Retronauts - 780: Pac-Man Fever

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

In the very early '80s, the world as a whole had come down with Pac-Man fever. But this condition wasn't formally diagnosed until budding musicians Buckner & Garcia released their hit album of the same name in 1982. Slapped together to address the then-recent fad known as "video games," this collection of songs took pop culture by storm—but the duo behind it failed to follow up on their tribute to arcade mania. This week on Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Drew Mackie (of Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games) as the crew digs into this novelty album and learns how to Do the Donkey Kong.Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, we've got a fever, and the only cure is less Pac-Man. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and this time we are talking about Pac-Man Fever, the 1982 album full of songs about Pac-Man and other video game characters. And, you know, we have covered video game novelty albums before on this podcast, yet somehow we have never touched the granddaddy of them all, and that is Pac-Man Fever by Buckner and Garcia. So this time around, we are going to be looking at this musical tribute to the Golden age of the arcade and mining whatever little kitsch value still exists within this musical product. Before I go any further, though, who is here with me today?

Ready to express his love for E.T. via song, Henry Gilbert. Excellent. We'll be talking about E.T. and the many songs written about that little man. And who else is here with us today? I've never actually had Pac-Man fever, but I did have West Nile, Dremacki. And that's caused by, what, a centipede? Mosquito-borne illness. I'm a bit next to a marsh. I shouldn't have been jogging there. That's my fault. There's only one real mosquito game, and that's Mr. Mosquito game, and I think he's been tested negative for West Nile.

Thank you. Yeah. Maybe you'd get it from pitfall. Maybe. Yeah, I think so. It's a swampy kind of game. So, yes, we are talking about the 1982 album, Pac-Man Fever. And before we dig into the history of the podcast and talk about the songs and play lots of fun and silly clips, I want to know from both of you, what is your experience with Mr. Buckner and Garcia and their musical Wonderland?

Henry, let's start with you. Well, I don't think I maybe had heard Pac-Man fever at some point. And I was as a child, I think we all grew up loving novelty songs that get introduced to us. And I like, I like novelty songs a lot. And I think of like, they might be giants was like a bridge band for me from like they first come off as novelty, but they're like a real band too. And then you can start listening to real music. Like that was for me. And yet the Buckner-Garcia, I barely heard of their song.

I think I heard disco duck more than I heard Pac-Man fever of songs of its time. But then when I became a professional, you know, games journalist, occasionally it would get into my zone for listicles of some nature, either in a Pac-Man history or also the other games that they did songs about. And plus they did start to have during our, like, 15, 16 years ago, they had a little wave of new interest in their works. So I got a little more aware of them. But this is an album that's like as old as me.

So I would have only heard it when it's old anyway. That is true. We were released shortly after this album, by the way, all three of us, 1982 boys. We've never known a non-Pack Man Fever world. Yeah, yeah. It's their world. We were born into it.

So, Drew, how about you in Buckner and Garcia? How do you get along? Well, funnily enough, I found out about this song as a result of a little TV show called The Simpsons. Have you heard of it? Yeah, that's right. I heard there's a great podcast about it. heard that. I can't stand those two guys who host it though. They suck. One of them's great, but the other one is terrible. Yeah. That's what I'm hearing a lot these days. So the 250th episode

of The Simpsons is a tale of two Springfields. And it's the one where they introduce a new area code and it makes old Springfield and new Springfield hate each other. And new Springfield gets the who to play. And then Old Springfield, which includes Homer, overtakes the stage and like sort of hijacks everything. And he tries to make them play Pac-Man favor. And they're like, that's not actually our song. So it's like a funny joke where Homer thought Pac-Man Fever was a song that the Who had written and performed. And he starts to play it, but in the Homer way, he does it very badly and just like strums, Pac-Man fever. That's it. And this aired in 2000 and I was like, well, I want to know what this is. And Napster exists. So I looked it up and downloaded it. And this made its way onto something. A little pet project that was one of my, like a first glimmer of what kind of adult I turned into is a collection of terrible novelty songs called, So, songs that should not be that I'd give to people as birthday presents and sometimes just leave in public spaces so people would like put this in their car and they'd like, what the fuck am I listening to? And they'd like trick people into listening to bad songs like this.

I should probably revive that pastime actually. But yeah, this is one of the crown jewels of songs that should not be a terrible song about back then. Yeah, you know, I am new to all of this, frankly. I know I heard the Simpsons reference through that you mentioned. I'm sure I heard this as a comedic sound drop in some movies or TV shows. But this is the first time I've sat down and since I sincerely listened to Pac-Man Fever and the following songs on the album because I just knew it as a reference. Like, ha-ha, Pac-Man Fever. Remember that old song, that old novelty song? We all liked it. It was so stupid. And I don't know why. I seek out these, these kitsy things constantly, but there was some mental block between me and Pac-Man Fever. I've just broken through it right now in order to talk about this album, but completely new to me as of like this week.

I'm now fully immersed in the world of Buckner and Garcia. I know their complete discography. It's very small. And I understand what these men are capable of. So I'm ready to talk about their history. It sounds like you are low-key asking me to send you a copy of songs that should not be. Is that correct? I would really like to hear this song.

Sign me up too. This album rather. I have to check with your partners ahead of time to make sure that's actually okay because this might be a marriage ruiner. But okay, sure. Yes. I mean, headphones are going to be on when I listen to this. Just like I was out working in public, taking studious notes on the Pac-Man Fever album while listening to it.

And I thought, if my headphones become untethered, I will be arrested. It's worse than secretly filming women listening to the Pac-Man Fever in public. I should say, I think another reason I might have heard this song more was for a few years I went to the very great, if you're in the San Francisco Bay area, the California Extreme show convention thing that happens where pretty much everybody on the West Coast who owns classic arcade games drives them up to a convention hall in San Jose and they just have them all set to free play and you get to play these amazing games that you can never normally touch in person

and also a lot of the obvious ones and they're always blasting this music there and I'm certain I would bet in 2010 Ben Buckner and Garcia played live at it or something, I have to imagine. Yeah, I've been to over a dozen Portland Retro Gaming Expos and probably like over 20 retrogaming Expos in general, maybe even 30. And I'm sure at some point this was playing in the background and I might have barely acknowledged it. But I'm ending the first 15 years of my hosting of this podcast with full immersion in Buckner

and Garcia. Who knows what I will discover in the next 15 years? We really have kind of explored every novelty album except for this one. So this is going to be groundbreaking. Let's talk about the history of Pac-Man Fever and just where Buckner and Garcia came from. So, yes, Akron, Ohio's own Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, they are the two men we're talking about today. Weirdly enough, they could have gone by Jerry and Gary. I think that would have been a much better novelty group duo title, but Buckner and Garcia is what they rolled with.

I guess there's more dignity to that. They sound like a law firm. Yes, yes. I would trust them. And were you to combine their names, they just become the lead singer of The Grateful Dead. That's true. Jerry Garcia was taken. Yeah, they couldn't do that.

So the duo they met in junior high school, they did not unite professionally until their adult lives because Jerry moved to Atlanta, convinced Gary to move down there with him. And this is where the two started a creative partnership that involved writing jingles. So that is where their musical roots begin in jingle writing. And if you listen to Pac-Man Fever like we did, you might. notice, oh, a lot of these songs are not songs, but they feel like they could be more at home in like a commercial for a waterbed store or off-track bedding or something like that. Very strong choruses. Every time the chorus is the best part of all these songs, and that's essentially what a jingle is,

chorus of verses. The verses are very, very brief. And this is like a chorus-focused album because, again, these are jingle writers. So they also worked in the field of novelty music. They were trying to get a foot in the door. That used to be a much bigger field. This is before Weird Al. This is like right before Weird Al is getting off the ground and kind of becoming the only guy in that world.

So they wrote a novelty song in 1972 called I Gotta Hear the Beat. And it was credited to Animal Jack, but this is written by Buckner and Garcia. And I believe performed by one of them. The YouTube upload currently has 16 views. So if you're hearing this on our podcast, you are one of a very few select group who has ever heard this song ever after 1972. too. So here is, oh, Drew. So when you set the notes out, it was 14 views, which means that the other two are me and Henry. Yes, yes.

Where the chart, there's like a sharp upwards incline on that chart for the views on this. The owner of that video must be very happy. But yes, let's hear a bit of got to hear the beat. You got to start somewhere, and this is where they started. And if you're wondering where this song goes, it goes nowhere. It is this singer singing Gotta Hear the Beat over and over and over again, getting more and more excited. That is the only lyric until eventually two men show up to take him away, presumably to a mental asylum or something like that. So that is the comedic premise of got to hear the beat.

This crazy man somehow is singing a song in a studio and then he is taken away by, I guess, men in white coats. I don't hate this song. I actually think it's fun and it has a very real energy to it. that is sort of reminds me of some of the more dancey indie rock that was coming out around like the 2010s. There's like stuff I listened to that was not that different from this and a very different version of my life. And this to me shows promise.

And I'm not sure where the energy went. Yes. Yeah, you're right, Drew. Even though it goes nowhere, I feel like it is a great example of anti-comedy. It's sort of like an Andy Kaufman-esque exercise. Everything they would do after this is incredibly corny and obvious. But for whatever reason, they wrote this song that only. exist to waste your time and end on a punchline that I guess kind of comes out of nowhere,

but it doesn't really justify that amount of time wasting. So yes, it is a Kaufmanesque exercise. In 1972, briefly, Buckner and Garcia and Andy Kaufman were working in the same zones of comedy. They were equals. Yes, they were. So their pre-Packman fever work didn't stop there. Fast forward way ahead of time to 1980. And they have another novelty song called Merry Christmas in the NFL, which appealed to people's love of professional sports and Christmas. So you can see they are hitting these broad targets. If you want a popular song, especially a novelty song, you write it about Christmas and that will get you in the door.

So they say, what else is popular? Football. Let's hear a little bit of Christmas in the NFL. And by the way, this is credited to Will's and Vigourish, or sorry, Willis and Vigors, but this is Buckner and Garcia. Center snaps a ball. The quarterback's fading. He throws long.

He's got it. It was a night before Christmas, and all through my brain, thanks footballs and thoughts of the upcoming game. My team colors were hung by the television set, and hopes they'd make it to the Super Bowl yet. When out on the street, there arose such a clatter. I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter. And you understand where it's going from here, right?

This is a parody of the classic Christmas poem, a visit from St. Nicholas, which everybody has done a novelty song about, or are they a basing kind of comedic version on that original poem? The least toothsome of parodies that you could possibly make. Yeah. And it takes forever, like it is, because it's a long poem. Like, especially in the realm of a novelty song where it's like,

I need to get to the joke sooner. It's like, okay, guys, let's get to it. But from a marketing, a jingle way of thinking, NFL in 1980 getting bigger and you put it with Christmas and people are watching NFL games in the Christmas season. Like it all makes sense. Like you're not going to do a baseball Christmas song. You're going to do a football Christmas song.

Yes. So that's what's going on here. And it is very obvious. I don't know how far this went up the charts. Presumably not very far because this was not a hit. This has not changed trajectory of their careers like Pac-Man Fever did just a year later. Christmas is the right one to bet on first with a novelty song. I give it to them.

When I think of like the most popular Christmas songs are the ones you hear all the time on the radio, like half of them are a novelty song. Like the Christmas don't be late or the two front teeth or mommy kissing Santa Claus. These are novelty songs. They just have become so normal. You're used to them and you don't even think of them as like a novelty or a joke. Yes. Perhaps a child wants a hippopotamus for Christmas. And we sing about that.

And that very aggressive barking voice you hear in Merry Christmas in the NFL, that is kind of how most of the songs are performed on Pac-Man Fever, which gets really irritating over time, I will say. There's another singer. I don't know who is Buckner and who is Garcia, but the guy who doesn't sing in that kind of aggressive cadence, I like his voice a lot more. Right. They need to mix up the voices a little more, perhaps, than I think it's the, you know, and

they might be giants. the two Johns really share the mic and it helps you know some they change the ratio of John to John in those songs but if you if you go too much with one guy then it's definitely going to start to feel pretty samey not every duet working on microphones can achieve such parody you guys yeah that's why they're still around to this very day Buckner and Garcia they their career did not last much longer than Pac-Man

fever we're going to find out so yes we have 1972 I got to hear the beat 1980, Merry Christmas in the NFL. They're making jingles for different businesses. They're succeeding in Atlanta in the smaller markets doing their musical career. But in 1981, inspiration struck when these two men got caught up an actual Pac-Man fever. And this is about a year after the arcade game first started rolling out in America. So Pac-Man is present everywhere. Everyone is addicted to it. And they decided to write this song based on the phenomenon, but no record label wanted to buy it. So they found, a way to release this signal independently. So it was a single first. And according to Jerry, the song took about two hours to write. And it does sound like it.

The album also came together very quickly. We'll talk about that very soon. But these songs would be a lot better if they were given more time. I think like, got to hear the beat and even Merry Christmas in the NFL. There's more of a concept fueling those songs than Pac-Man Fever in which you're mostly

hearing instructions for how to play the game. Right. I mean, the, the production. timeline on these things. They got, it was so much slower to make stuff back then, I think. They couldn't, they couldn't immediately get it out there. But yeah, they found a good, they found a hot new thing. Everybody's talking about the NFL. Like Christmas covered so much, but they did find a area they could pioneer on, on at least the American radio waves with the fairly new world of video games and arcade video games. Yeah. And I guess we could talk about the arcade very briefly. If you were right, Astronauts, listener, you know what's going on. But this era of the arcade arguably starts in 1978 with Space Invaders. And the arcade becomes a destination. People start to fear the arcade as this corruptor of children.

But we are only a few years out from arcade dominance. We are like smack dab in the middle of this golden era that started barely like two or three years before this song is even written. So this is considered a fad. Like we're writing about pogs. We're writing about cronuts. Something like that. Man, the Buckner-Garcia, them doing a Kronaut song, that would be so great. I think, yeah, we kind of grew up in the fallout of this.

When arcades weren't gone and they were still doing good, I think, in the, we're not like incredible. But yeah, we, if I saw, I was, we were thinking about this recently, me and Bob, because we covered the movie Reckett Ralph this month on, on our page on the Talking Simpsons Patreon. and it's all about 1982 arcade and then comparing it to 2012 and what's left of arcades then and yeah we got to see the Donkey Kong

or the Pac-Bans or Miss Pac-Bans those survived into the late 80s at most pizza places but the other old games like we only can see them at we often only got to see them at like collector events or something or they maybe would be in a dusty corner of an Aladdin's castle. By the time I started

going to arcades in the late 80s, I'll say, like maybe 87, 88, very young. There'd be an area with the older games, and by older I meant, like, I mean like five to six years old, and that's where you would find Pac-Man and Centipede. And those are the games that the parents would want to play because they were the games they were fascinated by

when they were slightly younger. But I would play them out of curiosity, but obviously by the late 80s, there are flashy games that talk to you and have Ninja Turtles and so on. Perhaps a Simpson could show up. So, yeah. Berserk does talk to you.

It does. Badly. Very, in very rudimentary terms. But I don't hear the voice of Dancastle the nut in that game. No, that's true. Important distinction. Yeah, I'll never forget is like four or five tops when I, like 85, 86, seeing 86 or 87, going to our local pizza place and just seeing a donkey Kong machine for the first time.

Like, it was incredible to me. I never saw that. And then, like, I think within a year of that, we finally got an NES. like 87, but I remember just standing at the Donkey Kong machine. I think they also had a Popeye machine and just playing with the free play and pretending I was playing the video game. As we all did. Yeah, yeah.

So I think it's interesting that these guys wrote a song about the NFL in 72. Is that the year that one person came up? That's 1980. 72 is Animal Jack. 80 is Merry Christmas in the NFL. So do you suppose that there is like about a decade's worth? of fad songs that just never saw the light of day and they were constantly trying to workshop these and Pac-Man fever just happens to be the one that actually caught on.

From them possibly, I mean, their career is very poorly documented, I'll say, and it is not my job to do so on a 90-minute podcast. But I was trying to pull together from different sources, including their website, like, what exactly is a timeline? What did they make? And I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that's not on YouTube yet that's never surfaced. There's a few songs that I've dug up in my history that I want to hear, but could not find any resource in order to, like, locate.

the MP3s or whatever. So we mentioned Pac-Man Fever. They write the song. It's a single. It's released in December of 1981. This becomes a radio hit that sweeps the nation, ultimately reaching number nine on the Billboard 100, getting the coveted gold certification. Yes, this is why Buckner and Garcia were able to live off of Pac-Man Fever for the rest

of their lives in this kind of peak monoculture era, like right when people are learning about cable television for the first time and getting VCRs for the first time. is still very, very important. And this puts them in league with CBS records, and they want an entire album of video game songs similar to Pac-Man Fever. And these two guys don't have a lot of time to write this. So I thought this was a mistake. I saw in different timelines, different sources,

Pac-Man Fever the single comes out in December of 81. The album comes out in January of 82. That is not a mistake. That is what actually happened. These guys are given two weeks to write seven additional songs And when you hear the album, you realize, oh, they did not have a lot of time. This is a very repetitive album, like I said. One premise is fueling almost every song on the album.

Here is how you play a game. I mean, if I'm a record, a cigar shopping, you know, well, it's early 80s. So probably doing Cocaine Record Executive. I don't have patience for this. Like, I think, I see the money that it makes, but I think arcades are going to be unpopular in like two weeks. Like, so we got to, if I'm going to sell this album, I need to sell it yesterday. Like, get on it, kids. Yeah, they're viewing the arcade like it's a, it's a new toy that kids don't want next Christmas.

Drew, go ahead. It's not as if the content in Pac-Man fever is so good that it would have been difficult to replicate. Like any restrictive, it took you like, what, two hours? And they're like, well, yeah. They're like, okay, well, like that time seven. I've just 14 hours. Can you do that in two weeks? That seems like a generous amount of time to me.

And it shows. Yeah. In some interviews with Buckner, he said they were getting a little squirrelly towards the end of this process. They'd have to go to the arcade, research what's popular, go back to the studio, start writing songs. They're writing seven songs is a lot of music to write in two weeks for a fully produced album published by CBS Records. How long does it take to read the placard of how to play and just turn that into the verse lyrics? Not very long. Yes, I'm sure that's what the executive's mindset was.

So we mentioned Weird Al before. I want to mention him again because, again, he will become the dominant force in this field. Notably, he is usually just seen as the only guy in the novelty song field. And his career was getting started around the same time because I believe 1978 is when he gets on the Dr. Demento show with my Bologna. 83 is his first album. But he is working on songs just to play on the Dr. Dementor radio show. Again, radio, very big. This is how you break.

This is how people find out about you. And he actually wrote his own Pac-Man parody. before Buckner and Garcia. So they were thinking on the same terms. This song was not released to the public until 2017. It was played on the radio in the early 80s, but there was a cease and desist because it was a parody of the Beatles tax man titled Pac-Man. So this eventually came out in 2017 via Weird Al.

Let's hear a bit of his own Pac-Man song. Yes. he is borrowing a Beatles song, but this is so much better than Pac-Man Fever. Well, the Beatles, I mean, you started with a great Beatles song. You're already in a far ahead of Pac-Man fever position. And conceptually, it's not just I like to play Pac-Man. It is about moving on from previously Pinball.

Like there seems to be more contours to the life of this man who's obsessed with Pac-Man. It's about an addiction, much like Pac-Man fever. But everyone is thinking the same way. we can't stop playing this video game what's wrong with us it's a strange phenomenon comedy can be mined out of this yeah I think it's also funny he got a cease and desist this back before

he was like ready to fight it though of course Weird Al famously even though he technically can't like parody whatever song he wants under the letter of the law of at least American parody law he does always get permission I think to a fault for any

song he does a parody of. Yeah. And I think at this point he is a guy in his early 20s. He is making songs for a radio show. And when a cease and assist shows up by the lawyers for the Beatles, you say, okay, I'm desisting. I'm ceasing. Yes. Yeah.

That show he got a level of popularity by that point. Like when I I'm sure he, I would bet he didn't check in with the queen when he did another one rides the bus before he got that famous though. Yeah, I'm not sure. But that scared him enough that, or at least Dr. Demento

was the coward in this case. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I think. Well, and Weird Al has since become friendly with Paul McCartney. I know Paul McCartney's in, like, some, a 3D film that Weird Al made once in the last, like, 20, 30 years. I know he's befriended Paul McCartney. So maybe that's why I finally got to release, an actual physical release from Weird Al on the Rarities album, because he now knows Paul McCartney.

And he's like, okay. maybe Paul at least said whatever who cares yeah I'm 80 now what do I care about your Pac-Man song I have a I have a weird out question that you guys will know the answer to do am I remembering correctly that Lady Gaga said no when he asked to parody one of her songs is that a thing that I think it's one of the cases of the lawyer he kept working on it and the lawyer said no and it was like the lawyer working behind Lady Gaga's back it's something like that yeah I think you can hear the song out there I don't know if he ever got permission the song I think is called perform this way,

which is, like, his parody of Born This Way, which I do think is a little meaner to the performer than some of his other parodies. It is, the song is a little about how this sounds kind of like Express yourself, doesn't it? Like, that was his main aim at

Gagga, which I also think Madonna is not a fan of either. Yeah, apparently Lady Gaga loves Weird Al, but it was more like her management finding the song damaging to the Gaga brand. Uh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, Gaga, I would hope she's cool with it. She seems cool.

So Pac-Man Fever, the album, hit stores about a month after the single. They don't make it out in time for Christmas. They still need 10 days to write this album. And big hit, goes gold just like the single does. And this seems like a promising next chapter in the careers of Buckner and Garcia. They got started writing jingles. Now they are your novelty song guys. And they hop into what they see as the next fad.

That is Stephen Spielberg's cute little wrinkling. alien boy ET. So these guys put together a song, and I'm not kidding, this song is called E.T. I love you. And what's even crazier about this story is this E.T. song finds itself in competition

with two other E.T. songs by more popular artists. And sidebar, if you have not heard our E.T. episode from Retronauts from 2022, look it up. E.T. at one point in history was the biggest movie of all time. For at least, I think like until Jurassic Park or something. Is that what's going on there, Henry?

I think so, yeah. And then it dethroned the Star Wars films. And then I think Jurassic Park surpassed it. And then I think it was another reason that Lucas wanted to do his special editions of Star Wars, a little bit of friendly competition with his friend Steve. And then, of course, Titanic comes out and beats both of them. And so now it's just Avatar or it's Avatar, Marvel movies, or a Chinese film that are battling over the top five these days.

Yeah, the competition now is very boring and not surprising, but it was fun when one movie would hold the title for 10 or 15 years back in the day. And Spielberg's been doing the rounds lately to promote Disclosure Day. And did you see, I saw a clip of one of his many do a silly game interviews that you have to do to promote movies now, he got asked, you know, is ET, you know, dry or slime? or no, dry or wet. And I think he's like, he's a little slimy.

I think was what Spielberg's answer was. Well, I don't like that he has to participate in this kind of content, but that's a good answer. It's, you know, I preferred watching him on, with Ben Mankowitz, like, just talk for 20 minutes about the making of AI. Like, that was the film, not the horrible thing. And that was really interesting to hear. But, yes, I don't, I don't want to see. I don't think he did eating hot wings type of. videos yet. That's good. Yeah. So yes, E.T. I Love You is in competition with two other E.T. songs.

And apparently, according to Buckner, Spielberg denied them permission to release this song. And CBS Records instead opted to release the Neil Diamond song, Heartlight, which is an unauthorized E.T song. And Drew, you're nodding. I know you have more information about heartlights, which is awful. It is one of those songs that if Beavis and Butth had watched the music video, they would immediately start frowning the second it came on television. So as a kid, my mom used to listen to the easy listening station or as Marge would call it suck rock. And this was one of the songs that played a lot. So I was very familiar with the song didn't necessarily hate it because I heard a lot and thought it was great. But not until

adulthood is actually Tony Rodriguez is the one who told me this song is actually about ET. And when you look at the lyrics, she's like, this is obviously about ET. That's so weird that Neil Diamond wrote a song about ET. And apparently he just like literally went to go to the movies one day and was just like so moved by it that he wrote a song where he was Elliott, I guess. But as you might know, he got sued for it and ended up having to give Universal $25,000, which is interesting because it's such a vague parody. Like, it's not a parody. It's a riff on themes from E.T.

But it's so abstract that you could easily listen to the song. I think it's just about your heartlight as a metaphor for like romance or something. And it's not literally talking about E.T. glowing organs. But honestly, I think it is, as far as songs about ET goes, I actually think it's better just because it is a song you hear, and it's not a great song. But when you, you could hear it a million times and not realize it's about ET, when that's pointed out to you that makes you understand it in a slightly deeper way.

So it actually gets a nod for me over the Buckner-Garcia one, which I do not think is good. Yeah, what's weird, I mean, I don't have a clip of the Buckner and Garcia one. What's weird about that song and a lot of their novelty music is it don't really think it's trying to be funny, especially E.T. I love you. It is a heartfelt love song or tribute to E.T. I believe one of them wrote it when their dog died and they saw E.T

and they found it very moving. But you really can't fully be on board with a song called E.T. I love you. It's a little too on the nose. When I listen to these E.T. songs in a heart light I knew a little bit. The other two

I didn't know so well. It is strange that they just to, I don't think in their context is what of when they came out they meant that way but they do sound like expressions of romantic love for ET as in less yeah it's not just not just like et I love you like a pet or a brother or my best friend it's like there there is some level of it's it's the joke on South Park of like being in love with Jesus Christ when they write Christian music there's there's there's erotic fiction about being in love with ET I've read up before I'm sure there's a lot of it.

Exploring all of those folds on his little body. Dry or wet. Your choice. You're going to write the story. You can decide if E.T. is dry or wet. So who belongs to CBS Records? Buckner and Garcia. Neil Diamond, also Michael Jackson belongs to CBS

records. And he has an E.T. song. His E.T. song is called Someone in the Dark. A very creepy title for a song about E.T. And ultimately, this song sees a release via the official E.T. Storybook album. and this is the origin of that really creepy photo

of Michael Jackson and E.T. together. If you're wondering where it came from, it is from that album. And I'm wondering if they cover that in the documentary. I might pirate it if they do. His work with E.T. It's not as wholesome as the Elliot Gould with Grover picture. I find that fine.

But he, no, that. Elliot Gould and Grover is also deeply erotic. Oh, yes. I think they're more open to it, I feel like. They know what they're doing. doing. I think, I hope that he is, I hope that wasn't just like the puppet. I want Frank Oz to be inside the Grover that's being hugged. I want Frank Oz to be just below Elliot Gould having his arm hugged. He's not just like a limp puppet or a puppet with some kind of weird armature

stuck up inside of him. So there's life in that puppet. Frank Oz needs to be like, well, I guess like his face would be at like, uh, belt level with Elliot Gould for that photograph. You can say crotch level. We were thinking crash levels. Hip area. The Michael Jackson one sounds like it's written from the viewpoint more of E.T. though, right? It's like E.T. is the someone in the dark in the song is about E.T.'s perspective hanging out with the kids, isn't it? Yeah. It makes sense that Michael Jackson would write that song, Henry. That's true.

Watching children from the woods. Sleeping over in their rooms overnight. Yes. Well, actually, I do have a clip of E. I love you. Let me play it now. Miles from home All alone

You were left behind in a world You didn't know E.T. You came to No one were true. E.T. You're apart. E.T.

I love you. That was a very long clip, but I wanted to get to him saying E.T. I love you. I mean, he's he's that deeply in love with E.T. He's got to take his time to really tell you how awesome he is. You know, at one point this week, I did listen to all three, and I did decide this is the best one. So I'm going to trust my memories. But Drew, you might be a bigger fan of Heartlight.

Yeah, I think Neil Diamond, I'm a sucker for Neil Diamond. And of all the Buckner Garcia songs we listen to you to record this episode, ETI I love you is the only one that actually made me want to, like, crawl out of my skin and die. I would have preferred you just wrote a song about the dead dog If I'm being perfectly Well, yes, I don't know The overwrought sincerity is admirable When you're writing about a puppet, I guess, is what I find

What tickles me, I guess, personally So we have to get to the in-depth conversation about the album But I do want to fast forward through their prolific career, Buckner and Garcia. So they had a second novelty album called Now and Then It was originally released through MP3.com around 1999, and it received a later digital release around 2009. That later release had a few songs cut from it. So this release is mostly just a small compilation of their few notable hits.

It's not really a real album. It's like scraping together demos and throwing Pac-Man Fever on there. But notably, the first edition of this album contains a song called Pog Wild about Pogs. And I cannot find this anywhere. This is true. I had to dig up the MP3.com forums and comb through it to make sure I wasn't dreaming. but there is a Buckner and Garcia song called Pog Wild about Pogs. Somebody out there has to have this.

Please send it to me. Thank you. I have to hear this. Please find the Pog. I want to hear them sing about how great Pogs are in the same way. They've got, what do they try to rhyme with Slammer? I wonder. Hammer?

Yeah. Jammer. I mean, a real jammer. Or maybe just Slammer and Slammer like about jail, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. That's worth playing too many Pogs. will land you perhaps in this world of ours in the mid-90s. But I don't know where Pogwild is. There's very little information about this album online. And this is not even included on their website.

But this album is real. Again, the history of Buckner-Garcia very scattered across the internet. It's very hard to track down exactly what these guys did and went after Pac-Man fever. I appreciate your commitment to investigating this fully. But I am actually good, not having heard Pogwild. I will die a very happy man. But it can make its way onto your album of songs that shouldn't exist. one song per artist and Pac-Man Fever is the winner in this competition. So here's a little bit more about their careers before we move on

so just a few things to mention here. Pac-Man Fever, the album was re-recorded in 1999, although mostly you will find the original recordings online. I think people prefer those over the second version and I assume they had more than a few weeks to record this second version.

So maybe on a technical level it is a better album but people like the scrappy original recordings than the more polished late 90s digital recordings. And there's also a 30th anniversary version from 2012 with commentary from Buckner on every song. And you can find that

online as well. And that did help me with my notes. This must be their version of the Taylor's version of Taylor Swift re-releasing her albums. It's like Taylor's version because she, for a time, didn't have access to the masters. So she has to re-record it

to release it with a better deal for her. Yes, they're very similar artists, at least in terms of popularity, they're like essentially the same. They both have songs in Disney movies, you know? There's a lot of crossover between T. Swift and BG. That is true. That is true. When I saw that there was commentary tracks about this, I was like, I don't want to listen to those. I'm like, wait, no, Bob will.

I don't have to. Bob will tell me all about it. This is my job. These commentary tracks exist for somebody, and that's me. So other things they've done. In 2011, they wrote a theme for Giant Bomb, the website. titled Found Me the Bomb. Another weird instance of me not being able to find the original upload of this or any MP3,

but because it was part of the rock band network, there are videos of people playing this song that are uploaded to YouTube. So you can see Buckner and Garcia's Giant Bomb theme, which I've fallen out of watching giant bomb stuff a long time ago. But I was in it around this time period. And I don't remember this being like a super notable thing in their history or at least something that was played a lot. Maybe it was just like a one-off novelty thing they celebrated.

and I missed it. Yeah, I was an enjoyer of Giant Bomb as our, like, as colleagues in our profession. My husband, though, was a regular viewer and subscriber to Giant Bomb. So he remembered this very well. I was like, well, yeah, Buckner-Garcy. He's like, of course. Like, my husband remembered the debut of it, how excited they were to show it off. When I listened back to it, it was, I thought it would be a little more rocky, but it's like a blues.

Like, yeah. Yeah. There's a real southern twang running through Pac-Man fever, and I think it's because these guys have been living in Atlanta for a decade. We'll get to it, though. I did want to identify that, at least. So, yes, they write that. I believe Gary Garcia called in during, like, a Pac-Man live stream,

and they joked about Buckner and Garcia writing a giant bomb theme, and they did. But unfortunately, this happens right before Gary Garcia passes away in 2011 at 63, making Buckner a one-man operation, which is a shame because this is when the duo is receiving some newfound attention. Disney is making a movie called Reckett Ralph and Buckner and the late Garcia are tapped into this movie to write the end credits theme, Reckett, Reckett Ralph,

which is a Pac-Man fever for Reckett Ralph. So Buckner writes this with some other people, given that Gary Garcia is dead, but I think that that was their last biggest period of prominence and probably like their second period of prominence after Pac-Man Fever's original release.

I have been listening to it unironically a bit these last a couple weeks since we covered record or recorded our Reckett Ralph podcast. I just really do love that it takes it, they understood the assignment of pretend you wrote this in 1982 about the game Fixed Felix Jr. in universe and it is entirely about the plot of Fixed Felix Jr. the video game and they even have a lyric to rhyme imman in domain. Yeah, it's a great song. I like it more than Pac-Man Fever. I'm not trying to say Gary Garcia was holding back Jerry Buckner, but

I think he had a lot more songwriting chops all these years later. So that's where you can find some of their later work. More about Buckner and Garcia over the years. In 2015, Pac-Man Fever is remixed for the Adam Sandler Film Pixels, which we should probably cover on this podcast. And the biggest addition to that is a rap verse. So that's out there. You can find that on YouTube very easily. I haven't had to hate watch pixels yet for podcast content, but I'm for it if I'm invited on that. I only know something happens with Cuberd in it. I know

from people joking about it in other media. All I know is Tanki Kang. Yes, that line. I know you didn't ask me to be on this episode, but I'm good. I'm good. I'm busy that week. Drew is Pianne from our pixels episode, as of now. Yes. So one final fact from the very scattered history of Buckner and Garcia,

and this one comes from the official Pac-Man Fever YouTube page. So, quote, Jerry also helped form Waffle House records for Waffle House restaurants with original songs featuring Waffle House themed lyrics for the in-store jukeboxes. Writing over 24 of the songs on the jukebox, he received an award for the most played song of the year in 2015. I don't know what award that is. It's probably some kind of Waffle House Association Award, but this is what Jerry Buckner does. He loves writing jingles.

He loves writing goofy songs, and he has not stopped doing it. Like he's found his wheelhouse. I assume he wanted to get in on Chucky Cheese when they were writing original music. But the bowling for soup guy beat him to the punch. That's true. Oh, man. Now I want to hear these Waffle House songs. I've only, and I grew up in the south of the land of Waffle House,

but I've only been to Waffle House like two or three times ever in my life. It usually more of a Cracker Barrel Cracker than a Waffle House cracker. Waffle House, the clientele's too scary. Yes, it should be, there have been jokes of this should just be. stage in Tekken, like, is Womble House parking lot. From all the videos I've seen, I think the people who work there are very good at breaking up fights. Yes, you have to, I mean, it's sink or swim, I think. If you work at a Waffle House, you die in your first week if you can't break up a fight. Like, it's a testing ground. But yeah, that is my final Buckner and Garcia fact. Does anyone else have anything to throw out before we move on to Pac-Man fever? We're about halfway through the podcast.

I'm looking up these Waffle House songs, or I'm going to a Waffle House and check in the, if, they still even have in-store jukeboxes for these songs. I got to find these Waffle House songs. Do you think they paid him in Waffles? Oh, man. I bet he would accept Waffles. So now let's move on to talk about a Pac-Man Fever the album. And we've covered some basics about this album to give it some context.

It's releasing in the Golden Era of the Arcade. This means that a lot of the classic games that we know and love don't exist yet, like Mario Brothers or Bubble Bobble, things like that. This is a very, very, I'm not going to say primitive, but kind of like the bronze age of the arcade compared to like what we grew up with five to ten years later playing those games. Yeah, there's only so many to go on in this like of popular ones. Then not all of them stood the test of time either. There was one I literally have never seen or I don't think I knew that it even existed until I found out what there was a song about it.

I'm going to assume that's Mousetrap. Yes. Yes. Now I will say credit to Buckner and Garcia. for getting in on the ground floor of this golden age of the arcades, they were able to correctly identify which games would stand the test of time, except for Mousetrap. So they hit bullseye on seven of the eight songs.

Mousetrap, it's a fine Pac-Man clone, but nobody remembers or talks about Mousetrap, except for the one person who will comment right after I said that. Right, right. It's interesting, too, looking at the list of the games that they have for the album. Like, perhaps they viewed Pong as too old and musty, not young, not hot and new enough, in early 1982 to do a Pong song.

Oh yeah, I think so. I think Pong was old news. And like I said before, there aren't really any big attempts to be funny on this album. Like Weird Al on his Pac-Man song is clearly writing jokes. Here, I think the overarching idea is it's funny to sing a song about a video game. That is just how simple of a concept this is. So all these years later,

it's kind of lost on us like 44 years later. But these songs are not about like telling jokes about the games or depicting comedic scenarios. It's like it's funny that a guy is singing a rock song about how to play Defender or Asteroids. And that's kind of it. It's funny that a guy is singing about how to play an arcade game eight times. Yes. You bought the album. You idiot.

It's weird that some of these songs are six minutes long. The very idea of hearing the song on the radio is what's funny. Yes. So we're going to move on to the first. song here, Pac-Man Fever, obviously based off of the arcade game Pac-Man by Namco, which was made in 1980. So like I said before, Buckner and Garcia from Akron, Ohio, they had been living in Atlanta for about a decade, which I think is why this album has a kind of like rowdy southern twang to it. It is sort of like rockabilly. When I hear these songs, I can feel the sawdust around my feet at the place they would be played.

I wonder I'd have to be like a music historian here, but I wonder where Atlanta's music scene was ranking in the early 80s compared to Los Angeles or Nashville or even New York. Like was Atlanta like heating up then or did they at least have a number of recording studios that they could work out of? We don't really hear a lot about in music history about like non-rap, non-hit hip-hop things happening in Atlanta. Like I have no idea like what the white people rock scene was there ever. really. The best I can say is that I lived in Atlanta or an Atlanta suburb in like 1990 to 92, but we only ever listened to the oldie station. But I think it led to a better mix of, it's not just the white oldies on the Atlanta oldie station, I think. Demographically, they had to serve a wider, more diverse audience. Well, I was thinking about the singer on a lot

of these songs, the dominant singer. I'm not sure if it's Buckner or Garcia. I'm sorry. I was not able to determine that. But it's very abrasive. It's like very masculine and abrasive. And it does remind me of another singer with a notable song. I was just thinking about like, who does this remind me of? And I found it. So here's a clip of what the dominant singer definitely, he evokes this image in my head. We got friends about for Monday night. Yeah, every song on Pac-Man Fever is sung in that exact same cadence and attitude. It's very, very strange. Maybe it's, maybe it was that's part of the joke. maybe it's like, well, we got to give you some kind of like masculine vibe to this because it is kind of dorky to be listening to a song about a mousetrap, perhaps.

Yeah, that makes sense. They're amping up the masculinity. Well, also they are NFL type guys, so or at least they wrote a Christmas song about it. But they perhaps like if you're either a dork or a drug dealer if you're hanging out in arcades as an adult. So they're trying to be a little cooler. So are either of you guys 30 rock people? A little bit, a little bit. I am not, I'm sorry.

I've not been baptized into that world yet. So a strong endorsement for me on this. It's very, very funny. You just unlocked what this album reminds me of. And it's the music of Jeff Richman, who is Sina Fates husband, but also the guy that does all the music for all of her shows, which means he's doing like the theme song and the score.

But on 30 Rock, especially, there's a lot of parody music. And for example, because this version of NBC is terrible and going out of business constantly. They've lost NFL Monday Night Football, but they have tennis. So they have Jane Krakowski's character, do like a country fried rockin tennis anthem.

That's just like a very bad idea. And there's a lot of other fake novelty songs. Like Tracy Jordan has a song called Werewolf Bar Mitzv that are very much in this vein. And this entire experience of walking my dog around my neighborhood listening to this album, maybe realized that I was like, oh, this is a remind me of 30 Rock.

And that connection of the Monday 29 football team is actually what made it. Yeah, yeah, I have not seen these parodies, but what I'm saying here is I want Hank Williams, Jr. to cover this album while he's alive. He's in between celebrating our wonderful, he has to be at a bunch of America 250 stuff, right? You think so?

He's got to be pretty busy right now. I think so, yes. So we mentioned this earlier, but all of these songs kind of have the same format, and they almost all start off with sound effects and music from the game, recorded from an actual machine. In this case, there was a Pac-Man machine at their nearby Delhi that they recorded these sounds from.

And at least this song is from the perspective of somebody with the addiction. This is like one of the more high concept songs in the album. Like, I'm a player of Pac-Man. Here's what I'm going for. Most of the other songs, like I said, not to be repetitive. This is a very repetitive album. The songs are, here is how you play the game. Here is a list of the enemies or the power-ups or here's what the buttons do.

That's kind of just all they can work with with the two-beating. they have to write the rest of them. And in title, but I don't think in style, the title to me evokes the 1977 hit from, you know, that horrible person, Ted Nugent, cat scratch fever, that song. Oh, yeah, so that was before this. Yes, it was a, I looked it up while we were talking. I was like, wait, when do cat scratch fever come out, which I also only know as a joke and references. to again a disgusting person, the singer of the song,

but the title, Cat Scratch Fever and Pac-Man fever, like, you know, they rhyme, they fit very similar. Ted Nugent, terrible driver. We've heard his stance on the speed limit,

right? That could be somebody else, actually. I'm not going to look into it. Oh, wait, no, that's Amy Hagar. Okay. I'll have to imagine Ted Nugent's not a good driver either. Ted Nugent has feelings on other laws about numbers,

let's say, age laws. He has opinions on those. So yeah, high concept song. The Stinger starts by saying, I've got Pac-Man Fever. Here are the symptoms. I'm running out of quarters. I've got callous fingers. I've got a sore shoulder.

So this is like the working premise of the song. And here's a clip of the chorus. So you can get a sense of what Pac-Man Fever is like. So there you have it. And I guess I was expecting more of a catchy hook because this is the dominant single. This is the big hit from the album. But I think they realize we don't have to work. work that hard. No one has really written a song like this before. Other songs in this album

are a lot catchier than Pac-Man Fever, I'll say, at least in my opinion. That sticks in my head. Like, it's been stuck in my head all goddamn week. And it is, it's not elegantly written, but it is a very powerful earworm, I would say. But they don't use enough of the, like, the music. They, they did like interpolate the music from the game all that much, which is incredibly memorable music. It gets played at the very start of the song, but they don't borrow any more than that. They do. So right. So right. after the chorus ends, they have another little bit of the music introduced as like a tiny bridge before they go into the next chorus. And I think that's actually one of the better uses of the original game sounds of anything on this album.

Because sometimes the original game music is incorporated very hand-handedly. Whereas like these do not go together. You're just doing this because I guess you think you have to. But maybe don't is what I would say. Yeah, you're right. True. Often the game music and sound effects will just be carelessly thrown into the mix and its class. with the actual song that's being performed.

But yeah, it's used a little better here. And also, I would want to go back to the Weird Al song. Weird Al incorporates the Pac-Man music into the song in a very clever way that is blowing this song out of the water. But again, Weird Al, he has stood the test of time. Yeah. Yeah, it's not fair to Buckner-Garcia to put it against that. Well, okay, then I stand corrected on the music thing for it. That does make me wonder, too, did they, legally, how are they using these clips from?

the games. I know it was the Wild West back then, but I wonder. Oh, yeah. So I think I know, because this has been a pet interest of mine is the collision of video game music and pop music, like for a major record label and how they interact. And I think it was the Wild West until that lawsuit between Bismarkey and the guy who's saying alone again naturally, because that was the thing that changed the way sampling worked in, this is essentially this is a sample. It's just like one where they're not really doing anything creative with it, the way hip hop artists would do something. They would be interpreting the original sound in an interesting way. They're just inserting it into this pretty much as is.

But I guess it would be considered a sample. And anyone could basically do anything until this lawsuit happened. And all the record labels are like, you have to clear everything. And it essentially changed the way hip hop worked. And there's like racist reasons for why that happened the way it did. But because essentially white musicians didn't think that what black musicians were doing was a legitimate creative endeavor. They thought they were just dealing. Very, very complicated.

But I was going to actually bring this up at the end of the episode. There are later examples of pop music interacting with video game compositions where they're not crediting the company or the composer or in the liner notes. There's no mention of the fact that you're building something off, something was created for a video game. And I was hoping someone who was listening to this episode would know or like know someone who like happens to know a lot about the intersection of these two fields. because if that person exists, they might actually be listening to this episode.

And I would love to interview that person because I want to try to get to the bottom of why sometimes things get sourced and cited and cleared. And sometimes even modern day major labels act like they can do whatever they want with video game music. And it's like a legal loophole. I know like you said, Drew, this all changed in the late 80s because I believe Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys is one of the final sample rich albums where it's just built completely out of samples that were not cleared. And then afterwards, you have to clear everything. Yeah, it becomes so expensive that it's, I guess, for some bands or for some groups, they get to show off. Like, we got to sample this because, like, it's showing off just the same as, like, buying an expensive piece of jewelry. Like, we can actually afford to sample this song for our music.

And then P. Diddy took all the hits from the 80s and made him sound so crazy. I know those songs were bad, Henry. Yes. I mean, it was, it is lame that, but I, beyond whatever happened in the news with that guy, I don't know about this. You said both, but we don't get to the dog button until mousetraps. So hold your whoops. No, yeah. It's just sad that the, the police song, for instance, is people just think that more, I hope people don't associate it as much with the, the ditty version. It's a confession. There is actually a weird sort of correlate to that where Childish Gambino did something really. interesting with a David Wise track from Donkey Kong country. And I don't think he ever released it

on official studio release. He released it on a mixtape. And I think releasing something as a mix tape where you're giving away for free allows you to scoot around the problem of having to clear something that if you're an up-and-coming artist who doesn't have the money to clear those samples, that's one way you can get people to listen to your stuff without having to pay large fees of money. But then you're also giving music away for free. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I believe like the internet obviously blew all this up. And that's, That's why in the aughts in 2010s, we had like mashup artists like Girl Talk, which they're like, we're just going to steal everything who cares, buy it online, come to our concerts.

What are you going to do? Call the cops. Or also the, was it DJ Danger Mouse who did the gray album of putting together the Beatles White album and Jayzie's black album into interspersed? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then, meanwhile, Childus Gambino taking the Donkey Kong. music and then he eventually becomes Yoshi.

Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Yeah. Interesting, interesting progression there. Back to Pac-Man Fever, though. We get some hard facts, I guess, because one of the verses is, I've got all the patterns down up until the ninth key. By the way, this key begins appearing in the 14th stage.

This guy is an advanced player. And then he mentions Speedy the Ghost, eating cherries, using the side doors. So we're getting into what this album will really contain in future songs. Billy Mitchell just cack like just scoffing at the hell how hard

it's hard for these guys he's killing the game he's getting kill screens every day yes uh with with some help a little help let's say so yeah the song is light on content it doesn't really take us long to get back to the chorus like I said earlier and I'm going to repeat myself

a lot because this is a repetitive album like I said but very short verse immediately we flee back to the chorus the chorus is what they're proudest of they're more confident with and there will always be like really long solo, which is a lot easier to do than writing lyrics. So this actually, like, structurally, this reminds me of Weezer's Green album, if they may be weird, because every

song on that album has the exact same structure, because at that time, the lead performer for Weiser, Rivers Cuomo, was thinking, I will make the mathematically perfect pop song. Right. That's actually a really good comparison. I didn't think about that. There is a Weezer quality to some of this. Yeah. I'd rather hear the green album, but I found that album kind of tedious. too because like oh it's the every song has the exact same structure this this kind of stinks and then 9-11 happened yes yeah we graduated high school well i graduated high school and then i i took my SATs the day and then went to pick up the green album at the record store same day i'll never i'll never forget i thought you guys said you took your SATs in the world trade center

oh no no where was henry on 9-11 yeah i've seemed like you were implicating yourself And hit him now. So, yes, I have one final verse from Pac-Man Fever before we move on to the next song. And for most of these songs, like I love pulling clips of goofy songs on Retronauts, but for most of these, I was just pulling one clip because there's not a lot of, there's very little meat in these gym mats, let's say. So here is my next Pac-Man Fever clip.

Now I've got them on the run and I'm looking for the highest door. Go it's once around the block and I'll slide back out the side door. There you go. So that's basically it for Pac-Man Fever. We go back to the chorus. Very slight. Get used to it. Yeah, you were right on the Hank Williams style there.

Like the last line in the clip you just played basically has the exact feel of the like, oh, my ratty friends are like the same cadence. You should ask us rowdy friends for some money. They're too rowdy. They're not going to lend money. All their quarters are spilling all over the floor with their rowdiness. So that is Pac-Man Fever. we're going to move on to Froggy's Lament.

So this is based on Frogger by Konami in 1981. And as with Pac-Man Fever, we first hear the very simple tune that starts off Frogger. And this is more of a high concept song on this album because we are froggy. The man is singing in a frog-style voice. He's croaking. And this may mystify a lot of you, but thankfully I was able to discover this reference. In a frog voice, the man says, pluck your magic twang or froggy. No, this is not perverted.

This is a reference to the boomer-era kid show Andy's Gang, which I guess is something the character would say. And this unlocked a reference because in my hometown, there was a bar restaurant called The Magic Twanger, and it had a frog mascot. So this is essentially the equivalent of us making a Simpsons reference. Right. Okay. So what's a twinger then?

It's like a liar or like an instrument. Oh, like a twangy instrument. Okay. That makes sense. And yes, the premise for the first song was, What is it like to be addicted to Pac-Man? Premise number two is, what is it like to be this doomed character in this video game? So let's hear a little bit from Froggy himself in Froggy's lament.

Froggy takes one step at a time. The way that he moves has no reason or rhyme. He hops and jumps, dodges and ducks, cars and buses, vans, and trucks. Go, Froggy, go. You got to keep on hopping until you get to the talk. Go, Froggy, go. Gotta keep on hopping. You can never stop.

It sounds a little bit like convoy, my opinion. It does. Oh, yeah. I think he's supposed to be doing like a frog-ish voice, but it does sound like the convoy guy. I think it's interesting that he's doing the frogish voice, though, and he's not speaking the first person as the frog. He's still putting like a narrative distance between himself in the game where they're very trapped by what they feel like they can do.

So like, rather than I am the frog, we're like, oh, he's the frog. We're describing the frog again. And it's like, you know, you guys can, you guys can play with it a little bit. Like, like, you're the frog. You're the truck. like just like you know have some fun but for a game they're not having that much of it this this narrative device is flawed you're right true i did not actually think about that how they're singing from the perspective of the frog but he's describing like what the frog should do

yeah like no you you're the frog i don't know maybe they thought boy this is dull what if i did a frog voice how long can i keep this up yeah it it it reminds me of uh disney movies of the time more earlier, like the classic era of, like in Robin Hood, the singing character about Robin Hood doing the d-d-l-l-l-le-d like that. He's singing about

the protagonist from a positive angle of the protagonist and knowing his internal thoughts but also like pitying this guy. Though, I don't know, I think Frogger moves with reason and rhyme. He wants to get from one end to the swamp.

He wants to get the swamp. Yeah, he's got to keep on hopping. It's actually quite, quite, understandable. I think he just came up with the lyric and didn't want to go back and change it. And another problem is, I think we've highlighted, these games are very simple. Like, yes, you have to keep on hop until you get to the top. That's kind of it for Frogger. I mean, there's some strategy, there's some nuance, but you're not, this is not like Street Fighter 2 or anything like that. You're a frog moving from the bottom to the top of the screen. And another problem,

narratively flawed. Also, this song is called Frog is Lament. It's too upbeat to be a lament. Right. I mean, I guess he's constantly having to dodge cars and that sucks. But he doesn't sound sad about it in the course of the song in that clip too he mentions got a pop to the top and he names every type of vehicle that could hit him and so it's like well you've said almost everything that is on screen in in the game frog yes and we've oh drew go ahead at one point he talks about there being otters i was like there was no otter and frogger it turns out the otter only shows up later and i just suck at frogger oh see i didn't know about the otter either so these guys are experts or they're peering over the shoulders of experts that might taking notes they're like

a 12 year old who's like very good at it. But yeah, we've covered maybe four or five of these video game albums on retronauts in a common device is, uh, let's just list nouns that are in this game and that that will be a song. And that they're kind of, he's resorting to that now. They, they resorted to that in Pac-Man favor. It's going to be the common device throughout. So songs don't have to tell a story, though. Songs can be like very abstract and they can just be about like a vibe or a mood.

And you can just sort of hover in that space. like most songs actually don't tell concrete narratives the way these are trying to. That's another weird thing where they're putting a limitation on themselves of being like, well, there's a frog and he has to do this. There's like, you can like just move beyond the concrete just a little bit. And these songs might be slightly better, not a whole lot better. Yeah, I think I assume that these would be just very loosely based on the games. Like, okay, what's the song we can write about a frog?

But no, they're being oddly literal. Like here are the few things you can do in the game and that's all we've got. I thought this is going to be like the Saturday Supercade cartoon where it's like, what if Frogger was a reporter? Something like that where they spin it off into a rare direction while kind of keeping some ties to the idea of a frog. But no, they're like, here's what you do in Frogger and that's all we got. Someone probably heard this and was like, I'm going to play this Frogger game. Sounds very interesting to me. Now I'm waiting if like in the other novelty song albums we've covered in Red For Knots in the past that will there be a listing of seasons in any of these that kills.

time. I don't want to disappoint you, Henry, but no. But it's just as repetitive. So, yeah, there is no solo in the Frogger's song, so they just kind of go back to the first verse again, which should be illegal. I say write another verse. But the rest of the song is so repetitive that I just have the one clip. And that's all you really need. That's not even time for a solo in Froggy's lament. I guess it doesn't seem as much of a lament, I suppose. The clock is ticking. CBS Records is waiting. So up next we have O to a centipede. Based on a... Atari Centipede, obviously. And in order so far, this is my favorite song because it is a fairly good take on a Jim Steinman Meatloaf song. It has completely different vibe from the rest of the album. And I really have a soft spot for Meatloaf thanks to my parents who played his albums in the car over and over and over. Is Jim Steinman Meatloaf or is that someone else? Jim Steinman is the guy who wrote a ton of the meatloaf songs, you know, like the big theatrical meatloaf songs. Okay. You're right. As well as, oh, as well as totally. A Total Eclipse of the Heart and holding out for a hero and the songs in Streets of Fire, which I was just listening to last night because Streets of Fire came up in a Blue Sky conversation

with Drew himself and Nina last night. I didn't realize that he did all of those. He's great then. I thoroughly enjoyed this person's work, even though I don't know his name. Did you guys know that Totally Close of the Heart is from a play about vampires? No. So it's lost a time, but like someone has the book for it somewhere. and it was like a rock musical.

And if you look at the lyrics to totally clips of the heart, you can be like, oh, it's about vampires. Like, obviously this is pulled from a thing about vampires, although it's not literally about vampires and they abstract a little bit, which is probably why the song had a shelf life as like a normal song that people didn't listen to the context of a musical. But yeah, I've always wanted to see that play. Interesting. Yes, I didn't know this.

In this, in this case, this song, it sounds a bit like, Tonight is what it means to be young from Streets of Fire, which is not by Meatloaf, but it is Jim Simon. Just the way it starts off with piano. So yeah, I'll play a clip of this, and I do like this the best so far. So there you have it. And it is sort of like a love song to the centipede, because he's pursuing the centipede, but it's sort of like a weird romantic pursuit in a way with these odd spoken word sections that I'll play.

a bit of soon. So I love this song and it is interesting. You could almost mistake it for being like a normal song. And if you were listening to it in a bar and murmur, like, what is this song? Is he singing about a centipede? What the fuck is this?

Yes. It is here. Actually, I'll play the very beginning, which it does just sound like a meatloaf song is starting here. There you have it. I love any drum fill. It's like, do, too.

Oh, that's so great. Man, yes. I legit like this song. I'm going to like, I'll be listening to it in full soon because I, I get, we, we all love the music of Jim Steinman and meatloaf on here. But that's such that it's, it's so driving and just building for, for Centipede 2. That's so great. Yeah, for a song about pest control. Yes.

What I don't like about the song are, are these bits. So there you have it. Yeah, I like this singer more than the Hank Williams guy, but he drops into this like weird childish kind of. voice, say, I'm coming to get you a centipede. And I don't, I don't like that. Is that what we think that accent is? Because I guess, like, gross child voice might explain it. But, like, he is talking unusually.

Yeah, it's a weird manner of speaking. To me, it reads as like a childish, like teasing kind of way. Like, playful. Or like a serial killer who talks like a child. Yeah, yeah. But that's another vibe I get from this song. It reminds me of the, uh, that actor in the beginning of Night of the Living Dead who says, they're coming to get you, Barbara.

Like, it reminds me a little of that too. but it's a creep and it's weird of like I pity centipede in this now this is a creepy player talking to centipede as he's trying to win

the video game and we learn facts about the centipede like the spiders are its only friends which they seem to have just some common ground in the game but no real partnership

no so after another spoken word bit where the player taunts the centipede we get a very time-eating guitar solo and I will say this song as much as I like

how it starts it is a very long song and it is like six minutes long. It is a slog. And I just have one more clip of more spoken word sections here. So, yeah, it is creepy. There are, I think, five of these little spoken word bits. And I feel like telling something the spiders won't help you now is something you only say to someone who is tied up in your basement. Right. Yes.

Right. this is like out of silence of the lamps Yes man I say asking if he has Nikes for all of them is that's a joke That's like an actual joke It's like a actual joke It's like what a six year old would think of

Like what if the bug wore shoes All right That's a start Why you know I suppose the centipede is known for being long And having a lot of sections So it fits that it's a long song Though that it being six minutes Or over six minutes

Feels like they had a quota of minutes that this album needs to be for it to cat like contractually and with only eight songs then you're going to have to have at least one long one to get to get over some threshold. It's incredibly long. So I'm done with Senepeed

if you guys are done. We're fine. Okay. We're going to move on to number four. Do the Donkey Kong based on Donkey Kong obviously. Drew, I know you've done a lot of Donkey Kong research very recently so I'm going to rely on you for a lot of this knowledge. So this is inspired by the dance crazes of the 60s in which

A song would be named after a dance And the lyrics would instruct you on how to do said dance It would normally begin with, Come on, everybody! And then it was like, do the blank. And then you would, you know, move your hands and legs As a singer would instruct. In this case, you need props.

So let me play a bit of Do the Donkey Kong. Wait, any gear, stop the feet on the ground. Climb up the ladder quickly can and spin yourself around. Open the umbrella, open, answers the phone. Partner, you can. do it all with the wall just how high can you go? You surely break her heart. Get it to slow.

I'm up on your chest and think you'll elevate the top and then you look from side to side. Okay. So to do this song, you need a ladder, an umbrella and a phone. So if you're going to the dance hall in the 60s, bring these with you, put them under the table. You'll be ready. There's no survivors from this dance hall. Like, people are going to hurt themselves very badly. I'll try to open a fake umbrella at the same time.

Also, where the fucking Donkey Kong? is there a phone? There's no phone. I'm asking you, yeah, Drew, what is this reference to a phone? Pauline has like her hat and the purse and the umbrella and maybe he's misreading one of those as a phone. There's not a fucking phone in the game. The purse could look like a princess phone maybe. I guess. I guess. But like, like there is also the decal on the side of a proper donkey cone cabinet that shows you how much they're worth and items. And like, oh, I can tell what they are. And like people didn't have cell phones back then. Why would she lose her phone on the fucking construct? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense.

I was, I stumbled on phone. I wasn't sure what that was. So we mentioned that the Frogger song, narratively flawed. This is also narratively flawed. They could have had a very easy song where, here's a funny dance you can do where you act like a monkey. That's all we got to do.

But no, this is basically how to play the game. Do the Donkey Kong as you act both like Donkey Kong and you also act like Mario at the same time. Like, no, you had a good idea in the title. You made it too complicated. I was trying as listening to it as like, okay, I'm going to try to act out everything he's telling me to do just on the fly. It needs to be one instruction per like lyric line, but it's like two.

It's like within the same lyric line, it's like comma, then do this. Like umbrella two phone and dead ladder. It's like slow it down. I need fewer instructions to do the donkey car. Pull your car over. Now throw your car keys into a sewer grade. I was like, wait, what? Why am I doing this?

I mean, maybe it's because they were getting squirly, as Buckner said. But I feel like they were overthinking this. Frogger could have just been about a frog crossing the road. This could have just been, what does a monkey do? Here is four minutes of how a monkey would dance around, but no, it's another list of things in the game, what the Donkey Kong character does, what the Mario character does. And yes, this follows the same format of the other songs in terms of like the verse and the chorus and a solo. So here's a bit more of the Donkey Kong song.

Jump over all the barrels and then out of little coconut free. You kick the hammer up and then they put the thinking no donkey. Okay, there you have it. And the album wanted, sorry, the record label wanted Froggy's Lament to be the second single. They wanted Donkey Kong, did the Donkey Kong to be the second single, and I think it's a stronger song and a better song. It's catchy. Like that chorus is great. The fact that it is committing the sin of like constantly telling you to do a dance that like you can't do makes it like, you know,

morally impure. If it had fewer instructions, I think it could have actually been like a roller rink or like junior high dance hit back in 1981. The kindest thing I can say about this song, I do kind of like it. And that's probably because it's cars adjacent. It sounds a lot like a lesser cars song. When you hear the keyboard solo,

I'm thinking this is possibly inspired by the cars or Gary Newman or somebody like that. It's in that era of like new wave, even though this is kind of like a 60s throwback song. So it's both like a 60 sound but also an early 80s sound and I kind of dig that. I mean, I think Bucknery Garcia were right in Do the Donkey Kong should have been the second single. Like Froggy's Lament, I'm flipping the station. It's just too slow or whatever. This one at least like, do the Donkey Kong, like it gives me something to nod my head to.

I think at least for an instructional song, a problem they have is like you're just going to want to do the monkey, the classic. song already of the 60s, and you can't do that. Like, that's their thing. So just doing the beating of the chest. They should just been hitting on that more. Like, just have that be part of your song. Like, that's, because Donkey Kong's a gorilla, not a monkey. It's his kid who climbs like that,

like the song, the monkey. They're trying to reinvent the monkey. And unfortunately, Donkey Kong Jr. nod out until 82, I believe. That's true. They couldn't have, maybe when they, Donkey Kong Jr. comes out, they're like, ah, that's the dance that we should have been doing for do the Donkey Kong. But then they moved on to ET.

So this song has a real curveball to it. If you listen to the entire thing, it fades out completely. You think the song is over. But then suddenly, bam, the chorus appears again like a vengeful ghost. What the hell? Yes. I've never heard that before in a song. I don't think it was a common thing you would do on an album.

But strange. It does happen sometimes. You have a fake fade out. And they're like, no, we're just kidding. We're coming back. But the thing is that those are usually songs that you are into. And you're like, oh, there's a thing. more song. That's good. In this case,

you're like, oh, the song's, it's still going. Oh, no. Okay. Yeah. Did I catch that they said duck the pies, like they, is this about them thinking the cement factory is the pie factory, as many people felt thought then? Yeah, that seems to be what they thought. Yeah,

they thought it was, so it is a cement factory. That's what I, that's what I always, well, came to believe as a Mario freak and that's why like the, maybe even why they They had the Game and Watch cement factory game not too long afterwards. Yeah, it's, Drew, do you have the answer for this?

Because I didn't bother looking this up. I just took it on face value that there is a Pi factory level because I'm so much more familiar with the console version. I don't think I've ever actually played that level in the arcade version. I believe it's officially a cement factory and that it's just colloquially known as a Pi factory because graphics are hard to read back then. But no, I don't know. Yeah, it's a cement factory, also known as the Pi Factory.

Yeah, it's officially a cement factory. But, you know, pixels are weird. Yeah, for the longest time I thought it was a pie factory too. And I think to this day, I still did until I was recently corrected. So thank you. Concerting sites don't have pie factories. They have cement factories. That's true.

The pie factory is not really an industrial installation. Yeah. Mario Brothers would never invest in a pie factory. Now, cement factory, that's they'd invest in. Cookie factory. It's a whole spin-off game. You just have to ask where the mob is and they're not investing in pies. Cements, yes.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, the cement, that's a legitimate business, but also you got to make some cement shoes, then it's good to own a cement factory. So we're going to move on to hyperspace based on asteroids by Atari, 1979, a very old game at this point. I guess they didn't want to call the song Asteroids. That's what Jerry Buckner says on the commentary,

because the word ass is in it, and I guess that's unpleasant to some people. I see. Okay, because it's the only one that doesn't have, well, I guess Frog Easlement. doesn't have a frog or in the title, but it's the only one that doesn't have anything of the game title in it. And we get a very long wind-up, which is the usual for this album.

The real problem here is this game is from 1979. It is the most primitive game in terms of what the other games are doing. And most of the song is about the hyperspace button. So let's hear a clip of that. Asteroids around me don't know where to rock. Someone between the moon and the sun. I'm in command of three ships and there's more on the way. And in less than a minute, he really wrapped up everything you need to know about asteroids.

And I feel like this, along with other songs, need a better concept. But this in particular, it should have been about the pride and the fall when it comes to overusing the hyperspace button because that can screw you in asteroids. That would be better. I do like the use, well, I mean, well, like is a strong word. But I'm having fun with hyperspace, boo, like using the sound effect there. I think that I like that use of the sound I guess if the title were Asteroid

they would be hitting the ass part really hard. Yes. For that Asteroids. Probably maybe that I can see why they made this choice now. Yeah. Why did they pick asteroids and not space invaders, which has a little bit more going on narratively? Yeah, this is an old game in Space Invaders is just a year older and I feel like maybe

they thought well that that was a fad that we all lived through and we want to like steer towards some of the newer games. Okay. And now thinking, rating how they like use or don't use lore, you know, asteroids doesn't have much of a backstory to it.

But it's crazy undo the Donkey Kong now. As I say that, like it's like Donkey Kong had the most lore of any video game in 1981. And they don't, they barely touch on any of it in there. Yeah. I think it is really, in terms of an arcade game,

the first game with a narrative that has a beginning, middle and end. And like, define characters with goals. Not like, you're a ship. Shoot other ships. Have fun. So, yes, that is really hyperspace.

I have nothing more to say, but the game, the song is just about one button on the arcade cabinet. Yes, it's a fun button to hit, but ultimately you need to use it strategically. Otherwise, it will warp you

in the path of an oncoming asteroid and you will die. It's more of like an emergency button than something you use like skillfully. But I'm not a pro asteroids player. I kind of suck at it. So I'm not the right person to be asking here.

So that is almost called an asteroid's hyperspace. So up next we have The Defender based on Taito's Defender. And I'm listening to these songs in order and taking notes. At this point, I am getting so tired of this singer's really abrasive voice. I am excited to go back to Froggy's Lament or the Meatlo song with the weird childish taunting voice. Because the Hank Williams Jr. guy, he just kind of sings in one way and there's not a lot of range there. And it just, it's grating on my ears. but here's another song in that same mode

and we are switching back to the perspective of another character in the game. It's not the perspective of someone playing the game. So here is a bit of Defender. So yes, I will say the actual tune is kind of nice but I think the other guy should be singing the Defender song. It's maybe a mistake to put Astro, Hyperspace and Defender so close because they're like conceptually very similar video games

and there's not a whole lot to differentiate them. He says, I'm the defender, a mutant bender. A mender, yeah. Is mutant bender, that's not part of the game at all, right? It's not like a... I guess he's destroying mutants. Okay. So he is a bender of mutants.

I take it. That's, that's sweaty. That's, that's rough. They, they didn't have to choose that the defender would be the rhyming word. Yeah. Like, that was their choice in, in constructing, the chorus. Like, well, it's got to be Defender is the word that's going to have

to rhyme in this. This is very like TKTK, find rhyme later. And then I mean, musically, this really sounds like the song at the end of an 80s movie where the nerd gets to dance with the cheerleader and the credits start rolling. If it's not about a defender, the musically, this just feels like an 80s pop hit. Like very, very bubblegum.

So it reminds me of the theme song to glow, which is what is it? The glow, you know what I'm talking about. The Warrior by Patty Smith. It reminds you. Oh, yes. That song, which is...

From the Netflix... Yeah, from the Netflix... The Netflix... The drama of the original of Glow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Right. But it is very much what you're describing Bob as, like, it's sort of an end of the movie thing.

Yeah, actually, I can load up the warrior here because I don't know if I know this song. So here is a bit of that song. Yeah, she could be talking about spaceships. We don't know. We don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I can see the similarities.

But yeah, I kind of, like, I... Because of when I grew up, I like, I like the bubble gum sound. of this 80s pop. I just don't want the Hank Williams guy singing about spaceships. That's my main problem here. They could, you know, they needed to have a girl in the group,

I think, a female voice singing a couple of these or at least shake things up or just tired. This is why Jim Steinman started working more with female singers or would counterbalance a, you know, meatloaf in a duet with a woman too. Those are great songs. Yeah, and I guess, so I think this is from the perspective of the guy in the ship.

but weirdly enough it ends with him giving up because the lyric is a miss, then a hit, now he's fading away, meaning the hostage he was trying to save. Lyrics continue by saying, I've done all I can at least for today. So he's just walking away from this hostage situation.

It's over. An ambivalent ending to a song. That's funny too. I guess in this being a Taito song, maybe that's why they didn't do Space Invaders. Like, ah, that's old. We need to go with the newer one, Defender. That's probably it.

And Defender was the new hotness in terms of that kind of space. spaceship game. So nothing more to say about that. Let's move on to Mousetrap. So this is based on Mousetrap by Exit. It is the most obscure game featured on this album. And I said this before, but it's basically a Pac-Man

clone with some twist to it that I think over-complicates Pac-Man. So you're a mouse. You're being chased by cats. So instead of Pac-Man, it's a mouse. Instead of it's cats. And instead of being a power pellet, you eat a bone that turns you into a dog. But you have to hit the dog button on the arcade

unit. So immediately, like, you're destroying the elegance of Pac-Man that only needs a joystick. And also, the mazes have doors that can be opened by hitting the corresponding button on the arcade cabinet. Like, the red button will open the red doors. So you're immediately giving Pac-Man four buttons, and I don't like this. Also, there's a bird that flies over diagonally that can kill you? Yeah, it's a hawk. Okay. And you have to, like, lead the hawk out of the exits in order to stun it. Like, I watched a playthrough on YouTube, and I was like, this is too much. I'm not even looking at the controls. And I am.

overwhelmed. I can see why this was not a success. I got to say, though, when I heard in the song that, like, you're a mouse who turns into a dog, I was like, number one, that does not make any sense. That's against God's plan. Number two, what the fuck is this game? So I actually looked it up. So it actually did the thing of advertising the game to me and like making me learn about it. So perhaps successful song. I don't know. Yeah. And I guess technically it's interesting because there are a lot of rudimentary sampled noises of cats and dogs and birds. So I guess it was a knowledge. for that reason. I like it.

This song amused me and is one of the more successful ones on the album to me. And yeah, there were a lot of Pac-Man clones around this time, but I thought like, well, Pac-Man is readily available.

Why do I need to play like any of the other Pac-Man clone? There's just so many of them. And a year later, you have the even better, arguably even better Pac-Man game, Miss Pac-Man. So you don't even need,

if you need something that is like Pac-Man, you've got Miss Pac-Man. You don't need Mousetrap. Yeah, you don't need a dog button. We're fine. So, what if they tried to pitch this as a Tom and Jerry game at some point? I'll put it in possibly better. I don't know.

I should say as a dog person, more games should have dog buttons. I just don't know what they should do. That's true. Very few games have a dedicated dog button. But yes, like the other songs, this might not surprise you, but this is also describing how to play the game. Let's hear Mousetrap. This is a doggy button or something.

This is It's something to sound like to me. This is Bob Seeger, at least to me. So much information in this. You're just like, wait, what is going on in this game? Like, it is so complicated. The hawk will turn stupid if I go out the door. Yeah.

And yeah, get a bone and then say, but then even telling you like, no, and press a dog button and then they leave me alone. Yeah, it's, uh, you could tell they're kidding very tired. I don't, I don't, I'm not, I don't hold any of this against Buckner and Garcia. They were given no time to make a record. They, I guess, assume no one would be listening to 44 years later, but here we are. Yeah. I wonder with this rudimentary strategy stuff that sometimes come in here,

including like how to confuse the, the hawk to leave you alone, like that. did they buy like a very simple well I was going to say like just a book that you see in the grocery store aisle check out of like arcade tips like quick printed books

would have been a lot better than like creepily standing over like a 12 year old playing game all day but I will tell you because I watch the play through a mouse trap the attract mode tells you all the rules like the Mike eats the cheese and the cats eat the mouse and the dog eats the cats and the hawk will chase

so and so and if you lead the hawk through a door. They use the term Turn Stupid. Oh, okay. Then they're... All right. Then it is just the attract screen. They watched the attract screen and played it for a little bit. Okay. There's no time for research

for Pac-Man fever. So that's Mousetrap again. A game that I guess is probably one of the more admirable Pac-Man clones, but I've only played it a few times at retro gaming cons and didn't really have a great time. I think it just makes Pac-Man too complicated.

At best, Pac-Man, add one button to it add like one extra thing like the championship edition would do much later and you're fine. It's much smarter to just add sparks to Pac-Man like in championship edition as well or DX. Yes, the sparks are nice. Like the drifting or whatever you do in that game.

And then finally we have Going Berzirk. So this is based on Berzirk by Stern 1980 arcade game and it is mostly famous for its digitized speech because you're moving around in a maze. Robots are saying intruder alert, Intruder Alert and

various other phrases based on the five or six recorded words they implemented in the game. But outside of this, it is a very simple game. You are going through rooms, shooting robots, and then sometimes a stalker enemy called Evil Auto will appear, a smiley face, and

chase you around and you can't kill him. Sort of like the nemesis of its time. Oh, the same deal there. That, yeah. The intruder alert thing, I think I heard it. I didn't play this game. I didn't have access to it until later in life. So the voice sample, I

knew at first when it's referenced by the nerds and Homer goes to college in the Simpsons episode. I was thinking of them too when I was just repeating the the digitized speech. But yes, given how harsh berserk's audio is, it may surprise you this song kicks off with piano like the centipede song. And this is actually a love

song. Like I've gone berserk over you. But ultimately, it is a how to play song like mostly everything on this album. Let's hear a bit of the Berserk song. And we're back to the other singer, which I like that. And we're back to the other singer, which I like, but he is incorrect. You cannot run or crawl. You move at one speed in Berserk.

The style or lyric style of I can blank and I can blank. it's uh i mean i like other stuff on it it gets repetitive but i like that you are in a viewpoint here of it as as the character describing all the things you can do i think the love theme would have been better if like okay just like spitball in here like what if the song was written from the respective of evil auto and the reason he's chasing you is because he's in love with you like that makes it a hundred times more interesting than um you can do these various things which you can't actually do in the game. Yeah, I mean, it's very strange how this eventually turns into a love song because we're starting off where most of these songs start off.

Here's how to play the game. And then there's a verse about Evil Auto, the smiley face that chases you. And then suddenly it becomes a song about playing Berserk, a single player game with another player. So let's hear that. It's very strange. Very strange. And I do want to note that this singer uses the non-standard pronunciation buzzer. which I think is an Atlanta thing because Henry also says buzzerk.

Does he really? I will say buzzerk flows better musically than berserk. Yeah, it's hard to say. But it could be like we're in the south now, in the south. We say, that guy went berserk. So when you're talking about the manga, you say berserk? I think I, well, now I'm going to be very in my head about saying it. But yes, I think I do, I do think I say berserk, not berserk.

Berzirk? Berzirk. Actually, so it's more southern when you say it like that. That's very interesting. He went berserk. Now, I, yeah, every southern person talks like Cleetist, by the way. No, yeah, I've only, I do think I say, I never thought about it, but I do think I say berserk. Like, yes.

The, the, the, I was getting the feel of early 80s sitcoms there. I think I'm going berserk. Do, do, do, do, do it, like it, I feel like we should be seeing a person's name and credits there. Yeah, yeah. It's like Patrick Duffy and Bronson Pinchot. I would watch that show. If they're going berserk for each other, that would be a great groundbreaking. Progressive for 1985.

But that is it for Pac-Man Fever. I just wanted to walk us through these songs and explore an album that had no time to come into being, and they made the most of it. It's just a very fun snapshot of what was the arcade in 1981 and what did regular people think of it? because I don't think that Buckner and Garcia were serious gamers. It's very strange to us who play video games all the time. A lot of people, they play video games during this period and then never again. It was just like, oh, everyone was playing Pac-Man, so I played Pac-Man. Did you get a Nintendo?

No. Did you play Super Nintendo? No. I don't even play games on my phone. Some people were boomers. Some boomers were just like, this is my area of gaming and then nothing else. Except for like Candy Crush. Yeah.

Yeah. They would play or bejeweled. I got my mom addicted to bejeweled, and she was playing at work all the time. But yeah, they've, most of them, there's a joke in early Simpsons where Homer emmarched, when they see Pong, they're like, we used to play that when we were dating. Like, just it was, it was a date night kind of thing. I get the berserk, the berserk song. There you go. Either one is acceptable.

But it has a little of that feel of like, we're on a date night. Like, well, if we do it together, let's play the game together, right? And I guess they'd have to take turns since it's a one-player game. It's just a turn-each-life kind of deal. I feel like playing the game together would be a relationship ender, but that's just me. Yeah. It's not a soothing game. It's like robots yelling at you for as long as it takes for you to run through that quarter.

Yeah, I feel like when I get on a plane, I see a bunch of boomers who are all like 70-year-older, and they're all playing one of the match three games they got for free with 14 ad-banner. and it's actively stealing all of their information off of their phone. And I think that person probably played the shit out of Pac-Man for two years. And then that was it for them. And now they're just like, I'll play a game on my phone and then I'll die. Eventually die after that. Yeah.

They don't feel like they missed out on anything, and that's fine. And Pac-Man's only taken some quarters from you instead of your identity. Yes. Speaking of death, after I finished listening to this album, I was still walking my dog. Because it's a relatively short album. It doesn't take that long to listen to. I was like, I want to play something else. I want to play like a song that I choose because if I get hit by a bus,

I don't want this to be the last, Berserk to be the last song I ever listened to because that just seems, that just seems bad. I want something that's meaningful to me. But it is, it is probably not a great sign when listening to an album gives me that response, you know? Yeah, actually,

I feel, I was wondering which song you guys like the most. And I was leaning towards going berserk, but I think that's because it's the last song in the album that was free. You're free. Yeah. But whatever one sounds more like a Carr's song is what I like. I think it is, do the Donkey Kong.

That might be my favorite. But also the meatloaf song is nice until the guy starts whispering at the centipede like a predator. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Don't like that. I got, I do, despite the creepiness of that, I think centipede is my favorite. I mean, there's a reason Pac-Man fever was the hit. And it's, it's, but to say the one other than Pac-Man fever, uh, yeah, I am between those two as well.

the creep in it I'll just skip the song after the third time I have to hear the creep and I'll just let it end early so I'm going to go with O'Dosentepede it being the most Steinman-esque I'll say and this episode is going to hit the free feet so it's very possible that Jerry Buckner

will hear this and if so we're sorry Jerry you brought us a lot of joy and I'm glad you're able to live off of video games as we all do in our own way I mean they are great at writing a hook Like those choruses are catchy as fuck And they're very talented doing that

They're just a little hamstrung by The verses that fall into how to play the game Yeah, I feel like if I would like to know what this album would be like If they had let's say three weeks Or two and a half weeks Or at least enough time to write and record a proper album Because two weeks is an incredibly short amount of time To put something like this together

And you can sense that their backs are against the wall And there's not a lot of time for creating freedom or like improvisation. It's just like, no, we have the format. Let's run with it. I am sad this wasn't big enough of a hit for them to do more albums like this. I would love if for the following five years, it basically just became like an album each year that's basically a year book of what were the biggest new arcade games of the

year. We wrote eight to ten songs about those each year. I think you're conjecturing, no, that's what I call arcade music. Yes, yeah. I mean, Ms. Pac-Man fever is, at the very least, do that sequel novelty song. Novelty songs are made to be sequelized and have a follow-up song, even in the same kind of style. It's too bad we didn't get that, unfortunately. And what disease would Miss Pac-Man have that would be a catchy song?

Menstru cramps, I don't know. It's like the Miss Pac-Man headache. Their Reck and Ralph song, sadly, is their best song. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it is the most like catchy to me. It's what I imagined all the other Pac-Man fever songs were about. And it also had hurt this one that I played for you guys. Right beforehand, checked in if you guys had heard before the Chubby Checker demo for a dig-dug song, which is a better song than these songs.

Yeah, I was shocked by how good. I mean, it is just Chubby Checker doing a Chubby Checker song. I can play like a little bit of it here. Now, since we're all gathered together to talk about these, where else can I play this? So here is Chubby Checkers dig-dug song. It's got kind of a wind-up, but he's going to do the thing that all these songs do in a second here. Come on, Chubby. Here we go.

We're going. So did Phil Spector produce this? It's awesome. Yes, it's really... I feel like this was used in a dig-dug commercial for, like, the Atari version or something. I feel like it was repurposed for something, because I have heard it before. I believe in our time in the Games Press 10 to 15 years ago, it was dug up as like a demo and then reused in a commercial purpose for it too.

Yes. Yeah. And then Chubby Checker, I think, well, hey, when we're recording this, I believe he's still with us, probably still performing at state fairs this weekend. Really? Yeah, he's four years young. And I assume he is running the state fair circuit. So if you ask him to play the Pac-Man song, he might spit on you. But then he might eventually do it.

Yeah. In fact, he is playing, as of this recording. in Iowa on Sunday the 28th. So if you're in Iowa, check out Chubby Checker. Great. There's very little time remaining.

Well, clearly, doing the twist is a great exercise that's going to give you a long, healthy life. Like, we should all be doing the twist every day. Come on, everybody. He's telling us.

Cardio is important. Do we think there's other demos out there for like other artists who are like, song about a video game, why not? And then they're like, no, this is not going to live.

Yeah, I wonder how many demos were not hearing. that are out there. Everyone send me to Bob. So Bob has to listen to all of them. Yes. Send me the Pog song. I'm begging you.

I need to hear Pog Wild. I was thinking, too, about this of, like, in the last 20 years, in the 20-ish years of YouTube and before that just oddline uploads of songs that go viral about video games. These guys, like, how many of them made adjusted for inflation anything close to what Buckner and Garcia made on their gold? a single for Pac-Man fever. Like that the money is like just not there. It's so disposable now to anybody can write a song, not anybody, but people write

songs all the time about a video game. And at best you get viral as a song that is shared on social media, but where is the money? Henry, anyone can write a song. They just have to ask their friend Claude to help them. Oh, yes. My wonderful stepdad, who's a great guy, he recently just, he has been mainly using Facebook to share songs that are written by AI about his friends these days.

And I just don't know what to say other than that's nice when he texts us to me. You need to just post that Wesley Snipes crying and holding out the gun in the comments. It's really too bad. The AI things is like that. That is why I try to never go to Facebook and only do it to check in on elderly relatives who only use Facebook. So I guess that is our episode about Pac-Manfavor. Thank you for listening. It was really fun to go through this and finally experience it.

Make some jokes. And I'll also get a taste of just like what exactly is going on here. So thanks for listening, everybody. This has been Retronauts. And I've been your host, Bob Mackey. And this is going out to the free feed. So if you want to support Retronauts, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up there. And for five bucks a month, you get a big, big huge thing for your five bucks.

And that is ad-free podcasts. You get them one week ahead of time, but also without ads. And you also get to access two bonus exclusive. podcast every month and a weekly column and podcast by Diamond Fight. And we've been doing this, I believe, for the better part of six years. So if you're not part of this tier, you have missed six years worth

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over to our guest, Drew. What's going on with you? I'm Drew Giaci. on Blue Sky, and I have a website called Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, where I do video game history digs and do interesting articles about stuff that most people don't think about. And usually when I'm on a retronauts,

I write an article about it. I don't know if I'm going to do that this. I really don't know. I thought I was hoping something would organically come up in our conversation and be like, oh, that's what I'll do. And I'm not really feeling it, guys. But I will promote this on my social media. You can guarantee that.

And I will send you those. horrible CDs that will curse your life. Thank you. Your next article, The Hunt for Pogwild. We must find it. Henry, how about you? Well, listeners know that me and Bob do a great podcast,

several great podcasts monthly. That is the Talking Simpsons Network of Podcasts, the lead one Talking Simpsons, where we cover the Simpsons television series, super in depth, and we go in chronological order, and we are in season six and 16. bounce between the 10 years every week. And we have covered some really great ones recently and also some interesting ones in season 16.

If you sign up on our Patreon, patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. You get those early in ad free. Same for our sister podcast. What a cartoon. And hundreds of hours of podcasts on the back end of talking Futurama and talking the Hill, talking critic and the mission Hill. And for all the stuff we've said about old arc. games. We certainly get into that

and a lot of trivia about those games when we covered Reckit Ralph this month is our premium podcast, what a cartoon movie. And that's just the most recent one of hundreds and hundreds of hours of those for 10 bucks a month. So you go to patreon.com slash

Talking Simpsons. The collections tab will show you all the great stuff that we do there. And also the ad free regular podcast too. And as for me I am Bob Mackey once again. You can find me on Blue Sky Letterbox, several other places as Bob Servo, but that is it for this episode of Retron's. We'll see you again very soon for another new episode.

Thank you for listening.