockbuster Video or Hollywood Video back after it came out on VHS in 1994. If you have never seen The Crow, I highly recommend watching it. You can find it anywhere now. It's so much easier than when I was growing up. Also, definitely check out the soundtrack if you're into darker alternative type music. And maybe seek out that song Only Dying by Stone Temple Pilots when they were known as Mighty Joe Young. And see if you agree that it should have been scrapped from the soundtrack after Brandon Lee's death. The Crow was definitely a hugely influential movie at the time and on me as a teenager growing up in the 1990s. Want to supersize that? Well, this week in history, we're going back 84 years ago to May 15th, 1940 and the opening of the very first McDonald's restaurant ever. McDonald's today is a juggernaut of fast food and restaurants in general. There are more than 14,000 locations in the United States and more than 40,000 locations worldwide. When you think of fast food, the first place I would say 99% of you would come up with is McDonald's. The irony is, when McDonald's first started, it was a barbecue restaurant opened in San Bernardino, California by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald. For several years, the restaurant just went as it was as a barbecue joint. It wasn't until 1948 when the McDonald brothers revamped their business model. They focused on a limited menu, speedy service. This innovation was what laid the groundwork for the modern fast food experience. They introduced the Speedy Service System, spelled S-P-E-E-D-E-E. That was even their first mascot before Ronald McDonald. It was basically... a chef with a burger head, and its name was Speedy. So McDonald's took a leap forward in 1948 with these changes, but it wasn't until 1955 when Ray Kroc, who was a milkshake machine salesman, partnered with the McDonald brothers. Kroc envisioned McDonald's as more than just a local restaurant. He saw it as a franchise opportunity with the potential for nationwide expansion. And it was from this point on that McDonald's started growing rapidly with new locations popping up all across the United States, leading to there being over 40,000 McDonald's locations. There are more McDonald's locations worldwide than there are people living in the town that I live in now. And probably it's that way for most of you listening. If the town you live in has less than 40,000 people, there are more McDonald's restaurants than there are people in your town. Some of the key milestones for McDonald's as they grew were things like the Golden Arches. Those are iconic. They were first introduced in 1953, and they've become synonymous with the McDonald's brand. All you have to do is see them. You know what they are. They're one of the most recognizable symbols in the world. There's the Big Mac, which debuted in 1968. It's one of McDonald's most popular menu items. You even know the ingredients to it thanks to the commercial. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. They introduced drive-thru service in 1975, which made it possible to get your meal from McDonald's and never even get out of your car. That paired well with the Happy Meal, which they launched in 1979. God help you if you were parents bringing your kids out to eat, trying to get them in and out of the car, it would probably be tough. So you just go to the drive-thru and get your Happy Meal and be on your way. McDonald's has given jobs to millions of people. They've set the template for a lot of fast food restaurants, just the basics of how to run your business. They became a huge cultural touchstone, influencing everything from entertainment to fashion and language. Some people hate it because it's definitely not healthy, despite the fact that they try to give you healthy options. But millions and millions more love it. They used to have that sign telling you how many billions had been served. Then they finally gave up when the number got too high. But the very first person of those billions and billions served at McDonald's came with the McDonald Brothers opening the very first McDonald's 84 years ago this week in history. Now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're going to stick to that same day. The first McDonald's opens. What was going on in the world of pop culture on May 15th, 1940? The number one song was I'll Never Smile Again by Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra. The song was originally written by Ruth Lowe, but interestingly, the vocals for this song were recorded by a young Frank Sinatra and his Pied Piper's backup band. The song was number one for 12 weeks. with it being number one on Billboard's national list of best-selling retail records. So there was no Hot 100 back then. The number one movie was Rebecca, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing 24 cents. The film was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Sir Lawrence Olivier, as a mysterious widower. and Joan Fontaine as his second wife, with Rebecca being his first wife who died under mysterious circumstances. The movie made about $6 million on a budget of just over $1.2 million, and is 92% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, plus it's an early Alfred Hitchcock film, so I think it comes highly recommended. And there were no TV shows back then in 1940. So the number one radio show was the Chase and Sanborn Hour. This was a variety show sponsored by the Chase and Sanborn Coffee Company. It was on the radio from 1929 to 1948. And it had all kinds of comedy and music with lots of famous people being on it like Jimmy Durante, W.C. Fields, etc. Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie, which I don't know how that would work for radio. I could do two different voices now and tell you I'm a ventriloquist. If you couldn't see it, what would it matter? And if you were around back then, May 15th, 1940, you're in the market for a new home. Well, you're in luck. It's the dying days, but you can still get yourself a pre-cut home through the Sears catalog. This includes two different versions of a Cape Cod style home. House A had two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, and that would cost you $886 or just under $20,000 today. House B had two bedrooms, kitchen, living room, and a dining room. That would cost you $1,097 or about $24,400 today. Tens of thousands of these homes were sold. I'm assuming you had to buy the land and probably get people to build it for you. Unless you wanted to be like the Three Stooges and build it yourself and have everything sideways and ruined. But yes, for years, Sears Catalog sold pre-cut, pre-made houses that you could buy. That'll wrap up another This Week in History and another Time Capsule. We're going to travel now to the early days of MTV for this top five as we look at the top five forgotten MTV shows of the 1980s. Let's see how many of these you used to watch. Back in the dark ages, there was actually a time when MTV played music. I know young people out there listening to this, it's shocking. There was a time when MTV was a revolutionary idea, concept, music television. On August 1st, 1981, MTV launched. In the past on the podcast, I've actually done a couple of different segments about MTV. Way back in episode 31, I did a segment about the launch of MTV for its 40th anniversary. More recently, in episode 135 of the podcast, I did a top five about the musical artists that were played the most on MTV's first day. So the videos that got played the most by certain artists. So if you want to go check out anything about those topics, you can go back into the archives. But this week's top five is going to be a little bit different. We're going to look at some forgotten MTV shows from the 1980s. The channel has had some major successes over its 40 plus years. MTV Unplugged, Beavis and Butthead, Remote Control, Headbangers Ball, Total Request Live, 120 Minutes. These are all the shows that I associate with MTV. If you're younger and you're watching it, you're probably more associating it with some of the reality shows that have basically been what MTV is over the last 20 years. I scoured the archives and did my research to find MTV shows that came and went pretty quick. A few of these you might remember, but all of them are kind of the trial and error of a new television station. As with all of these top five lists, there are some honorable mentions. So, honorable mentions for forgotten MTV shows of the 1980s include... Profiles in Rock, which was around in 1981-82, which literally was profiles, biographies of musical artists. International Hour, which was around in 1986-87, which was an hour of videos of musicians not from the United States, typically over in Europe. Friday Night Party Zone, which was around in 1986-87. It's more upbeat videos, dance party videos for a Friday night, kind of what you'd expect in the title. And Saturday Night Concert, which was around from 1981 to 87, and it was a weekly show with a live concert, a full concert from some famous musical artist. Those were the honorable mentions. Did you remember any of those? The Saturday Night Concert, I think you might remember because it was around for several years. But let's get into the actual top five. Boy, this is going to be good right here. Top five forgotten MTV shows of the 1980s. Let's start with number one, the Yahoo Sirius show. Boy, where do I even start with this? So for those of you that don't know, Yahoo Sirius is an Australian actor. He had a brief, very brief time where he was a mainstream star in the United States, thanks to his movie Young Einstein. His real name isn't Yahoo Serious. Well, I mean, it is now. He changed it. He was born Greg Pede. Just in case you wondered what was wrong with his parents to name him Yahoo Serious. This show was on, very briefly, 1989. And it is what you think it is. It's a talk show with Yahoo Serious as the star. I had no idea this existed. And when I saw the name, I was like, oh my God, Yahoo Serious. I hadn't heard his name in 30 years. If you go look on YouTube, you can find a few clips from the Yahoo Serious show. I can only assume MTV was trying to capitalize on Young Einstein, which wasn't that big of a hit. But once they realized Yahoo Serious wasn't going to be a long-term star, they got rid of the show. Number two was Friday Night Video Fights. This was on between 1982 and 86. This show was hosted by VJ Martha Quinn, and it was kind of self-explanatory. There would be Two different videos from two different artists, and they would fight it out. You would vote on who would win. There'd be such epic battles like Def Leppard vs. Quiet Riot, or David Lee Roth vs. The Monkees. The show was a hit, but it had a couple of problems. One was that you had to call a specific number to vote, so you'd get charged for that. That was a big no-no in the mid-1980s with actual landline telephones. And some of the videos that would lose would kind of brand those bands as loser bands. So I think some of them were glad when the show got canceled in 1986. And it was coincidentally replaced by Friday Night Party Zone, one of the honorable mentions. Number three is the basement tapes. This aired from 1983 to 1986. This show was also hosted by Martha Quinn, and it featured lesser-known or unsigned artists. Martha Quinn actually won a Cable Ace Award for hosting this show in 1985. The main selling point of this show... was that the videos that got played by these unsigned artists would be put up to a popular vote, similar to the Friday Night Video fights. But whoever won the vote, their video would then be put into rotation on MTV. So you talk about a huge opportunity. The first ever band to win on basement tapes was a Seattle-based band called Rail. And their claim to fame before winning the first show was supporting Van Halen on their tour in 1980. In doing my research for this segment, it was hard to find any sort of comprehensive list of winners on the show. But as far as I could see, there were none that really went on to do anything of note. Number four is Closet Classics Capsule from 1987 and 1988. This was an interesting concept for a show, because this was during the midday, and it'd be a half hour of music videos from the 50s and 60s being played in the 1980s, which is actually scary when you think about it. If they did this same show today, they'd be playing music from the 90s and 2000s. Oh my god, it just dawned on me. The show probably would have been more fun for the parents that were home with their kids during the day. Because it would have been music from either when they were young or music they remember their parents playing. God, I keep going back to the fact that if they did this show now, it would be 90s and 2000s music. What is happening with time? But speaking of time, finally, number five on the list of top five forgotten MTV shows of the 1980s. is Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes. Andy Warhol was an abstract artist. This show was on the air between 1985 and 87, but I could only find five episodes that ever aired. The 15 Minutes comes from an Andy Warhol quote saying that everybody gets their own 15 minutes of fame, despite Andy Warhol being kind of weird. He did have some big guests on his show during that time, including Debbie Harry from Blondie, Rico Kasich from The Cars, Yoko Ono, William S. Burroughs, and even a very young Courtney Love, which is wild. The main reason the show ended was Andy Warhol's death in February 1987. But that wraps up the top five. I can tell you in doing my research, there were dozens more shows. There were dozens of reality shows, but I didn't care about anything that aired on MTV after the turn of the century. But it was wild to see how many different shows tried and failed in the early days of MTV. Do you remember any of those? You can find clips of all of those shows on the internet. So you can sit back and remember what it was like when MTV actually played music. This might be a segment where I have to control my laughter many times. In my day job, I work as a personal trainer, exercise therapist, helping people get in the best shape they can at whatever stage they are in life. And it's true that the vast majority of people listening to this or living in the world At some point, we'll try to take control of their personal health, whether through exercise or diet. And the real reality I have learned as a personal trainer, that there are no real secrets. It's exercise more and eat better. That will help you. But I wasn't always a trainer. And growing up, especially in my 20s, I tried everything, all of the tricks to try to get in the best shape I could. What we're going to do here is go way, way back in the day to the 1970s and see what some of the failed weight loss or exercise fads were. And some of these I can't believe are real, but yet I can. Those of you who are older, 50s and 60s, most of these you'll probably remember. Me growing up as a child of the 80s, a few of these I remembered. because the fads didn't just end when 1979 ticked over to 1980. Man, I had fun researching this. I've got a good list here, so get ready for some laughs and please don't try any of these. First off is the unfortunately named AIDS.

Speaker 03:

I've tried fad diets, powders, pills. Still, my weight's been up and down like a yo-yo until the AIDS plan taught me how to take off weight and help keep it off.

Speaker 01:

AIDS may taste like a candy, but AIDS contains one of the most effective appetite suppressants you can buy.

Speaker 00:

The full name was AIDS Reducing Plan Candy. It was spelled A-Y-D-S. It was appetite suppressant candy with different flavors, chocolate, peanut butter, peppermint. Butterscotch, all that stuff. AIDS was around for decades before the illness became front and center. That's what the main issue was with the AIDS candy. By 1985, they had decided to change the name, fortunately, to not have it associated with an illness that was killing everyone that got it. South Park actually poked fun at this when they had Jared Fogle. Boy, this has aged well. They had him on South Park, or at least, you know, the fictional version of him. And they asked how he lost all of his weight, and he said he got AIDS. What he meant was diet AIDS to help him with his nutrition, but they didn't specify it. So it's sort of like getting this candy in 1983 and saying, yeah, I just had AIDS, and now I'm losing weight. You could see where that wouldn't go over well. Another one that was big in the 1970s is the drinking man's diet, which is a low carb diet, but featured a lot of alcohol. This originated in a 1964 book by Robert Cameron. And the idea was that they didn't encourage drinking, but knowing that a good majority of people were drinking in America, they decided to craft a diet around it. The book was a success, selling nearly two and a half million copies. So I guess a lot of people wanted to know how to lose weight while continuing to drink. Despite the fact that it sold that many copies, just a year after the book came out in 1965, Time Magazine did a review on this drinking man's diet and immediately found it to be total nonsense, no scientific basis, which is a lot of these diet fads. There's a lot of mights and shoulds and coulds with these diets. It's sort of a protective thing for the people that create them. Instead of saying whatever diet or diet pill will have you lose weight, it says it could. Just so that when it doesn't work, you can't sue. One of the absolute kings of exercise fad failures is the sauna suit. The idea behind it is that you wear clothing that will heat your body so you'll sweat more like you would in a sauna. You're just supposed to wear this suit that's typically a top and bottom, pants and shirt, while doing whatever you do. And you'll sweat more and then supposedly burn fat. But in reality, what you end up losing is the water through sweat. So if you're out doing some kind of hardcore cardio running in a sauna suit in the heat, You're going to get rapidly dehydrated, end up on the side of the road just cooked inside your sauna suit. I still see these things at Walmart, at Target. You would think after 50 years with there being no real success stories with a sauna suit, they would just get rid of it. But I guess there's suckers that are looking for shortcuts. Another supposed miracle weight loss diet that popped up in the 1970s was the grapefruit diet. This came from the notion that there was supposed to be some kind of fat-burning enzyme in the grapefruit. This is not true. But interestingly, eating more grapefruits as a part of this grapefruit diet, it did help people lose weight because they were eating healthier. So it wasn't so much a miracle fat-melting enzyme in the grapefruit, it was just eating the fruit in general. I wish there were secrets and such like that for diets and exercise that would get you to where you want to be faster, safely, but it's really not true. One diet pill that you likely will remember if you're of my age group was Dexatrim.

Speaker 02:

Today, there's a diet pill that can help you lose weight without being hungry and without caffeine to make you nervous. Just one caffeine free Dexatrim works all day, morning through bedtime to control your appetite and help you lose weight.

Speaker 03:

The pounds came off and I feel great.

Speaker 02:

You can lose weight, feel great with today's caffeine free Dexatrim.

Speaker 00:

Now, Dexatrim is still around in one form or another, but I'm talking about the original Dexatrim that got pulled off the market. The original Dexatrim formula was pulled in 2001. It's a diet pill, appetite suppressant pill. Hell, I was just in the supermarket earlier today. I saw Dexatrim there. A Yale University of Medicine study found the link between the ingredients in the original Dexatrim formula and hemorrhagic strokes in females. And granted, not everybody that took Dexatrim or takes any fat-burning pill is going to have negative side effects, but knowing there's the risk, is it worth it? You should stick to something tastier, like the cookie diet that was around in the 70s. This is along the same lines as the things that you find in stores today, like Atkins chips or low-carb cookies or healthy cookies, if there is a such thing. The cookie diet was created by a man named Sanford Siegel in 1975, and he claimed that these cookies would curb hunger based on certain amino acids that were baked into the cookies. The idea is you would eat up to nine of these cookies throughout the day and then have a quote-unquote sensible dinner, five to seven hundred calories. A lot of that comes down to self-control. The reasons that I don't have lots of junk food is because I don't trust myself. If I buy a container of Oreo cookies, I am highly likely to eat way more than whatever the suggested serving size is, one quarter of a cookie. It is said that this cookie diet is still around the recipe to make these cookies with whatever amino acids are in them, but it definitely peaked in the 1970s. I'm all for scaring people straight when it comes to their health fitness diet. But if you were faced with something called the last chance diet, how would you feel? Like you either do this diet right or you're going to get thrown off the bridge. It was created by Dr. Roger Lynn in 1976. You were supposed to drink this very low calorie liquid protein concoction. And then you didn't have to exercise after. So it's like the magic miracle that everyone wants. The problem came when people were only drinking this proline drink, which is what they called it. It was less than 400 calories. So they were having 400 calories in a day, dropping 10 to 30% of their body weight, just like that, and then dropping dead. Yes, people were dying on this last chance diet, which is why the name of it is so appropriate. It's like if this diet isn't a success for you, don't worry, you'll probably be dead anyway. The irony was that this protein drink, it was low in protein and it was collagen and low in vitamins and minerals. You'd probably have a better chance of drinking a bottle of Yoohoo or Nestle's Quick than stupid last chance diet. One that sounded like it would have been a lot of fun is the wine and eggs diet. This became popular in Vogue magazine in the 70s, and obviously it consists of lots of wine and lots of eggs. I found a site that has the article printed from Vogue magazine, what you're supposed to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Breakfast was one hard-boiled egg, one glass of white wine, preferably Chablis, and one glass of black coffee. There's your breakfast. Lunch is two eggs, preferably hard-boiled. Poached is all right as well. Two more glasses of white wine, preferably Chablis, and another cup of black coffee. Finally, for dinner, five ounces of grilled steak. It says... The rest of the white wine, and then it has in parentheses, up to one bottle per day, and then a cup of black coffee. So based on this diet, you're going to drink up to seven bottles of wine per week? What the hell kind of insanity is that? When you take it all in total, could you imagine that? Up to a bottle of wine and three cups of coffee every day? The coffee would be fine, but good lord, the wine. No wonder why this thing didn't really take hold. So I will, in full transparency, say the diet is supposed to be three days you do this and you'll lose up to five pounds. But come on, how many people that would have tried this and see the quote-unquote results after a few days are going to stop after three? By the time three days hits, three bottles of wine, they've already got a problem with drinking. Man, that's insane. One of the funniest things that I saw when researching this topic was something called the slender bender. There's pictures of advertisements for it. It's basically, it's like a lawn chair that you would do sit-ups using. Honestly, this looks like a lawn chair that you would have gotten in the 70s and 80s. And it comes with a booklet that shows you diagrams of different exercises you can do with it. Essentially, they're all sit-up versions. $34.95 it was going for with some of these ads for this stupid thing. You'd be looking at about $200 if you were going to buy one of these slender bender chairs today. At least with the crap like the sauna suits, they're like $10. Could you imagine $200 for a lawn chair to do sit-ups with? It's supposed to be for housewives that can't get to the gym. I wonder how many 70s kids were traumatized looking on from the crib as it looked like the lawn chair was eating their mother. Or maybe it worked. Any of you out there ever get a slender bender chair? Last but not least for these failed weight loss and exercise fads of the 70s was air shorts. The pictures of these will, if they don't make you laugh, you might not have a soul. They're along the same lines of the sauna suit that you inflate these things around your waist, abdomen, legs, and it'll make you sweat and burn more calories. It says to inflate them and then do some sort of exercises or even housework. It looks like you were going to be dressed as the Michelin Man for Halloween, but you could only afford the bottom part. The sad thing is... People probably bought these thinking, wear it around my midsection, it will burn fat there. But there's no such thing as spot burning. Unless you go to a plastic surgeon and get lipo, your metabolism is your whole body. That's why when people start dieting, those that are overweight especially, you see the weight loss first in their face because the fat is burned evenly throughout the body. So the idea is you've got the least amount of fat in your face, so you'll see the results in your face first. Oh, but if you buy those air shorts, you'll burn it just around your waist and butt. So there you go. 10 failed weight loss and exercise fads of the 70s. Man, some of these, I can't believe they were real. But then again, there's 80s, 90s, 2000s, different shades of the same coin. People looking for the fast track to get in shape, which is totally understandable. Unfortunately, once I became a trainer, I came to the sad reality that it's just not true. In the future, I'll do segments like this for the other decades, especially going back further, 60s and 50s. There was probably insane stuff back then, even worse than the 70s. If that's possible. But until next week, it's time to wrap this show up. Pop the top on the end of the show. It's an energy drink. Remember that. Thank you all for tuning in. I love doing these shows and it's made even better knowing that some of you out there, it's appointment listening for you. Although I gear it more towards my age group and Generation X in general, you don't have to be of this age to appreciate the nostalgia. And I'm always working hard researching, trying to find something that'll be interesting for the next episode. Next week is episode 145. We're going to have a segment about 1980s educational children's shows. Oh, there's a lot of great ones there. I'm going to dive into the madness that was the game Tetris, dreaming about it. I bet you can hear that song. And I'll dive into the story behind my first race that I ran in almost seven years that happened a few weeks ago. I'll just say it's way more than just a race. There's a lot more meaning to the story. You may have heard last week I wished my Uncle John an early happy birthday. In a shocking turn of events, not long after I put that episode up, he got very, very sick. He was very close to dying. I'm not going to get into the details of what went on, but it was scary for a little while there. Thankfully, he's on the mend. And although he hates being in the hospital, doesn't want to do the rehab... I'll take that problem over how bad things were, you know, for a little while there. So get well soon to my Uncle John. Hopefully you listen to this. I told my mom to make sure you listen to the podcast. Listen to all of them. Not just if you're trapped in a hospital bed like my uncle. Take the podcast with you. It's beautiful weather out. I'm looking outside right now. It's sunny. These podcasts are perfect timing. 45, 50, 55 minutes. Go out for a walk. Enjoy it. If you're on Cape Cod, May the 24th, 1 p.m. at the West Dennis Library, I'll be speaking about Searching for the Lady of the Dunes, my true crime book. Also about the Lady of the Dunes documentary by Frank Durant. Come on out. Hear all about this infamous Cape Cod murder case that's 50 years old this year. Check out my website, ChristopherSetterlin.com. Links to all nine of my books. Find me all over social media. Check out the insanity of my initial impressions 2.0 blog. Like I said at the top of the show, you can become a member over on patreon.com slash inmyfootstepspodcast. $5 a month gets you access to bonus episodes of the podcast, early access to the main show, early access to YouTube videos. But if that's not feasible, sharing the show, going to wherever you get the podcast, rating it, reviewing it, that draws more people in. Because obviously I'm going to preach and market and hype up this show. But it means more coming from listeners. Seeing the reviews of the podcast is good for my mental health. And that's the big thing. Take care of your mental health. The weather's gotten nicer. Things are in bloom. Summer is right around the corner. Hopefully, you will have more time with friends, family, being outside, getting that vitamin D from the sun. Just wear sunscreen so you don't get burned. And lean into those things that make you happy, whatever it may be. If it's not hurting anyone else, then go for it. And I'll keep pumping out the content. Look for all my updates on social media. I'm trying to do a lot more marketing of the podcast. beat you over the head with how much I like it until you listen. But until next time, folks, this has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew that. And I'll talk to you all again soon.

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Christopher Setterlund

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