Long ago, I was in the studio audience of a local PDX TV kids show called Ramblin’ Rod. “Local kids show” is a format that is completely lost to time, which is pretty wild, because it was such a thing. Think Krusty the Clown — kids sitting in a studio, a goofball host, time filled with lots of old cartoons.

I have strong memories of going to the studio. I even mentioned it (randomly) at the start of a GDC talk I gave in 2024, including some heartbreak.

But I always wondered if my memory matched reality.

Then, a month ago, my dad found the tape. It’d been sitting in our basement, never-watched — a friend of my dad’s used his Betamax® VCR to tape the show, and we never had a Betamax® player to watch it.

There’s a guy in town that can digitize Betamax tapes. And he digitized it for $25. (Did a great job.)

So, for the first time in 40 years, let’s watch some selected highlights from The Ramblin’ Rod Show on 2/8/1984… together.

(If nothing else, you’ll see a very small me, a very good Pac-Man Cereal ad, and a very weird cartoon.)

BONUS: you can watch the entire hour-long episode, including commercials, over on the Internet Archive.

One thing I can’t quite explain about this: it doesn’t feel super old or nostalgic to me, it still feels strangely fresh. All of this material is still so present in my brain, every song, every intro, even the commercials I know by heart, still. Sure, all the trappings are retro, but we see new retro things every week (like, uh, Blippo+!). It’s a weird feeling.

Also, in my GDC talk, I said that Shannon and I both did a goofy face where we rolled our eyes back making weird creepy all-white eyes. (That was his idea.) But looking at this tape, those eye-rolls are nowhere to be seen! I’m shook. I was 100% certain that’s what happened. Why did I remember it that way? Did we maybe do it in a rehearsal? Was there a rehearsal? I’ll never know. I guess memory is like a jacket covered in buttons — it can only hold so much, and it sure jangles a lot when you move.

“Ramblin’ Rod” Anders passed away in 2002. The show ran from 1964 to 1997. In 1989, he estimated he had been given 15,000 buttons for his sweater. “I’m a good person. This is a good life. We can make the best of it, and we can be all right.”

But yes, I’m still mad at Shannon.

Yours,
Cabel