In My Footsteps: A Gen-X Nostalgia Podcast

Episode 158: MTVs Celebrity Deathmatch; Weird 1970s News Stories; Favorite 1990s Athletes; Birth of the NFL(8-21-2024)

• Christopher Setterlund • Season 1 • Episode 158

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Fights to the death between clay versions of celebrities? Some of the weirdest but true news stories of the 1970s? My favorite athletes of the 90s? How could so much fun nostalgia be stuffed into one show? Carefully.
Episode 158 starts with news stories from the 1970s that are weird for different reasons. Some are hilarious, some are horrifying, some are so bizarre but one thing they have in common is that they are true.
Back In the Day there was a show that featured clay versions of celebrities fighting to the death. That show was Celebrity Deathmatch and it was fresh, new, and hilarious. We look at why this show was such a popular part of MTV for years and wonder about if it could be made today.   
This week's new Top 5 looks at the great decade that was the 1990s and more specifically some of the best (in my opinion) athletes that played then. Your lists will definitely vary.
There is a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule featuring the story of the birth of the NFL.
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Speaker 02:

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 158. We've always got a heaping helping of nostalgia, but this week the nostalgia is going to border on the weird, and we're going to start it off literally with the weird news stories of the 1970s. Some of these have to be heard to be believed. We'll continue with the weird, with the weird but fun, as we go way, way back in the day to look at MTV's infamous celebrity deathmatch television show. There'll be a brand new top five that are my top five favorite 1990s athletes. Are there any weird choices here? I don't know. And there'll be a brand new This Week in History and Time Capsule looking back at the birth of the National Football League. All of that is coming up right now on episode 158 of the In My Footsteps podcast because nostalgia is awesome. So what are we going to talk about this week? Welcome into the show. Thank you all for tuning in. We've got a lot of fun stuff to get into. Like I said, a lot of weird topics, quite literally. What's not weird is me starting off as I normally do by thanking my Patreon subscribers, Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Marguerite. If you want to become a subscriber, $5 a month gets you access to bonus podcast episodes. Early access to YouTube videos, early access to the main podcast. At some point there will be video podcasts. I've said for the last few episodes that I had broken down and gotten a camcorder. Well, it's already been sent back. So I've got a new one on the way. God, it's like a recurring joke. We'll see if this ever actually happens. I do want to do video podcasts and do more in the way of 4K travel videos and such, so I'll keep getting camcorders and returning them if I have to until I get the right one. I have good news for all of you that wanted to come to my Sounds of the Cape History of Music on Cape Cod event at the Payamette Performing Arts Center in Truro. It was a couple weeks ago from when this podcast goes live. The folks that run the theater liked my performance so much that they're going to bring it back again next year with more hype behind it. So get ready, there'll probably be a part two. For those wondering, my next book event is not until October 23rd, the week before Halloween. I'm going to be speaking at the Eldridge Library in Chatham about my Searching for the Lady of the Dunes book, perfect tie-in for Halloween. Even if you're not from Cape Cod or on Cape Cod, you're doing the next best thing to coming to one of my events, and that's listening to the podcast, sharing it, telling others about it. I'm quickly hurtling towards four years of doing this show, almost 160 episodes. And I can tell you, I have probably more fun doing these now than I did when I started. And it's evidenced by if you go back and listen to the first... You know, dozen, two dozen episodes. My style is a lot different. I was finding my voice. This here, as I talk, this is more closer to me. The first few episodes there, I'm very monotoned and very serious. Like, I don't know what I was trying to do then. Now, this craziness, this is closer to who I really am. And I hope it comes through in these broadcasts. I hope that you enjoy them. I hope that you enjoy the wacky topics that I come up with, especially now that it's nostalgia-based, because there's really no shortage of topics I can find. And there's no better example of that than this new topic that's going to kick off the podcast. Weird news stories of certain decades... We're starting it off with the 1970s. I've got seven stories that are very true and very head scratchingly weird. So let's get into those and kick off episode 158 of the In My Footsteps podcast. I was debating which kind of weird music to have to kick off this segment. It shows that I'm probably going to do several of these sporadically as the show goes on. To me, weird usually equals funny. Although not always, and you'll see that not all of these stories are funny. The gist of this segment, Weird News Stories of Certain Decades... I've got lots of countdown segments that come and go on this podcast, so I tried to make this unique. So there's seven stories from the 70s. Some of them are funny weird. Some of them are shocking. And some are kind of tone deaf. But one thing they have in common is they're all true. They're all real. As a kind of... Pulling back the curtain, the way I found a lot of these was just searching bizarre, weird, strange, along with 1970s, and just seeing what Google brought up for me. And you'll have to let me know if you enjoy this segment, because obviously there's loads more decades that I can do these segments from, and I've already seen stories that I want to include, so that's a bit of foreshadowing. This first one here is more along the lines of funny weird, but also just mind-numbingly stupid. We go back to January 1973 in the state of Texas. Texas State Representative Jim Castor filed a bill that would have required criminals to give their victims 24 hours notice before they committed a crime. I had to literally pause recording this and just laugh and shake my head because how is that anything that you would think was a good idea? So a criminal is going to rob someone, stab someone, steal their car, but yet they're going to warn them before? So they're going to break one law but follow this stupid one? I don't know how many of you out there have ever seen the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report from 2002, where they can basically prevent crimes before they happen. It's a pre-crime unit. So you could go up to someone and say, you're going to rob a bank in a year, so we've got to put you in jail now. That's kind of the stupidity of this bill. And obviously, even the representative, Castor, knew that the criminal wouldn't do it. But the idea was also that if this bill passed and they then didn't warn their victim, it was another crime they could be charged with. It's like someone robbing a convenience store and then also getting arrested for loitering because they waited outside for customers to leave so they could go rob the convenience store. No surprise that bill was defeated. This second one, it's weird, but this is more shocking and sad. I don't think there are many good ways to get bad news, but hearing about it on national television, that's got to be one of the worst. For this, we go back to August 8th, 1977. There was a 12-year-old boy named Scott Krull who was terminally ill with bone cancer, but he didn't know of that. On that day of August 8th, the Chicago Cubs set up a phone call saying, between their player Bobby Mercer and Scott Krull. Mercer had promised that he would try to hit a home run for young Scott, who had been battling cancer for almost three years. Not only did Mercer hit a home run, he hit two home runs in the game that night against the Pittsburgh Pirates. So right there, if the story stopped, that's a wonderful moment. You could make a movie out of that. The problem came when after Mercer's second home run, a note was sent up to the broadcast booth where ABC broadcaster Keith Jackson announced to the world. After saying that Mercer had talked to Scott Krull in the morning, he finished it off by saying that young Scott was dying of bone cancer, which he did not know and he was watching the game. Like I said, there's no good way to get bad news, but watching your favorite baseball team and then your favorite player hitting two home runs that he had said he would try to do for you, and then right after getting it announced that, oh, by the way, you're also dying of cancer, it's just the worst. And sadly, Scott Krull died two weeks later on August 22nd at the age of 12. The third story is the absolutely bizarre and macabre story of Danny O'Day. O'Day grew up kind of a wannabe musician that never really made it. He played in a few local bands, played drums. In 1977-78, after another kind of failed local tour, Danny O'Day came up with an idea to inspired by the 1947 movie Dark Passage, where Humphrey Bogart undergoes plastic surgery to change his appearance to avoid being captured. O'Day's idea was to take ordinary people and give them plastic surgery so they would resemble dearly departed musical stars like Elvis. O'Day had a friend whose brother, Dennis, could sing like Elvis. So this is where things crystallized. And he said, if I could make him look like Elvis, he already sounds like him. After healing from the plastic surgery, this man, Dennis Wise, actually appeared on Good Morning America as Elvis speaking like him. It was initially a success with Dennis Wise performing shows until he realized that he hadn't read the fine print of the contract. He had signed with Danny O'Day for 50 years, and he was entitled to half of his earnings. O'Day ended up convincing other people to get plastic surgery to look like Jim Croce, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. It did not take off the way that he had hoped, and Danny O'Day, he passed away in 2003 without really assembling his army of lookalike celebrities. The fourth story here is something that some of you might be familiar with. Others of you might not know that it was real. I'm sure the majority of you have heard of the Nightmare on Elm Street film series and the premise behind it that Freddy Krueger could kill you in your dreams. But did you know that that is based on true events? No, Freddy Krueger is not real. But the events that people were dying due to their nightmares... This was actually a real condition that really came to light in the 1970s into the early 80s. Sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome, SONS. This was common in people from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam who had been fleeing the genocide of Southeast Asia. Their nightmares from those events would sometimes kill them. They'd be found dead, but with their hearts wildly beating. With a lot of these victims having told others about these horrible nightmares they were having leading up to their eventual death. It got so bad there was an article in the Los Angeles Times about these people seemingly healthy dying in their sleep. And according to the indigenous Hmong people of China, suns was the result of evil spirits reaching people in their sleep who had not worshipped properly. So there's the evil spirit part of it. And obviously, director Wes Craven saw these stories and used them as the basis of A Nightmare on Elm Street. That one's pretty wild and creepy, but the fifth story here is way less serious to try to add a little light to this segment. And that is the story of the group called the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. This group, it started as a grassroots political organization. It was founded in 1968 by high school and college students in Ohio. Their goal was to eliminate pay toilets, which required a dime or more to open. The grassroots campaign and pressure on states actually was successful. According to a 1974 Wall Street Journal article, there were at least 50,000 pay toilets in America that were mostly made by the Nick O'Lock Company. But the Committee to Eliminate Pay Toilets in America over the next few years were successful in obtaining pay toilet bans in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Florida, and of course, Ohio, where they were from. I'm all for having a cause and a purpose in life, but pay toilets? I don't know. To me, it seems like it's kind of foolish. But the thing is, this group was successful. Twelve states enacted bans on pay toilets by June 1976, and the group announced that it was disbanding because they had achieved their mission. I guess they really are an example of follow your dreams. I've thought it was weird to be doing... content creation and podcasts and spending 20 hours a week doing that. That's nothing compared to people spending hours and years trying to get pay toilets shut down. The next one here, the sixth story, is probably one a lot of you are familiar with or at least have heard the gist of it. And that's the story of Hiro Onoda, the man who continued fighting World War II nearly 30 years after it was concluded. Onoda was a second lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, and he was stationed on Lubang Island in the Philippines with several others. And the mindset was carry out guerrilla warfare, never surrender. After the war ended, the Japanese army, the Japanese people were trying to find these soldiers and let them know the war was over. They were dropping leaflets. They were having over loudspeakers announcing to come out that the war was over. But Onoda and his crew said that's exactly what the enemy would want us to think. They'd want us to come out so they could kill us. One by one, the other members of Onoda's crew died, were killed, but they were continuing to shoot at locals and raid farms and villages. World War II ended in 1945. Hiro Onoda surrendered finally on the 10th of March, 1974. For nearly 29 years, he carried out what he thought was his mission for the Japanese army. On one hand, it shows his dedication to his country and to his military and his mission. But on the other hand, you think about decades worth of his life with his family and friends that he lost out on. It's not all bad. When Onoda returned to Japan, he received a hero's welcome, and he did live until 2014. So even after fighting World War II for an extra 29 years, he lived 40 more years as a hero. And finally, the seventh weird story of the 1970s. I'm going to end it on the most random nonsense I could find, and it has to do with music. Lou Reed was an American musician, songwriter. He led the band The Velvet Underground for a long time. For as acclaimed as Lou Reed was, is... In 1975, he released what is widely considered to be at least one of the worst albums ever made called Metal Machine Music. To sum it up, this was a double album of basically all just noise, screeching gears and metal. The album was shrouded in secrecy with Lou Reed recording it by himself in his Manhattan loft, sometimes working deep into the night. The album did not sell well, and the stories behind why Lou Reed seemingly tanked his own career, at least briefly, with this awful album of horrible noises, there's two popular theories. One is either that he was trying to get out of his record deal, so he put out this album to fulfill his contractual obligations, and it was just awful. The other is that he was trying to weed out the fans that only wanted to hear his popular songs like Walk on the Wild Side, which I don't know if you put out an album of just gears and screeching noises, how many fans are going to want to stay and listen to you anyway, even if they didn't like your most popular songs? The record initially sold more than 100,000 copies, giving it the distinction of the best-selling noise album ever, which I didn't know that was a thing. But the problem was, most copies were quickly returned when people realized there wasn't songs or music, it was just crazy noises. I thought about trying to include a clip from that Metal Machine Music album here, but I would not do that to you who listen to the show. So there you go. Seven weird stories from the 1970s. Which one do you think was the weirdest? I tried to kind of run the gamut from super serious to foolish to things you can't believe are true. And if you enjoy it, let me know. There's all these other decades that I could definitely find stories from because there's always weird stuff going on. This week in history, we are going back 104 years ago to August 20th, 1920, and the birth of what is today known as the National Football League. Today, the NFL is the most popular sports league in America, American football. The vast majority of the most watched television shows in history are the Super Bowl, which was why when I did the countdown of the highest rated television show episodes ever back in episode 149, I had the caveat that I had to remove all the Super Bowls because that was basically the top 10 and it would be boring. American football traces its origins back to the late 1800s and it evolved from this blend of rugby and soccer. As the game grew in popularity, colleges and universities across the United States formed their teams and established competitive leagues, but nothing like what was coming. Fast forwarding to August 1920, representatives from several professional football teams gathered in Canton, Ohio to discuss the formation of a unified league. The meeting took place in the showroom of Ralph Hay, the owner of the Canton Bulldogs football team. and attendees included prominent athlete Jim Thorpe, who was named as the league's first president. This league would be known as the American Professional Football Association, APFA. The APFA aimed to standardize rules, reduce player poaching between teams, and enhance the sport's overall organization. The league initially comprised 14 teams, Of these teams in the first season of the APFA, I would think the only one that you probably have heard of is the Chicago Cardinals, who are now the Arizona Cardinals, and maybe the Canton Bulldogs because I just mentioned them, and that's where the Hall of Fame is. The franchise fees for that first season were $100. That's about $1,570 today, so to get into the NFL. And I know it's not apples to apples, but as of 2023, the average value of an NFL football team was about $5.1 billion. So I know it's not the same as franchise fees, but it just shows how the league has grown. What's crazy about that first season of the APFA is there was no postseason, no championship game. They determined the champions by a vote at a meeting. The Akron pros were voted the champions with a record of 8-0-3. What makes it even crazier is that for a long time, records of this event were lost. So it was denoted for years that the 1920 season, there was an undecided APFA champion. Thankfully, they've got a lot better organization now. In 1922, the APFA was renamed the National Football League. That season saw teams like the Chicago Bears, the Chicago Cardinals, now Arizona, the Green Bay Packers. So there were some familiar teams. But those early years, it was not a success. There was a lot of financial instability, low attendance, low player salaries for a very dangerous game. And there were other professional and semi-professional teams and leagues competing with the NFL. In 1933, the NFL first introduced a playoff system, culminating in a championship game between the Chicago Bears and the New York Giants. But it wasn't until the 1950s, with the advent of television, that things really started to turn around for the NFL. Up until then, the league had been struggling to get by, which is wild to think of in this day and age. Today, the National Football League is a multi-multi-billion dollar industry. with 30-second advertisements in the 2024 Super Bowl going for $7 million. And the birth of the NFL, the birth of the National Football League, as the American Pro Football Association, the APFA, happened 104 years ago this week in history. Oh, by that sound, it is time capsule time. This week we are going back 94 years ago to August 20th, 1930. The reason I chose this date is that it's the oldest radio program ratings that I could find. So it's probably the oldest time capsule I could possibly do. So let's see what was going on in the world of pop culture way back then. The number one song was Happy Days Are Here Again by Ben Selvin. This song has been recorded numerous times, including more recently by Barbara Streisand. It was in the 1930 movie Chasing Rainbows. It was the campaign song for President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first run as president in 1932. Ben Selvin's claim to fame is being in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific songwriter ever. In his career, he was estimated to have put out anywhere from 13,000 to 20,000 songs. So modestly, if you were to write one song a day, every day, to get to 20,000, it would take you more than 54 and a half years. So that is a lot of songs. The number one movie was Song of the Flame, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing 35 cents. This is a movie based on the 1925 Broadway musical of the same name, and it was a movie shot fully in color in 1930, even though it wasn't shown in color in most theaters. It starred Bernice Clare as the character that would be known as the Flame, along with Alexander Gray. It's 82% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. I wasn't able to find anything as far as box office numbers, budget for the movie, but it does have another claim to fame as the initial showings of Song of the Flame were preceded by the first ever Looney Tunes cartoon called Sinkin' in the Bathtub starring the character Bosco. The number one radio show, because there was no TV, was Cheerio. Cheerio was a character meant to be happy and get you in a happy frame of mind. Charles K. Field, an American journalist and poet, he played the Cheerio character. The show was on from 1927 to 1940, and the Cheerio character became something akin to Pee Wee Herman, where Charles Field wrote a book as Cheerio. So it's sort of like in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure where it says Pee-Wee Herman played by himself. So they became one and the same, which is kind of weird. And if you were around back then, August 20th, 1930, you'd be 94 if you were born that day. But maybe you were looking to make a hot meal for your family. Well, you're in luck. You can get yourself a Glenwood C226 gas range with uninterrupted gas service called a never-before-seen kitchen convenience. And you could get this range for $120 or about $2,250 when adjusted for inflation to 2024. This gas range looks like what you would see in every classic old movie. But I'm sure at the time it was cutting edge. And that's going to wrap up another time capsule, another This Week in History. We're going to come forward a little bit in time with a brand new top five. As I look at my favorite 1990s athletes, your list may vary, but let's get into mine right now.

Unknown:

This Week in History

Speaker 02:

This is gonna be fun. We're gonna be going back to my prime days, high school, the 1990s. The decade that is now the most popular for nostalgia, which really makes me feel old. And we're gonna look at my favorite 1990s athletes. Like I said, your list will vary. I guarantee nobody out there will have the same top five, same honorable mentions as me. What you will notice about this list is that this was at the time when I was playing baseball, playing basketball. So you'll notice that a lot of these athletes are from those sports. This was a list that was easy to put together, harder to kind of organize as far as honorable mentions go. And I'll have to give some caveats with some of the honorable mentions. The top fives in no particular order, the honorable mentions, I'll just get right into them. They include Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics, who's only an honorable mention because he only played two seasons in the 90s, so there was eight seasons he was retired. Pedro Martinez of the Boston Red Sox, for the same reason. He only played two seasons in Boston and was only really known for three seasons the year before in Montreal when he won the Cy Young. Pavel Bure, who may be a shocker, hockey player of the Vancouver Canucks. I just liked his style and he was the one hockey player I collected all of his cards of. Ben Coates, who was tight end for the New England Patriots. He was like a refrigerator with arms and legs and one of the only highlights when the Patriots were a joke team. And the final honorable mention is Frank Thomas, who played baseball for the Chicago White Sox. The big hurt. I had all of his cards as well. So those are the honorable mentions. I figured that Larry Bird and Pedro Martin has needed descriptions because of how legendary they are in their sports and how could they be honorable mentions. mainly due to their connection to the 90s. They didn't play that long or weren't in the spotlight that long in the decade. Boy, I'm really trying to justify it here. But the actual top five is really good, and I can have a much easier time justifying these. So let's jump in with number one, Barry Sanders, professional football player for the Detroit Lions. I consider him the greatest running back in the history of football. Your views may vary, and that's fine. It's subjective. He was amazing. He was impossible to tackle. Shorter for a running back, about 5'8", 200 pounds. But he could shift and spin and get through little holes in the defense. He was so much fun to watch. And that's what led to the Detroit Lions being my favorite football team for most of the 1990s. The Patriots stunk, and here was my favorite player was on the Detroit Lions, so naturally they'd be my favorite team. Unfortunately, they also mostly stunk, and they drove Barry Sanders into an early retirement at the age of 30. So now I hate the Detroit Lions because they deprived me of a few more seasons of him. But I digress. We move on to number two, Michael Jordan. Basketball player for the Chicago Bulls. Even if you didn't watch basketball in the 90s, you knew Michael Jordan. All the Gatorade commercials, McDonald's, him being host of Saturday Night Live. Of course, there was also the fact that he's the best basketball player ever to walk this planet. I think most people will agree. Some of you might not, but that's fine. He won six NBA titles in the 90s. and has a list of highlights as far as in-game and career that are longer than most 10 players put together. I used to love that during this time in the early to mid-90s, I had a basketball hoop in front of my house, which I talked about in depth back in episode 29. but the hoop, you could lower it to be seven, eight feet tall. My friends and I would have dunk contests, and I would always want to try to mimic Michael Jordan's dunks, including trying to jump from halfway across the street like he did at the free throw line. We move on, though, to number three, Shaquille O'Neal, basketball player originally for the Orlando Magic. Shaq was one of the first basketball players that I actually watched when he was playing in college at LSU. So when he got drafted in the NBA by the Orlando Magic, I said, well, there's my new favorite team because the Celtics stunk. Shaq was a force of nature. Seven foot one, over 300 pounds. He had the habit of dunking so hard that he would rip the rim right off the backboard or tear the hoop down. He was another marketing machine. He had all those different commercials. I remember the one where he was dunking the ball and he tore the rim off the hoop and there's all these other famous NBA centers, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, watching him and not being impressed and making him clean up the glass with a broom and dustpan. Shaq went on to be a champion in the NBA when he went to the LA Lakers and got paired up with Kobe Bryant. and he's still front and center today as an analyst for TNT for their basketball coverage. The funny thing about the first three of this top five is I can close my eyes and I believe I had posters on my wall in that order of Barry Sanders, Michael Jordan, and Shaq all next to each other. We move on, though. I actually had to have an athlete from Boston in the top five, and that's number four, Roger Clemens, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. When I was playing baseball, if I was going to be a pitcher, I wanted to be Clemens. Even when the Red Sox stunk, he was still appointment viewing. I remember after the 1996 season when he left and went to Toronto, I never thought that could happen. He had been a Red Sox player as long as I'd been a fan. And he actually got better when he went to Toronto, although there are rumors of why he got better as he got older. Roger Clemens with the Red Sox won three Cy Young Awards and an MVP, but no World Series. Unfortunately, he won his World Series when he left and went to the Yankees. And finally, number five on my list of my top five favorite 1990s athletes is Ken Griffey Jr., baseball player for the Seattle Mariners. People who knew me growing up, they knew Ken Griffey Jr. was my above all else favorite player. He and Barry Sanders were 1 and 1A, but Ken Griffey Jr., because I played baseball, was number one. The smoothest swing that I wish I could have imitated. I remember trying to mimic so many baseball players' swings and just never being able to get Griffey's down. He became my favorite player during a game that I attended at Fenway Park in 1989. I was in center field, 12 years old. Ken Griffey was a rookie. And I remember yelling down to him and he actually turned around, yelled back, waved. And I immediately was like, you're my favorite player ever. So luckily he was good. If he had stunk, it would have been embarrassing to constantly be trying to get his baseball cards that are worth three cents. I had always wished that there could have been a way that the Red Sox could have gotten Ken Griffey Jr. Every now and then, the local teams would end up trading for my favorite non-local player, like the Patriots got Rodney Harrison, the Celtics got Kevin Garnett. I wanted for so long for the Red Sox to get Ken Griffey Jr. or maybe the Patriots to get Larry Fitzgerald, but it just never happened. Those are my top five favorite athletes and some honorable mentions. Which one of these is the worst for you? Because I know our lists will never be identical, but are there any players that you listen to me talk about and say, why is it on your list? Maybe it's some of the honorable mentions. This, though, was the list I was most confident in as far as favorite athletes because this is such a fun and vivid time in my life for sports, especially playing it. One of my favorite sports to play growing up in the 90s was wrestling. I'm trying to segue here as we go way back in the day to, I guess, what's not really wrestling, but it was a death match, a celebrity death match. So let's talk about that. Ah, the 90s were just such a fun time to be alive, to be growing up. You had great music like grunge. You had the dawning of the internet. Various snacks and sodas to give you the sugar rush. And that's just talking about me. When it comes to making a nostalgia podcast and doing all the research, there are things that can slip through the cracks of my mind for weeks, months, years. But eventually they rise to the surface. That's what happened here with MTV's infamous, very popular show, Celebrity Deathmatch. I can't even remember how I found it again, but when it popped up and I saw a scene from one of the shows, I said, oh man, I got to talk about that on the podcast. the very quick soundbite of what Celebrity Deathmatch was. It was a claymation TV show where celebrities of varying levels would fight each other to the death. Naturally, there's a lot more to it, but for those of you that may have never heard of the show, I wanted to quickly clue you in as to what it was about before I do a deep dive. Claymation as an animation style, it's been around for decades. The Wallace and Gromit movies, the California Raisins commercials, and then failed TV shows. What I'm going to talk about here as we go back in the day is about the original Celebrity Deathmatch, which was from 1998 to 2002. It was, for all intents and purposes, a parody of professional wrestling because the matches took place in a ring. There were announcers. It was different in the fact that you could have kind of cartoonish, really gory violence happen to people that you knew, although mainly the celebrities didn't voice themselves because who would want to voice themselves getting killed? I mean, I would. It would be fun. But some celebrities don't have humor like that. The show itself was created by Eric Fogel and produced by John Worthlin Jr. for MTV. Back in 1998, MTV was still mainly a music channel. Sure, they had started to delve into reality shows, real world, road rules, true life. They also still had 120 Minutes, Total Request Live. They were still doing reruns of Beavis and Butthead and Daria. So you can see kind of the style of MTV at the time that Celebrity Deathmatch came along. There was definitely a hole in the schedule for celebrity on celebrity murder and violence. In total, the show would run for 93 episodes, with there being two pilot episodes broadcast on MTV in January of 98, with the show properly premiering May 14th, 1998. The show was all claymation. It would start off with the announcements of who was going to be fighting who on today's show. There were announcers.

Speaker 00:

Unbelievable. Gallagher has just taken out the Gallaghers.

Speaker 01:

You know, Liam and Noah were pretty drunk when this match began, but now you'd have to say they're hammered. Guys, I said it before and I'll say it again.

Speaker 02:

Johnny Gomez, who was voiced by Maurice Schleffer. and was the more normal announcer compared to his partner Nick Diamond, who was voiced by Len Maxwell, and he was perceived to be an alcoholic who would constantly make screw-ups on the air and occasionally bring his son to work to see his favorite celebrities get murdered. The other main recurring character was Mills Lane as the referee.

Speaker 03:

He was

Speaker 02:

the famous boxing referee in the 80s and 90s and later a judge on TV. He would always start the fights with his catchphrase, let's get it on. But then he would also be very loose with the rules where he'd let people obviously bring in wacky stuff to smash each other with and he would just allow it. But he wouldn't allow biting or guns. Those were the only things you couldn't use. Anything else went. There were interviewers who would talk to the celebrities before and after. Most well-known, Stacy Cornbread. She was the first one.

Speaker 00:

But right now, let's check back with Stacey Cornbread, who's still in the locker room with the Gallagher brothers. Stacey, how's the mood back there?

Speaker 04:

Well, Johnny, as you can see, these two brothers may hate each other's guts, but there's one thing that can still bring them together, and that's the music.

Speaker 02:

The big highlight and the real connection to professional wrestling was Stone Cold Steve Austin, the wrestler, being guest commentator. He'd also be scientist, doctor, weapons expert. This was the time when professional wrestling and more in particular the World Wrestling Federation were as popular mainstream as they've ever been. This was the attitude era where there was way more violence and sex and over-the-top characters on TV and Celebrity Deathmatch kind of fit that mold. After getting through all of these ancillary characters, obviously the main point of Celebrity Deathmatch was seeing famous people, at least in clay form, fighting and dismembering each other. You had such matches as Mike Tyson vs. Evander Holyfield, where Tyson pushed Holyfield off a building and blew him up with TNT. The very first episode of the show had Marilyn Manson versus Charles Manson, where Marilyn Manson pulled Charles' spine out of his mouth. You had Kid Rock versus Eminem with Carson Daly as the special guest referee, where Kid Rock's partner Joe C. shows up and takes control of Eminem's body. There was Sylvester Stallone versus Arnold Schwarzenegger, since you couldn't get them to fight in real life, so you put them in the ring in clay form. Mariah Carey versus Jim Carey, featuring an appearance by Drew Carey. There was a match between all four Beatles, where John and Paul kill Ringo and George, but then they agree to be friends at the end. There was a show they did in January 99 called Death Bowl, a takeoff of the Super Bowl. And that had the infamous Michael Jackson versus Madonna fight where the ring is surrounded by hydrochloric acid. And when Michael Jackson falls into it, he comes out with his face from the 70s, how he used to look. I am sure that a lot of celebrities got rubbed the wrong way by this show. When I went through the IMDB page for Celebrity Deathmatch, you can scroll down if they've filled it out fully and see all of the voices, all of the actors and actresses on the show. And that's where I got to see how few celebrities actually voiced themselves. I'm sure a lot of them were asked. There were loads of WWF wrestlers that voiced themselves, including when Stone Cold Steve Austin fought Vince McMahon. They both voiced themselves, and that was before they had their first real match on pay-per-view. In fact, besides Jerry Springer, who voiced himself on an episode, the only time you could find celebrities on Celebrity Deathmatch was a segment in 2001 where they asked celebrities what they thought of Celebrity Deathmatch. That's where you had celebrities like Janine Garofalo, Tommy Lee, Moby, talking about what they thought of Celebrity Deathmatch. Other than that, though, it was voice actors portraying all these famous people. There were some memorably brutal matches from this show, including the Beavis and Butthead one, which surprisingly Mike Judge did not voice them because he was busy doing King of the Hill. There was a fascinatingly prophetic match between Liam and Noel Gallagher from the band Oasis where they just smash each other with mallets. And I think this was before they really hated each other and really fought each other on stage. Despite the sheer brutality and often mocking tone of Celebrity Deathmatch, as far as I could find in my research, there were never any lawsuits filed by celebrities against the show's creators or MTV. So it's either these celebrities all actually had good senses of humor, or the show wasn't important enough to them to kind of file a lawsuit. I don't know what the ratings were for Celebrity Deathmatch. Although the story that is commonly thought of as far as the end of the show was that they did a series of German shorts called Celebrity Deathmatch Hits Germany in June of 2001, but it was so poorly received from the fans that may have led to the end of the show. There was a brief revival of Celebrity Deathmatch on MTV2 in 2006 into 2007. But there was no Mills Lane. There was no Stone Cold Steve Austin. I think they even changed the announcers' voices so nothing was the same. Over the years, there have been a few rumored reboots of this show. I don't know if it's a product of the 90s. I don't know if you can have a show like Celebrity Deathmatch now where you pit celebrities against each other and have them kill each other. I don't know how their fans would react. You can find certain fights from Celebrity Deathmatch on YouTube. On Paramount, I guess all you can find is that revival, which if you're going to dip your toe into Celebrity Deathmatch, don't look at that one. Go back to the originals. Did you ever watch Celebrity Deathmatch, especially when it first came out? And did I name off any of your favorite fights? And do you think the show could make a comeback now in the 2020s? Society is definitely different from way back 25 years ago when I was watching this show first run. I think this might be one where it's better to leave the memories alone.

Speaker 01:

Well, folks, it's been a night to remember, but right now we are out of time. I'm Nick Diamond. I'm Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Speaker 00:

And I'm Johnny Gomez. On behalf of all of us here at Celebrity Deathmatch, good fight, good night.

Speaker 02:

Until next time, though, that's going to wrap up episode 158 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Thank you so much to all of you for listening, sharing, and Subscribing on YouTube to my channel. I'm trying to get kind of in a rhythm with putting up videos. Over the last few weeks, I've done video segments on the weirdest Atari games ever. The story of Cape Cod's Lost Lighthouse. How I got out to the most exclusive location on Cape Cod. I'm doing a lot of these old Cape Cod segments as videos now because even though I don't really do Cape Cod-centric content on the podcast, I've got a lot of good stuff and good stories, I think, that work well as videos. Next week, it's going to be episode 159. And interestingly, the show drops on the birthday of my oldest friend, Barry. You've heard me talk about him ad nauseum on here. My goal is I'm trying to get him to at least pick one segment he wants me to talk about. He doesn't have to program the whole show, but at least something so it can be kind of a birthday gift to him. The pressure's on because I can always pretend that he wanted to have me talk about certain things and have them just be terrible topics and say, yep, it's Barry's fault. He created, developed, and still runs my homepage, ChristopherSatterlund.com. That's where you can find links to all nine of my books. As I said at the top of the show, I'm not doing another book event until the week before Halloween, so I've got some time in between. But I think I've already got a few scheduled into the new year, so we'll see. I'll obviously keep people updated as my schedule fills out. Make sure to check out my initial impressions 2.0 blog that follows the weekly weirdness and randomness of my life. If I ever get a dang camcorder that fits what I want, that's going to be what I use for my video podcast will be the initial impressions 2.0 blog. So as I'm sitting here right now recording this show, I'm kind of in a holding pattern. Recently, I got some very bad news about my Uncle Bob, one of my favorite people, one of my favorite family members, someone that I still keep in touch with to this day a lot. He's had a lot of health issues over the last several years, some of them pretty severe, but he's always bounced back or fought through them with his typical dry, sarcastic humor that runs in my family. But this here, I don't know. I don't know if he's going to come back from... He suffered a major stroke, went in for surgery, and developed pneumonia, and he's on a ventilator. This is as of the time I'm recording this. I don't know what the end result is. It does not sound good. I'm hoping that he has more time, that he has at least opportunities to say goodbye to people. I've been lucky in my life to have... Several great role models, male role models in my life. And I've had a couple really, really terrible male role models. And it's sad that the good ones are the ones that are leaving this earth or could be when the bad ones are the ones that are still hanging around. I'm not wishing bad things on the bad people. I just wish good things for the good people. And I hope my Uncle Bob can make some miraculous comeback at the end. And I was delaying even talking about this at all because I don't have the update. My cousin, his daughter, I haven't heard back from her, so I don't know what's going on right now. It's just another reason for me to share that you should make time for those that matter. If you're thinking about someone right now as I'm talking, just message them. Text them. I do that. I'm trying to get better where it doesn't have to be some big... 10 page letter to someone it's just a text hey just checking in to see how you're doing I'm glad that I kept in touch with my Uncle Bob basically on a weekly basis all the way up until this past health scare but he's one of the most universally liked people that I know in my life my Uncle Bob so we're all pulling for you it might be a long shot but if anyone can make a comeback it's you So give your thoughts and good vibes and prayers for my Uncle Bob. And remember, in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life. Because tomorrow's not guaranteed. You never know what comes next. Thank you so much for listening. This has been the In My Footsteps podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund. You already knew me. Talk to you all again soon.

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