Citation Needed - Coleco

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Coleco Industries, Inc. was an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company.[3][4] It became a highly successful toy company in the 1980s, known for its mass-produced version of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consoles, the Coleco Telstar dedicated consoles and ColecoVision.[5][6][7] While the company disappeared in 1988 as a result of bankruptcy, the Coleco brand was revived in 2005, and remains active to this day. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details. Fuzzball Parade by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5044-fuzzball-parade License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

So, so what is the bad guy or maybe they're joining powers? It is extremely unclear what happened. Thank you. Okay. And five, six, seven, eight. out of sync. Are you listening to me? I can't see you conducting through all this makeup, man. I need more spirit glue for my first. Not hanging on. Hey, guys, what is with these get ups? You don't know. I mean, I knew you were a fellow feline fanatic, but this week

takes the cake. We are going to just have so much fun. No, maybe I should have sponge it. I think you should. I just have should. He knows. I just have to get back to him. Okay. I'm confused. You guys dressed up as cats from my episode on Coleco. I think it's pronounced Calico, buddy. Calico. What is a gelical guy? I feel like if I knew I would be more motivated to do this. Guys, just so in any way. Guys, guys, it's Coleco Coleco. It's a video game company. It's the story of greed, vice and technology that formed us.

So your essay is not on Calico cats. No. Yes, I'll go change. That's cool. We did a lot. You guys sounded really good, though. I'll bring the nail polish remover in there. We'll get that spirit.

Thank you. Talk about self me out, Tala, shouldn't I? Am I right? Now we like, okay? Okay. Okay. Get the fuck out. Okay. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed Podcasts where you choose a subject to read a single

article about our Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Cecil and I'll be your cash here tonight. Let's start by ringing up our panel here. First up, hot pockets, eggos and Coke, and a whole card of various uncooked meats. No entom. Wow, dude, that intro was as cold as the center of a hot pocket.

That's it. That's it. That's it. Got a five pound pork roast sitting out on my counter to cook tonight after we record for no other reason. I like to have meat on hand. In case I run out of the meat, I was eating while I was cooking the meat. That was a lot like Ron Swanson just all the time. Also joining us tonight, a cart full of scotch and cheese and five packets of nutritional

yeast, four heads of lettuce and a palette of toilet paper. Keith and Eli, nailed my stuff. Great. I love how we start every episode of this. It was a tall, cartful of scotch and cheese. I'm sorry, Alice. Somebody actually made a remark.

I was like, scotch and cheese. I was at a liquor store. They happened to have cheese too. So I was like, I'm just like, a bunch of scotties. It was amazing. Cheese. Was his remark, sir, you're crying? My own remark was you still have to sell it to me.

I was hoarding toilet paper before it was cool. That's all I'm saying. Before it was cool. Hi, patrons. Looks like you gave a little extra. Oh, that's on'm saying. Before it was cool. Hi, patrons. Looks like you gave a little extra. Oh, that's on purpose. I wish everyone was nice as you folks are.

And if you'd like to learn how to give us a little extra, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that, all the way, tell us Noah what person-place thing concept phenomenon or event we're talking about today. Today we're going to be talking about the story of the Coleco corporation. Okay. All right. So why did you pick this topic? Because the story of Coleco is in my mind,

the perfect encapsulation of the 80s. It was a company started with, you know, bootstraps and gums and whatever, back in the 30s. And then through thrift, innovation and elbow grease, they grew over the decades into a well-run, diversified and profitable company. And then the 80s came around They switched their business model the electronics and hype they squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue through nothing but

Coke-fueled viewers this story is like a reverse monkey pause situation where the genius is just doing as damned as to grant somebody's billionaire wish But the wish err keeps managing to somehow fucking up. So the main thing is, I really do want an 11 inch pianist. Stop making me repeat myself. I'm just going to impress this girl. And then she'll let me fuck her. So Coleco began in 1932 as the Connecticut leather company, supplying leather and shoe findings

to shoe repairers, which I was sure was a Wikipedia typo of shoe bindings, but apparently that's a blanket term for all the shit shoe makers need that isn't leather like their tools and shit. Anyway, by 1938, they expanded out to rubber footwear as well. Big shit there. And during World War II, like pretty much anybody operating in American factory, their business exploded. Metaphorically, I guess a lot of factories were literally exploding at that time. I probably should have used a different euphemism. But the point is business was really good.

By the end of the war, they were manufacturing shoe making machinery, hack cleaning equipment, which was apparently a thing once, and equipment. As the wiki article puts it, quote, even marble shoe shine stands, end quote, as if that was like the lofty ambition, they'd started the factory within the early days. I am 100% going to get you a Gen 1 marble shoe sign stand for your brain. War. Huh. Yeah.

What is it good for? Oh, well, I guess the shoe. Yeah. What is it good for? Oh, well, I guess the shoe. I fuck that all the song up, doesn't it? Didn't see that coming actually. Wait, was the shoe shine stand like made of the stone marble or was it like with circular little marbles that cleaned your shoes? Oh, I hope it's the second one. It was a shine stand for marble shoes. Um, shoes, the shoes were made of marble, so were they were made of the stone. Are you all interesting?

Now I'm getting it's not. Now, if I get my shoes shined and it's made of fucking limestone, I will make a fucking scene. It's not marble. Now, the Connecticut leather company was a family owned business. It was started by Marie Screenberg. Do. Yeah, probably.

But by the early 50s, he'd more or less handed the reins over to his eldest son, Leonard Greenberg. Yeah, a bit. Yeah, probably. And apparently, Leonard didn't care much for all this shoe bullshit. So he said about diversifying and trying to find some other focus for his company. Well, he found that in 1954, we introduced a line of leather crafting kits for kids at the 1954 New York toy fair. Okay, that's an all.

So literally a short metal spike with a handle for kids. That's part of it. Hand-powered shopping. And they hand-powered shopping. And they brought it to fucking all the toys back then. Yeah, I mean, like he was right, he was right next to the play uranium booth, right? And that point.

No, but this was great for business, right? They were cheap to manufacture. They could use the lowest imaginable quality of leather on these things. And they sold for a crazy markup, replace information for leather. And you have the college textbook industry. Oh, Cecil, textbooks are now much cheaper than when you were in college. They have this thing called the printing press now. So you don't have to carve women.

We're going to get to the all spring. The later of the story, ages not fine. So within a couple of years, the company shifted their focus wholeheartedly towards toy manufacturer. This change was further cemented in 1956 when Leonard read about all the exciting new shit that was happening with plastics, especially the emerging technology of vacuum forming. That led among other things to the Connecticut leather company becoming the world's leading manufacturer of above ground swimming pools.

Oh, Coleco, I just got that Connecticut leather company. So yeah, it also led to the whole Connecticut leather company name being a bit vestigial since they were a pool manufacturer. So in 1961, the leather and shoe findings portion of the business was sold off and the company was renamed Calico Industries Inc. and a year later, they went public at five bucks a share. So this is also where we introduced the reverse monkeys, Pa paw here in the person of Leonard's brother Arnold Greenberg Jew thanks good to keep it running tally like you thank you. Thank you Arnold started off his career as a lawyer But as the company grew Lenners invitation to come work for the family business got ever more appealing no

I'm just saying you whenever we say you You only do when you introduce me. Yeah, right. So, but the dynamic here is that Leonard brought a lot of expertise in terms of engineering and manufacturing, though, how, but he felt woefully underqualified to handle shit like marketing and long-term business strategy. And tragically, as it would turn out, he was under the impression for some reason that that stuff was right in his brother's wheelhouse.

So in 1966 Arnold joined the company as a CEO. Now, as near as I can tell, Arnold was one of those people that just assumed if large amounts of money were moving around, there must be some profit in there. Are you mad at me? No, again, this feels personal. I'm always mad at you and it's always personal time. Talk this out. You know, so he started buying up competitors and semi related businesses like it was trying

to grow a medieval fiefdom or something. They bought up their chief pool making rival, Kestrel Corporation. They bought pervader of cheap plastic gas station, crap playtime products and the Canadian tabletop gaming company Eagle toys among others. The end result was that after four years of Arnold being the CEO, Coleco controlled 10 manufacturing facilities had a spiffy new corporate headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, had upwards of $45 million a year in sales and wasn't turning a profit. Yeah, but just two or three more product parties

at a cousin's house and they were on their way to a pink house. And then he came up with a rideshare idea that would turn grad students and single parents into an army of roving wage slaves. Well, also not turning a profit, right? Also, yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

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Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right But that's not what it looked like to Wall Street and the value of the company's stock started to decline in the early 70s. It didn't help that in 1972. They decided to buy their way into the snowmobile market right before a historically mild winter.

Oh, you got to fix that with Mark to market accounting. They had an invented. Yeah. Yeah. There will eventually be snow. So you just take all the profits right now because there has to be snow. Sorry. I'm just basking in the nostalgic olden days when bad business decisions hurt a

company. Eventually. But despite the shaky results of this strategy so far, what was the strategy? Noah, because we're selling toys and pools and shoes and now snowmobiles. And you're just using the word strategy like it means something over here. It meant more cocaine and Arnold snow. So yeah, well Arnold though was undeturbed. So he decided in 1976 that he was going to get into the burgeoning video game market. Oh. And a lot of listeners just realized why I'm doing this essay.

Congrats. Well, it is a lot of people shout it on their own. Yeah. Exactly. Now, the video game industry itself was born for all intents and purposes 50 years ago this year when Atari released Pong to the world. Wasn't the first video game. Wasn't even Atari's first video game, but it was the first hit video game. And it was the spark that would ignite the 135 billion dollars in your configuration

that we have now. Three years later, Atari would kickstart the home video game market with the release of Home Pong. And that would be so successful that every company in the history of anywhere that had the manufacturing chops required to pull it off was jumping into the Pong clone market. I see what you're going for, but I don't think you can call it ping, Carl. I'm sure they could. At that time.

No, there were already like dozens of identical pong clones out there, but the number skyrocketed a year later when general instruments introduced their AY 3, 8,500 integrated circuit, known colloquially in the very few co-wims that knew it at all, I guess, as pong on a chip. So now, instead of a manufacturer needing to be able to make microchips to enter the video game business, they just need to know how to plug them in. And that's some Coleco could do. So they ordered a fuck ton of AY3 8500s and they set about creating the Coleco tell star video game console, which would ultimately play the exact same

seven versions of Pong that eventually seven hundred plus different brands of game console did in the same colors even. Okay. Was the world just like way more into ping pong than it is now? Because of us that one game for a while as what video games would be. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine video game makers today trying to release identical video games year

after year consumers would go maddened? I tried for so long to come up with a fuck. I spent a fortnight trying to get a pun. No, but luckily for Coleco though, the Jeannie put his thumb on the scale a bit here because of the overwhelming demand for the pong on a chip general instruments was unable to fulfill most of their orders that first year. Can you imagine a chip shortage must have been crazy back then, but Coleco was the very first company to place their order.

So they were one of the very few companies that actually got all the chips that they needed. They didn't make overwhelming profits or anything, but the Coleco tell star did break even in his first year and they did it with a lot of fucking sales. That was enough for Arnold Greenberg who decided that video games were Coleco's future. Arnold's like, I'm celebrating by going to the strip club. That one girl has a crush on me. I'm sure. Right. Yeah. Hard to go over the next few years. They stayed active in the industry by releasing a series of revisions to the tell star line as well as several handheld games, mostly licensed LCD versions of popular arcade games that despite universally sucking ass were all the rage in the early eighties. Yeah, look,

you look, son, you have packed with at home. Like, yeah, sure. Um, but because Greenberg like to push money around, he was able to outpin his rivals and lock up the rights for classics like Pac-Man, Frogger and Donkey Kong. But all the while they were designing a powerful new console that they hope to overtake the Atari 2600, which they called the Coleco vision. It was between this on my buddy who's working on laser discs now. Yeah, both great.

A betamax, you could get a debate. A max. Well, I'm sorry, no, but how do they keep having all this money to push around if they're never making any profits? Adventure capital, been invented already? But that was the, that was the 80s. That was the whole 80s was that question. Why would they still have money?

Right. Now, the colleague of vision, I have to say, but the standards of the time, it was an incredible machine. It's technically a, a, considered a second generation system, but it had third generation graphics. It was by far the closest thing to arcade quality that the average consumer could afford in 1982. Of course, by then, it's the main competitor of the Atari 2600 cost $50 less and had hundreds more video games available. But more than that, their product was releasing into a crowded market that already included Mattel's in television, Magnavoxes Odyssey 2, GCE's Vectrex, Fairchild's Channel F. Right. So, Balais Astrocade, Emerson's Arcadia 2001, RCA's Studio 2, the APF MP 1000, the Interton,

the VC 4000, the VTech Creative Vision vision and the epic cassette vision, not to mention the equally priced higher end Atari 5200, all of which they knew existed when they released their fucking thing. Huh. It's weird though, because selling the same thing with way less options for way more money, it worked amazing for Apple. Did it? Yeah.

No, they didn't. So they had to pave the way for that, I guess. Now a year later for reasons that seemed pretty obvious in retrospect, the video game console market crashed and Calico lost a ton of money, both in stock and development costs. But they had a backup plan because just as the video game console market was crashing,

the new home computer market was on the rise and required pretty much exactly the kind of expertise and facilities that they had just developed for the Coleco vision. So they stake their future on a new computer called the Coleco Adam, which has a legitimate claim on worst consumer product in all of human history. Well, I'm super excited to find out if they buried all the unused computers next to the ET cartridges and the recipe for new Coke, but we'll have to do that. For some apropos, nothing. Hi, welcome to 1980s video game store. This is startlingly close to what I was actually doing at this age. How can I help you?

Yeah, I'm looking for one of them newfangled video game systems for my son. Ah, well, you came to the right place. May interest you in the Pong Master 5000. This baby runs Pong, hold yourself, at nearly one meg an hour. Wow, look at those graphics. You'd swear that white dot was ball shaped. I wouldn't adjust. Now, let's talk speakers. Can I send you home to the set of these bad boys? Oh, those are speakers. I thought you had a truck backed up into the center of your showroom. A common mistake. But no, these are indeed speakers. And if

you want experience pong the right way, you got gotta have a set of these top of the line You know what I'll take them. When can you add them to my house? 1992 Wow, that's fast. Well, you do live next door. We aim to please. I do I do Well, we're back and we left off someone invented a useless computer even before we could mine Bitcoin Okay, okay, you're gonna feel really stupid when all the Bitcoin I bought in November 11 Okay, this is how you back again my god, so you're gonna feel really On that right now. Yeah, I don't know right now.

Just a plus minus. I don't look. Well, you'll need a magnifying glass if you try. All right. So you okay, you're hypervelling. I'm fine. It's better not to think about it. Thank you for the terrible business decision, Segway Eli.

I've got it from here. It's my 9-0-Liquid. It's a blockbuster stock or something. Yeah. So I love this story so goddamn much when the Coleco Adam was introduced to the crowd at the summer consumer electronics show in 1983. It was encased in a shaded plexiglass box. The representatives would be happy to answer any questions you might have for it or even

take your money for advanced orders. But if you wanted to actually try out the prototype that they had on display, you are going to need a gun and an escape plan because, and this is for reals, even with the company's best engineers on site to fix any problem that arose, they were afraid that if people tried to use the thing, it would catch on fire. And eventually delivered products had an annoying tendency to do. Hell, the glass they were hiding behind was shaded so that it wouldn't be as obvious that many of the components like the tape drives and shit were handmade non functional

models. Yes, sir, every single model has a hand-widdled keyboard. It's on fire. Shouldn't belong so hard. We're done selling the Coleco atom. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. They're going to have to sell right now. All right. So now, this is a story that people who followed the electronics industry know pretty well

by now, but it was a fairly new story back then. It's that thing that happens when the product starts with marketers telling the engineers what it's going to cost and what it's going to do, and then responding to their objections with various forms of go fuck yourself. The Galico Adam was going to cost $525. That's about $1,400 in today's money and it was going to come with a printer, which is amazing given that a very low quality computer printer at the time would run you about 600 bucks. Yeah. It turns out that lying is amazing for that. So eventually that retail price crept up from 525 to $600 and eventually

to $725. But that was still way too cheap to make a computer that was any fucking good at the time. In June, Colligo was promised to start shipping the computers in August. In August, they promised it would be shipped before Christmas. Then they missed their September 1st ship date

for that. They missed their September 1st ship date for that. They missed their September 15th delivery date and their October 1st one and their October 15th one. She's just crazy. And by then tech magazines were already warning potential customers of persistent problems with production and not small ones. Again, the things had a tendency to just catch on fire all by themselves. And even when they were working the way they were supposed to, they made more noise than a fucking lawn mower. Yeah.

The screensaver was a flock of winged woodchippers. By the way, the design was so fucking stupid. The entire power supply for the whole computer system was built into that printer unit. Yes. insisted on. So the thing ran at approximately fire temperature. Paper in it. Paper in it. The thing that holds paper was when they put the super hot power supply for the entire device.

And third party companies had to come out with separate power supply units that were far away with a long, long wire that let you run the atom system without the printer. So it wouldn't literally burst into place. It's an internal combustion computer. It's a double. The double does a space heater. Kids are shoveling coal into your desk. That's for Jimmy. That would have been much safer.

One of my number munchers. I mean, can you imagine the suckers who fell for these promises? That's got a few platforms. Any word on when that steam deck order is coming in? You know what, Tom? That's that hot elgone. So ultimately, the company did manage to ship about 95,000 units before Christmas of 1983 into a market that was starving for home computers. That was less than a quarter of what they originally said they were going to send out. And that was the number before customer started returning them saying that they were either defective or caught on fire or some combination of the two.

And while the exact return rate isn't known, or at least I couldn't find it, the magazine creative computing reported at the time on one store manager saying that five of the six atoms he's told had been returned. And he suspected that the other one hadn't been opened yet. The guy who wrote the computer's manual reported receiving 300 calls on Christmas week alone from owners with problems, many of whom, according to his recollections, quote, were on their fourth or fifth atom. And quote, that's why you don't put your phone number in. Yeah, right. Right. I like that you could call the guy that wrote the manual, direct. The whole. Yeah. Well, they had a, like, a, like, a, like, a, like, a service.

Weird thing to do. Yeah. No, they had a number that, yeah, they weren't expecting that many calls, but before the terrified stockholders forced them to shelf the product in 1984, the company had lost a staggering $48 million on it. Okay, so I know this is a problem, I don't like blaming the victim, but if you buy a thing and it spontaneously combusts and then you buy it again for more times, it has to be your fault somewhere in there. I'm gonna say three. They were giving you one that wasn't on fire when you brought the thingy one in. I want my money back. That's what I want. I just fucking returning at work. It's like, I tried to print the receipt, but damn it. I need to return my house now. I have a pile of ashes. I don't know. It was a computer. Maybe. Now, normally, this is where the story would end, right? In a universe with a loving God. Yes, it was absolutely, but that is not our universe.

But normally, again, the company is bankrupted by its hubris or it learns a bit of humility and it gets back to making plastic swimming pools and shoes or whatever. But even while he's missing deadlines and losing tens of millions of dollars, poor money into the flaming computer of his Arnold Greenberg is still gobbling up random companies here and there. One of them was the board game company, Celcio and writer known for such classics as Scrabble and Parcheesey, and also was the maker of the quintessentially 80s game trivial pursuit. Speaking of iconic 80s shit, they also secured the merchandise and rights for the show Alph and released a pretty popular cassette operated talking alfdol, but most importantly, they

lucked into possibly the most iconic 80s product of them all, the right to save your Roberts little people dolls, which of course, Calico renamed cabbage patch kids for our younger listeners. If you've ever seen a picture of me and thought, Oh, I want to shave him and live him in my house. You'll love cabbage patch. That's what I'm doing. Right. They're like, okay, here want to shave him and live him in my house. You'll love cabbage. Right. So, okay, here's the thing about cabbage, peshk is though, either you're me and Cecil's age or you don't get it. I don't get it.

Right. Right. Right. There is no strange. I still don't get it. Right. There's, there is no modern analog to the popularity of those ugly ass little cherubs. Yes, almost every year now has its must have gift that parents fight in the aisles for whatever. But at this point, a ton of that's manufactured scarcity and

stage marketing bullshit with cabbage, veg kids. It was for fucking real. And what's more, it was new, right? Paris had never knife fought each other. I've got a toy before in the fucking ais oils. They're with me and they were, I'm barely exaggerating. There were riots all over the countries where Paris were mobbing store employees and fellow shoppers in the mad scramble to get their hands

on a fucking cabbage patch. All in 19 TV show or something. No, no, no, it was just the fucking dog. Just the dog fucking crazy for it. Eventually it was everything. It was a TV show and everything else. But at the time, it was it was everything. It was a TV show and everything else. But at the time, it was just a doll.

It was a really creepy show, too holy shend. Yeah, it really was. But in 1983, Coleco destroyed all previous sales records with over $3 million shipped, a record that was dwarfed by the more than $2 billion worth of cabbage patch branded merchandise that they slung in 1984. There's like two things I remember a cabbage patch kids. One, they were always fucking filthy. Like, they did not as a box on the show.

Fucking gross. And the dog had been playing with them all the way. They had fucking smeared of something. I don't get it. And then they were inordinately heavy. Like, you could do kettlebell swings. Okay, true story. We had to carry a cabbage patched all around in junior high for a week as part

of our like sex ed health class scared. Incident program or whatever. Yeah. I can confirm that they are also remarkably effective melee weapons for board teenage balls. Yeah. Somebody died for sure. But of course, with great success comes great lawsuits.

Xavier Roberts, the guy who created the collectibles that cabbage patch kids were based on didn't like the creative direction that Coleco was taking with this product. And admittedly, look, the advertising pitch was that if you didn't buy that orphan doll, it was going to be abducted by an evil villainist and put the work in a gold mine. So he wanted to took issue. So he created a new line of dolls that he wanted to directly compete with cabbage patch kids, which of course is licensing agreement, obviously, per paid. So losses fly back and forth. One of the end results of all of that is that Coleco has to pay a king's ransom to renew the contract with Roberts. Wait a minute. Is the back

story about like adopt this canary worse than a cold mine real? Yeah. Is that real? That's like the rescuers meets 101 Dalmatians. Well, my kids are coming up with their own new ideas. Come on. So fuck. And of course, at the time, just as the tech industry is laughing at what a shit job they did with the glee go at them, the larger business presses just throwing all kind of praise on Arnold Greenberg, the brilliant CEO behind both the cabbage patch craze and trivial pursuit, right? They're showing this close up picture of these two incredible marketing bullseyes he had, but they're not panning back enough to show that the entire dartboard and indeed the entire wall that it's hang on are covered in darts that greenberg missed, right?

Still, the staggering sales of cabbage patch kids did offset the losses of the atom and this company's stock price slid, but didn't tumble yet. Okay. New ad campaign, we combine them. If you buy an Adam, we light a cabbage patch kid on fire. Or just set it near the Adam. I mean, it was light. We've given Adam to an orphanage.

Yeah. But unless the problem with making your money on fads is that, you know, they're fads. Um, no, I sure love it in our nice cozy glass house. Wait, just save it up. Just save a little of it as I'm saying. In 1983, cabbage patch kids were worth gouging a stranger's eyes out with your car keys over. But by 1988, they were

just weird-ass looking, cheaply manufactured a hype that we were all kind of embarrassed to have bought into in the first place. Right? So in 1986, America was still buying $800 million worth of cabbage pastels per year. By 1988, that number had dropped to zero. That's not very much. Yeah. At the same time, America was starting to wake up to the fact that trivial pursuit was a phrase that meant waste of fucking time. And the game's popularity plummeted in a way that it would never recover from. And, and well, it would linger on for a few more years before getting canceled. We were also starting to realize that Alf was just some crackhead telling us the same joke

over and over again. So with warehouses of unsolved social and writer games and cabbage patch merch as well as separate warehouses full of unsolved and unsolvable Coleco atoms, you know, so that the former didn't catch on fire. The company ultimately folded filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1988. The reorganized Coleco sold off its North American assets outsource thousands of jobs enclosed virtually every plant they ever operated in the US. Seventeen years later, a brand revitalization company

then called River West brands, now Dormitas brands, reintroduced Calico to the market. But the fact that their brand revitalization brand had to rebrand does not vote well for their future. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? I find this shit way more interesting than normal people do. Yes. Yes. I heard it for the quiz. I've been ready for 46 years. All right. Noah, which of the following is not the name of an actual second generation console. A, the SHG black point. That's a German one. B, the compact vision, T people.

That's the only one. C, vision tech, create a vision. No. D, V tech, create a vision. Wait, I've never heard of the create a vision. So I'm, I feel like it's, they're all real, but I'm going to just go with C just to be on the safe side. You're right. It is C.C. is the only one I made. And we're surprised they named their company meta.

All right. Noah Fads are stupid. And the people who buy into them always get burned, which of the below are as pointlessly ridiculous as cabbage patch, trivial pursuit, or a flaming pong clone. Hey, beanie babies. B Dutch tulips, C and F T. We're getting emails. D crypto. What did I do to you, Tom? What did I do or E anything Joe Rogan likes? Secret answer app all of the above and secret answer is He is also kind of all of the above. Yeah, I think it's gonna be yeah, that's true. I'm just Right. No, I got one more for you. Which of the following is a true thing about the Coleco Adam that we haven't mentioned yet a

The Adam would generate an aggressive surge of electromagnetic energy on startup. Aggressive, yes. B, that surge could erase the contents of any removable media left. Edea or near the drive of the device. C, making this problem worse. Some of the Coleco manuals instructed the user to put the tape in the drive before turning the computer on. Oh, D eventually they put a sticker on the

atom that said, don't turn on the power with that fucking manual. You can't trust anything it's column column. He's right there at the back or E another way to erase the contents of removable media left in or near the drive is the house they're in burns. I'm going to go with secret answer. F all of that plus the printer had a fucking daisy wheel.

Did it have a graphing graphics? It had a friction. It's so fucking stupid Instead of the shitty school They didn't even use like refillable ink and a guy Everything about it was so stupid It was a hot matrix It was so good

Alright you win for that, Heath Thank you Alright next week Let's get a little Eli Oh Why did you say that? You didn't have to say that. It's going to get weird. Alright, well, for some Noah, Eli, and Heath, Cecil, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week, and by then,

Eli will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, listen to our other shows, you can find them at citationpod.com, And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod, or if you believe it's a five star review, every you can. But we like money too, we like money more, I think. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com. All right, son, I'll set up. What do you think of that? Uh, actually, I just learned to masturbate, so... No, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Go ahead. Put it in your room. Then... Starting now.