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But Wait, There's More - Ron Popeil The Pioneering Infomercial Pitchman · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_10: Alex, Alex, Alex, it's so good to see you, man.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_10: It's been a little too long.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, how you been?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_10: It's been uh a week.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_10: We go every every Thursday at 7 a.m.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_10: A week is too long.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_10: That's what I'm saying.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_10: I I I missed your uh Alex made a really great observation on a group text that we're both in about uh David Lee Roth um in in his 2025 um iteration singing Panama, sounding and looking just like Baby Billy, Uncle Baby Billy.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_10: Poor Dave.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_09: Dave, if you're out there, it's okay to retire, man.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_10: It would really help.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_10: It would really help.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_10: You probably got enough money, you probably got enough girls, you probably got enough sports cars.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_10: Why are you still doing it?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_10: That was recorded this week in uh Gary, Indiana.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_10: Watching the little clip you sent of them Panama, the playing Panama, the music was actually pretty spot on.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_10: Like the the musicians were playing pretty well.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know who they were, but good job for the the session musicians playing along with DLR, David Lee Roth.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_10: All I can think of is all the high school girls I knew in high school, when I was in high school, who had pictures of him up on the wall with the assless chaps and uh No, he's just an old man.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_10: No, he's just an old man, just like us.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_10: Except we know we we changed.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_10: We we stopped, we were both rock stars, we both stopped doing that to switch over to podcasting.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_10: I think David Lee Roth would host a very interesting podcast.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_10: You gotta be nimble.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_10: You gotta be nimble in this business.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_10: In this business.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I want to talk to you about somebody.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_10: Um, and as I was saying before we started recording, I spent a lot of time uh researching this guy because he's super interesting.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_10: He is somebody that is a historical figure, recently died.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_10: Um he actually died in 2021, but kind of not the typical historical figure that I like to do.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_10: He's he's uh he's a little more in your lane, so that's a clue right there.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_10: You like the Ben, the Ben Franklins, the Eleanor Roosevelt's.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, the Olive Oatmans, the Neil Armstrong's.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_10: Um, but but this guy, he was born in Manhattan in 1935.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_10: Manhattan, New York.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_10: Manhattan, New York, yes.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_10: New York City, not Kansas, get a rope.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_10: Um he became popular on television in the 1950s.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_10: Now he was born pretty poor.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_10: Um, as a matter of fact, his parents pretty much abandoned him as a child.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_10: He he later reconciled with his father, but he became very wealthy through his skills and his television career, but it wasn't really about television that made him him wealthy.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_10: Uh he coined a couple of phrases that are still popular today, but people don't always realize.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_10: And I'm gonna give you two of them, and I think one of them will give it away.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_10: One is, but wait, there's more.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I know that phrase.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_10: Wait, there's more.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_10: Steve Jobs used to say that, uh, sort of paraphrase that, or what one more thing, or I'm gonna say it's like from a but wait, there's more.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_10: Another phrase that he said uh that was very popular was set it and forget it.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, set it and forget it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's like when uh Shaq says, chill and just chill, fill and chill when he's talking about Epson printer.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_09: He says, just fill and chill.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_09: Set it and forget it.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_09: I've heard that too.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_09: That's it.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_10: What is it like Shaq doing when he's uh talking about the Epson printer?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_09: Those are pitchmen, right?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_09: Those are yeah, yeah.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_09: So but wait, there's more.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_09: Is that is that Ron Popeel?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, yes, he founded Ronco, the marketing company.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_09: You know, I was gonna I was gonna do him um a few months ago.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_09: I had uh looked into doing him.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_09: I don't remember why I didn't, but yeah, interesting dude for sure.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_09: Did I tell you this was more up your alley than mine?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I definitely had him on my list of people, and you're right, he did die just a few years ago.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, 2021.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_10: Born in uh May of 1935, died in July of um 2021.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_10: He was born to Samuel and Julia Popeel, and as I said, they divorced, and when they did, they pretty much abandoned his brother Jerry and he.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_10: He had a he had an older brother named Jerry.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_10: Um, you know, Jerry is a very 1930s kind of name.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_10: You don't really meet people named Jerry anymore, but sent him off to this boarding school, basically became like an orphanage for them until they were about until Ron was about eight.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_10: And that's when his grandparents came to get him and moved him to Miami, Florida, where they raised him as grandparents.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_10: But it turns out they were kind of horrible because the grandfather was mean and would fight with the grandmother all the time, and they just bickered, and it was pretty not a loveless house, right?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_10: And I guess maybe they were raising the kids because they had to, not because they wanted to.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_10: So Ron and his brother had kind of a kind of a tough childhood, but there was a bright spot, and can you imagine, based on what he ended up selling, what that bright spot was?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_10: So you're asking me his first thing that he sold.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I mean, he sold kitchen gadgets for the most part, right?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_10: Okay.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_10: That's what's what he was known for.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_10: Um I was saying that he had a bright spot in his childhood, and that was uh helping his grandmother cook.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_10: So he enjoyed spending time in the kitchen with his grandmother, and that's kind of where he started to love um kitchen gadgets.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_10: And you know, oh but you had asked me a question.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I just I just asked if you could guess what the bright spot was in his childhood.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, that's what it was spending time with his grandmother.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_10: No, cooking with his grandmother, not spending she was she was an awful person, and his grandfather was an awful person, but she liked to cook and he liked to cook.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_10: And so even though they were awful, it's kind of like you and me.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_10: Like, you know, would I spend time with you if we weren't doing this?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_10: It's questionable.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_10: Anyway, um, he learned to cook, he learned to kind of, you know, knives and measuring implementations and all the things you use in the kitchen.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_10: Well, when he was 13, um, his father was in Chicago, had divorced his mother, and his for some reason they went up to Chicago to help his father in a factory that his father managed.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_10: And guess what his father made up there?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_10: We just talked about it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_10: Kitchen gadgets.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_10: Okay.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_10: Samuel Popeel was the original kitchen gadget maker.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_10: Ron Popeel moved up to help him.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_10: Uh and his brother as a gadget.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_10: Um, we're talking about choppers, slicers, maybe egg timers.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, things that you don't necessarily need, but are a little yeah, I have tons of those.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and they're and they're they're probably simply made, you know, they're not super complicated.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_10: And at the time, mechanical, right?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_10: There wasn't a lot of electronics, it was all mechanical things.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_09: I get a lot of gadgets for Christmas because I do a lot of cooking.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_09: The problem is I as soon as you know you open it and it's got the the card on it that says what it is, and then once I put it in the drawer, I forget what it is, what it does.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_09: And then you never use it, and I and then the next time you're cleaning out the drawer, I'll ask my wife, I'll say, What is this supposed to do?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, that you know, right takes right.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_09: We there's different ways to pit things and core things, and yeah, all those.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and yeah, I don't know what half of them are.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_09: I should label them.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_10: The sidebar for a moment, I got the coolest kitchen gadget from my sister and brother-in-law, and it is called the meter, M-E-A-T-E-R.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_10: Can you guess what that does?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_10: Does it pound meat?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_10: It's a meat thermometer, but it actually connects to your phone.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_10: It has some sort of a Bluetooth um thing in it, and you have an app, and it works great.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_10: You put it in the meat, uh, it tells you what temperature it should be, tells you how hot it is.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_10: So it has two sensors, one on the inside that gives you the temperature of the meat, and one on the outside that gives you the temperature of the grill or the temperature.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_10: Have you ever used it?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I've I used it and then it uh stopped working, and then I got and then I decided to go back to the basics.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_10: Well, um I've had mine for maybe two or three years, and it's worked great.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_10: Maybe you needed to change the batteries because the did it come in a little wooden box?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_10: I go through a lot of thermometers.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_10: Okay.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_10: Well, anyway, um, he moves to Chicago at and begins to help his father selling kitchen gadgets.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_10: Like, and and then he gets so good at it that he decides to go out on his own and he buys inventory from his father, kind of on spec, and he goes out onto the street and sells them in Chicago.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_10: There was a place called Maxwell Street, and Maxwell Street in Chicago apparently had a lot of flea markets.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_10: Well, he was able to get a spot in a fish store, not like goldfish, but like um fish that you eat, and apparently it was pretty grimy and smelly.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_10: But he showed up there every morning at 5 a.m.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_10: He would go set up his table out on Maxwell Street on the flea market, and he would sell all day.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_10: And he got really good at pitching to people and selling people and attracting people.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_10: And by the time he had been doing this for a few months, he was making 500 bucks a day, which was amazing for a kid.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_10: Now he had to pay pay his father for the products, you know, but there's a profit margin there.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_10: Huge success for a kid in the 50s, especially one that grew up grew up poor.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_09: You have to have a good spiel, you have to be a good barker.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_10: Well, and that's exactly what I'm gonna talk to you about next is his spiel, his his whole technique.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_10: He had this idea of show, don't tell.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_10: So instead of just describing something, he would go buy vegetables, you know, these are mostly cutters, and he would slice them, he would dice them, he would uh chop them, he would do all these things.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_10: He had his sleeves rolled up, he had this table out, he's standing behind it, and he's got the boxes of his wares, you know, the chopper or slicer, and and he's going at this pile of tomatoes or carrots, and he would like wave it in the air and say things like, uh, ladies and gentlemen, come come a little closer.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_10: You don't want to miss this.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_10: How many of you ever spent hours in the kitchen slicing onions with tears running down your face?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_10: And you know, people can relate to that, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_10: You've done that.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, and if you've ever been to like an auto show or anything, people are still doing this this technique to this to this day.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_09: And it's a very effective way to sell kitchen gadgets.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_10: Well, after after he attracted some people, he would uh he would try to build more of a crowd.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_10: So the thing is once you have a few people watching, it's easier to get more people.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_10: It's he talked about building momentum.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_10: So once he had a few people watching, he would do a few tricks, and that you and those those people watching would say, Wow, ooh, yes, you know, and then he would get more people, and he was so good at this that he could time his his uh demonstration to have the best parts shown where the most people were watching.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_09: Did he ever like pay friends to be those first few people, you know, like how you put some money in a tip jar to start off?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, like a mole.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_10: You put you put uh you put a couple people out there.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_10: No, he he didn't really have to do that.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_10: He had this formula called problem solution and close, and he'd talk about like a dull kitchen knife and how difficult it was to cut a potato with it, and how you could cut yourself and what a dangerous thing that was and how much food got wasted.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_10: And so he'd do this for a little while, and then he'd say, But wait a minute, we've got this great uh slicer that will solve your problem.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_10: And he would talk about how affordable the slicer was, he would talk about how it would pay for itself over time because you didn't have to spend as long cutting whatever you were cutting.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_10: And then he entered, he he uh introduced urgency and scarcity.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_10: So he basically would give people FOMO by saying, I only have a few of these left at this price, or this is a special for today at the fair only.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_10: You know, tomorrow it's gonna be twice as much.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_10: So people would get FOMO.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_10: He used a lot of repetition and he used a lot of catchphrases, the slices and dices, look at that tomato.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_10: Um, you don't need to be a chef, you just need this.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_10: That was something he would say.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_10: No skills required.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_10: Um, he always said those things again and again, so they stuck in people's mind.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_10: And then this was kind of the what did you call it?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_10: The chef's kiss.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, he would pull somebody from the audience and he'd say, Ma'am, have you ever sliced onions at home?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_10: And she'd say yes.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_10: And then he'd say, and you know, this is we're talking about maybe the chop omatic.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_10: Now, the chop omatic was a device that was round and you had a plunger.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_10: Remember this?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_10: And you'd push down on it, had a bunch of blades in it, and as you pushed, the blades rotated so it would kind of like spin and so she would do this, and the cloud, the crowd would go crazy because the onions were chopped, no tears were spent because of the onions, like they normally would be.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_10: And so they thought, well, if she can do it, I can do it.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_10: All of this paired with his low price, so all of these things were a couple of bucks, and sometimes he would do two for the price of one, specials like that.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_10: All of that just came naturally to him and made him a master of selling at these carnivals.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_09: Because he's volume selling at that point, yeah.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he's he's trying to sell, move a hundred units, a thousand units, whatever it is.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_10: He he did have a couple of people that he worked with in these um fairs that would go with him, and they were never quite as good as him.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_10: It was kind of one of these things where he realized that he was so good at this that he wished he could replicate himself.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_10: Well, guess what came along that allowed him to replicate himself?
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_10: Television.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, video.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_10: So here's uh here's a clip of him in his first infomercial in the 50s.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_10: He he realized that if he could record this and put it on local TV, that he could sell a lot more units than just doing it at the fairs, because he was limited at the fairs by how many people actually saw him.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_10: So here's him uh selling the Chop A Matic, which is that thing I was talking about that you pressed down at uh on a on a on the first, what could be the very first infomercial of all time.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_12: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to show you the greatest kitchen appliance ever made.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_12: It's Carl Choppermatic.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_12: The secret of this remarkable machine is every time I tap on the knob, the blades rotate.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_12: That's what makes Chompa Matic so amazing.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_12: The next thing is.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_10: Um definitely hypnotic.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_10: Well, he um started creating these commercials.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_10: Um I think the first couple of ones he paid a couple of hundred dollars, maybe four or five hundred dollars to get them recorded and on the air.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_10: And if you watch that video, you can find it on YouTube.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_10: It's black and white, it's just him, two cameras, probably, because there's like a close-up and a wider shot, and him just you know, it's like a 10-minute demonstration of this device.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_10: And they set up a phone number, and people would call the phone number to order the chop a matic, and it was wildly successful.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_09: Well, I love this because just like when we talked about Dr.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_09: Scholes and when we talked about Dale Carnegie, this is like the beginning of you know our consumer world that we are that we're finding ourselves in now.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_09: Problem is with with all three of those guys, the problem is we kind of become immune, uh, we kind of develop an immunity to that kind of stuff, right?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_09: You have to get different, you can't that those techniques don't work as well anymore.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_09: Although I still think that if you tried to do that, most of the time, like that show don't tell, that in general, that principle still works as long as you have a quality item.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_10: Or I mean, you watch Shark Tank, right?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's that's kind of what they're doing on Shark Tank when they go in to talk to the sharks, they're pitching, right?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_10: They're right, they're they're kind of in that mode.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_10: Um, well, the Chop O Matic was pretty successful because of that commercial, and it was followed up by the Vegematic.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_10: Now you've heard of the Vegematic, I'm sure.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_10: Sure, sure.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_10: You know that you know the difference.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_10: What year are we talking about here?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_10: Um, I know the Chop Amatic was in the 50s, and the Vegematic was in the early 60s.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_10: I don't have the exact year.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, but yeah, the the Chop O Matic, the the line was, and he said it in that video, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna show you the greatest kitchen appliance ever made.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_10: And every time he's pitched the Chop O Matic, that's what he would say.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_10: For the Vegematic, it was larger, it was hinged, so you actually could you know lift it up and close it and like get inside it.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_10: You could change the blades to do different things, and the catchphrase there, you probably heard this one, is it slices, it dices, it makes Julian fries.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, there you go.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, that was for the vegematic.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_09: So the vegematic wasn't it, it was just a little the blades were different, is what you're saying.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_10: It was bigger, and instead of just being a contained round thing that you placed on top of small um vegetables, it was a larger um thing that you lifted up, you put the vegetables in, and then you turned it or did something to it.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know exactly how it worked.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, that's cool.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_10: So, other things that he came up with um and was able to get produced early on.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_10: He worked with his father for this because his father worked in a factory that did this.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_10: Later on, he started to get his own suppliers.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_10: But there was the Showtime Rotisserie.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_10: Have you heard of that one?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_10: It was uh and and this is around the time he founded Ronco.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_09: So Rotterdam was pre-microwave oven.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_10: Right, right.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_10: That was that was the Showtime Rotisserie was where the phrase uh set it and forget it came from.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, okay.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, because you could turn it on.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_10: I I'd say even more, you know, microwaves usually are fast, like you know, everything happens pretty quickly.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_10: Um, with the Showtime rotisserie, it's almost like a pressure cooker, or uh, what are those things called?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_10: Ninjas or crock pots, you know, yeah, yeah, crock pot, yeah.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_10: It was but it but it wasn't, it wasn't pressure that was working on it.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_09: This was more just a rotisserie oven that you know at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of the day, and then do your housework the rest of the day, and then it'll be ready for slow cook.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_10: Got it, yeah.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_10: So one of the one of the add-ons, the other big thing that he was always big on was add-ons.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_10: So if he sold something, he would give you something for free.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_10: It wasn't really free, you were paying for it, but um, but it was part of the deal, or it was something you paid for separately, but it was an addition.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_10: So one of those things was called the solid flavor injector.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_10: Any idea what that would do?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_09: Solid flavor injector.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_09: Is that like a baster kind of thing?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_10: A little bit.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_10: It was something where you could put solids into a almost like a syringe and then inject them into things like meat.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_10: So you might put salt or you might put an herb, basil, or garlic, or um, carrots, or anything like that into the solid food injector, and then inject it into like barbecue ribs or lamb or beef, and he called them flavor nuggets.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_10: So he'd make these little flavor nuggets inside the meat.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, he wouldn't.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_10: He would make the nuggets.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_10: Well, no, it created these little small chunks of flavor.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_10: So if you imagine this big beef that you're cooking in your um in your Showtime rotisserie, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_10: Or chicken that you're cooking, um, now what you're doing is you're injecting this thing with uh little bits of onion, jalapeno, cheese, garlic, salt, whatever, you're pushing this in, and then it becomes and then you pull it out and it's left there.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_10: So it's inside of the meat.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_10: So now if you're eating this chicken, oh, you might hit a jalapeno, or you might hit a bit of cheese, or you might hit a bit of garlic.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_10: And and it would be like little flavor pockets inside of it.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_10: But that was the the important thing about that, that this was the solid flavor injector, it was an add-on to the Showtime rotisserie.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_09: Well, in order to make that stuff fit into the syringe, too, you'd have to have a chop omatic or a vegemacy.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, oh yes, ecosystem baby.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_10: It was all worked, it's kind of like the iPhone and the Mac and the iPad and the Apple TV.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, once they got you, they got you, right?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he was he was a pioneer in that area.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_10: So he would do this, create these, um, create these things that were pretty popular.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_10: Uh he had the um Dialomatic, which was a successor to the Vegematic, it was a little fancier version of the Vegematic.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_10: Dialomatic, yeah.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_10: He had the have you ever heard of the Ronco inside the egg scrambler?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_10: No.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_10: So he could he could scramble an egg in its shell.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_10: Why would you want that?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_10: Well, because according to the commercial, um, it actually, you know, he talks in the commercial.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_10: I wish I had audio from the commercial, but I don't have that one.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_10: But I have a lot of others.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_10: Um, he talks about the fact that with the Ronco um inside the egg scrambler, the egg is more evenly scrambled, it's better mixed.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_10: And so, like when you make French toast, you don't get the yolk and the white in separate areas, it's all even.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_10: Or if you're making fried eggs, or if you're making any anything where you're putting eggs on something.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_10: It what it was, it was like a little cup, slightly bigger than an egg, and had a needle sticking up.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_10: And you would set it down on the needle, which would poke a tiny, tiny hole, and then it would just vibrate.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_10: It was like a little, like a little, um little, it just would real fast for about 10 seconds, and then then you would crack the egg and it would already be mixed.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_09: Have you ever had a scrambled egg inside an egg like that?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_09: No, no.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_10: I've never I I really I kind of do want to try one of those because that sounds like I feel like it would be the area is smaller.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_09: Like you would have a a one egg scrambled eggs, and it'd be like a bite.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_10: It's a number of it's a it's a solution, it's a solution looking for a problem, right?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_09: Exactly.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_09: I didn't know scrambling eggs was such an ordeal, right?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_10: Well, oh yeah, and in the commercial, uh, he says it is.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_10: Um, so he also had the uh Ronco six-star 20-piece cutlery set.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_10: Cutlery was a big thing with him, you know, knives and such.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_10: Um, he had the Ronco drain buster, and that was kind of interesting, actually.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_10: It was probably one of his better products.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_10: It was designed to actually get rid of clogs using compressed air.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_10: So it would blast a little compressed air through instead of using a chemical, you know, like instead of Draino or something, it would blast compressed air to so at this point, he's probably not an inventor anymore, but people are probably coming to him with their inventions, right?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_10: Well, no, he was an inventor.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_10: First and foremost, I listened to a very long interview.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I listened to his autobiography and a very long uh interview with him, and his passion was inventing.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_10: So he he liked kitchen gadgets, but he also did a smokeless ashtray.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_10: So this was one of the first ashtrays that had um little fans and a filter that would soak up all the smoke.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_10: And I want to play you a commercial for that smokeless ashtray.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_10: Now, this is not really an infomercial, but just imagine a father in the car with his wife and two children in the back.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_10: What year is this?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, this would have been in the 60s.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_11: Okay.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_11: I'm not inconsiderate.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_11: I know my cigarette or cigar smoke irritates my family, and it smells bad too.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_11: That's why I went out and bought Ronco's portable smokeless ashtray.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_11: It filters out irritating smoke, allowing my family to breathe cleaner, fresher smelling air.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_11: Belkroll Faster secures a portable smokeless ashtray to prevent it from moving.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_11: This Christmas show you really care.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_11: Give smokeless ashtrays by Ronco.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_11: They make fabulous Christmas gifts.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_05: Available at these fine stores.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_10: Any commercial that starts with, I'm not inconsiderate, right?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_09: I'm not inconsiderate, but I still smoke in the car with my family, but right, right.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_10: Oh well, I think everybody did back then.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_10: Um, so you know, he had a pasta maker, he had all kinds of food stuff, but he also had a few things that were unusual.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_10: He had the Ronco Rhinestone Stud Setter.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_10: Now, can you imagine what that was?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_09: Almost like a bejeweling, pre-bejeweling bedazzler.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_09: The bedazzler.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_10: Bedazzler, right.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_10: So believe it or not, the bedazzler was a competing product.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_10: So the Rine Ronco Rhinestone Stud Setter was first, and and uh it changes everyday clothing into exciting fashions that you don't have to spend and you don't have to spend a fortune.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_09: That had to be like 74, 75.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, mid-70s.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_10: Um and there was a little bit of uh grief because a bedazzler came in and improved upon it, and uh, you know, there was some some bad rhinestones were big though, mid-70s.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, like a rhinestone cowboy.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_10: Um now he had another thing called the cap snaffler.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, I can't even guess what that would be.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_10: Um well it it came from uh the word cap as in bottle cap, but also snaffler is a British slang term meaning to grab, snatch, or seize quickly.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_10: And so, like, you know, he's he snaffled the last cookie, you know, he grabbed it away.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_10: So this was a thing that you uh used to open bottles, so beer bottles, soda bottles, whatever, and it used these little claws, like you put it on top of the bottle, and then it had a little chute on the top, and it was clear plastic where the bottle caps would go.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_10: So you would collect the bottles.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_10: It didn't bend the bottle cap or damage it.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_10: So if you collected bottle caps, they were perfectly pulled off because it pulled it off in all places.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_10: Um but it just used some little spring-loaded grips or teeth inside, and you gave it a little uh pressure down, the pop would cap off, the cap would pop off.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_10: It was great for parties, great for bars, no litter.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_10: Um a lot of these are solutions looking for problems.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, that's exactly that's exactly what I was getting at.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_09: Well, you know, so is the iPhone, really, when you think about it, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's a problem that we needed necessarily in 2007.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_10: Did we really need all that?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_10: But um, yeah, you're right.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I've I've got another one for you, and I want to play you a clip from this one and see if you can guess.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, you're gonna guess it right away because it says the name of it, but this is probably one of his most famous things, and I actually didn't realize this was his product until I started this research.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_10: So check it out.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_06: Hey, this Christmas party is getting a little too quiet.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_06: I think it's time we liven it up with my favorite Christmas gift, Mr.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_06: Microphone.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_06: Hey, what's that?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_06: Well, you set the dial on your FM radio and testing, testing, testing on the radio!
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: These kids are having a fabulous time with Mr.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_02: Microphone.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: The cordless voice actually puts your voice on the radio.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: There are no attaching wires, so you're free to move around.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: Broadcast over any FM car radio.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, dude, look at it! We'll be back to pick you up later.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I was gonna say.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: Professional entertainers use Mr.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: Microphone for rehearsing, and you can too.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's practical and great fun for the whole family.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: And for only$12.88, they really make great Christmas gifts.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_04: The perfect Christmas gift at Walgreens, Woolworth, Wolko, Osco Venture, Weebolts, Montgomery Ward.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_10: And that list of stores.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_10: Obviously, it didn't work out too well for them, did it?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_09: I tell you what, Mr.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_09: Microphone changed my life, man.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_09: I I did a version of this show back in the 70s with a Mr.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_09: Microphone in my room, um, where I I talked about uh things and um introduced songs and I recorded that stuff.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_09: I loved Mr.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_09: Microphone, man.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_09: The part that I loved on that commercial I couldn't get enough of is when you go, Hey, good looking.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_09: We'll be back to pick you up later.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_09: Love that.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_10: What a creep.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_10: You remember the scene?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_10: Well, it's it's like four of them in a convertible, and it's two girls walking along or a girl walking along.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_09: I think they were biking, weren't they?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_09: Or bikes?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_10: I think they were walking.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, just just saw the commercial um recording that.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_10: So do you remember though?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_10: Um, a famous nod to that when Bart Simpson got a uh super celebrity microphone, or it was called Superstar Celebrity Microphone.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_10: Uh Homer gave it to him for his birthday, and he ended up dropping a radio down into um a well, and then he pretended to be Timmy O'Toole trapped in the well.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, I do remember that.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it was a pretty it was an early episode of The Simpsons, and I do remember when you said Timmy O'Toole, it all came back.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_10: You remember who the uh Kent Brockman's reporting on it, and they're all there around the well, and you know, lessons are learned and comedy is had.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_10: But do you remember who the um celebrity that joins in the the charity uh to help save Timmy O'Toole is?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_10: Who?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_10: It was Sting.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah, okay.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, Sting Sting was on that episode.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_10: So it's great.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_10: Little tribute to the Mr.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_10: Microphone.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I've got another one here, and this is another one that is pretty well known that I think you will uh you'll remember.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_10: It's back, the Pope's pocket fisherman.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: I got a three-pound trout with it.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: Whoa! I got a lot of the Christmas, and it's really cool.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: I just got these with my pocket fisherman.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's the fishing invention of the century.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: There's never been anything like it.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's Po Pield Pocket Fisherman.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: So small it fits in your glove compartment.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: Fact, even your pocket.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the pocket fisherman's handle is its own mini tackle box.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: Casting is so easy with the Pofield Pocket Fisherman.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: And boy, you can catch all kinds of great fighting fish.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Pocket Fisherman is also great fun for adults, too.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's rod, reel, line, bobber, hook, casting plug, the whole thing.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Expert or amateur will love the pocket fisherman.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Call now and get two pocket fishermen for the price of one.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: For a limited time, you get two pocket fishermen for only$29.95 plus SH.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: It catches a lot of fish, and it also makes a great gift.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_09: I remember all these commercials because I was home during the day.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_09: I was a latch key kid.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_09: And that's when they show these.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_09: They never show these during prime time.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_09: No, it's always during the day.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_10: That was one of his philosophies was to actually buy cheap television time.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_10: So you could get, he would, he would buy local markets.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_10: He didn't ever go for national.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_10: So he would buy, you know, instead of buying um Houston, he might buy Huntsville or uh Clear Lake or whatever.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_10: You know, he'd buy a smaller market and then he'd do it um during the day or late at night.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_09: Well, and that probably once cable TV came in, you could really segment it like that.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_09: You couldn't do it as much before cable, um, other than just go into smaller markets.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_09: But yeah, I remember all that stuff.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_09: Now, I remember the pocket fishermen.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_09: There were some singers back in the 80s.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_10: Called the Pocket Fisherman.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_10: No, no, no, no.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_09: Well, maybe that too.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_09: But they used to make fun of Ron Popeel, make fun of Pocket Fisherman.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_09: Maybe Mojo Nixon did some stuff about him.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_09: What who was do you know?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_10: So Weird Owl has a song about um about Ron Popeel, and we're I was gonna talk about that a little bit later.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_10: Um I did also find some references to Alice Cooper and the Beastie Boys having name checking Ron Popeel.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah, I'm sure.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_10: But the Weird Owl song I'm gonna talk about later because that's how we're gonna wrap up the show.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, but before before we get to that, do you remember that there was a kid's version of the Pocket Fisherman and what it was called?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_10: No, it was called the Tadpole.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, it is.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, the Tadpole was the kids' version.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_10: So, you know, we've gone through a few of his inventions and things that they sold.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, I want to give you a few more lesser-known products, uh, actually, quite a few.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_10: There's there's a just a ton when you start looking into Ronco and all the things they did, and it was also interesting because sometimes it was called the Pope Pocket Fisherman or the Ronco something, or the something by Ronco.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_10: So he loved to slap his name on this stuff.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_10: I guess so.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_10: And you're saying he invented most of these things, if not all.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_10: He was very involved, or was the direct inventor.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, he spent a lot of time according to his autobiography and and the interviews with him I've um recently looked at.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_10: That's amazing.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_10: So he had the auto cup by Ron Co.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_10: It was basically just a cup with a uh little little button that that had a spring in it, much like uh you know, Contigo or Yeti cups now.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_10: They have a little magnetic thing.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it was just a cup with a lid that you pushed a button and it opened so you could drink coffee in your car.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, but he started that, yeah, yeah, by Ronco.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_10: It was something they sold, it was like$11 or something.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_10: Um, the Ronco buttoner.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_10: Any ideas on that one?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_10: Buttoner to replace buttons.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, like sew them on fast.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_10: No, no, no, no.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_10: It was like it was more like a staple gun.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_10: So instead of sewing, you just clicked it.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_10: You know, you kind of just did this number and it put the button back on.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_10: Worked on every kind of button because you know what the problem with buttons is people lose buttons.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_09: Right, yeah.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's that was the commercial.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_09: You you drank the Kool-Aid on the Pope, I see.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_10: He had a uh he had a back relief product that was basically a uh vibrating cushion.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_10: He had a battery tester, um, you know, like kind of one of those ones where you put a nine volt or a double A or a triple A or a C battery on it, it would tell you if it was any good.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_10: Um, yeah, those are good.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_09: And and it's funny because like as you're talking, I'm thinking, I'm remembering that you say that it's a uh solution in search of a problem, but by the end of one of these commercials, you're thinking, Well, what kind of fool wouldn't buy one of these?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_10: Right, right, right, yeah, 100%.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_10: He's like, What if my button pops off?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_10: Or what if what if my back hurts?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_10: Or I don't want a dead battery in my flashlight, you know.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_09: And that's a lot of times they present problems that don't really exist.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_10: Well, that's you know, like that's yeah, that's how the commercials would start with the button popping off, or with somebody turning on a flashlight and it dies, you know.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_10: And uh, well, get the Ronco battery tester.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_10: They had a thing called the Ronco bottle and jar cutter.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_10: So, what you would do is you would take a glass bottle or a glass jar, it could be a wine bottle or a jar of mayonnaise or whatever, wash it out, and then you'd cut it, and it had an emery board, and you would kind of shave it down, and it you could make it into a glass or a vase or whatever.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_10: It was basically just cutting the top off a bottle, you know, cutting the threaded part or the um you know the the cap part off and make and using it.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_10: Uh which is actually, you know, as as far as um uh ecologically friendly things, that's actually a pretty cool thing.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_10: I can see people that are into crafts really wanting those, right?
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_10: A hobby for dad, a craft for mom, fun for the kids.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_10: Um they had the Ronco Glass Froster.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_10: Now, have you ever heard of this one?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_10: No, but I I like a frosted mug.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_10: So um there was actually I found a YouTube video of a guy who uh probably like five years ago had one of these still in the box, and he opened it to see if it would still work.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_10: What it was was a uh compressed aerosol can, and it had a little thing where the nozzle went in, and then it had a round container where it would basically hold the aerosol can, and then it would spray into your glass and would immediately frost it.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_10: And I watched the commercial for it, and you know, in the commercial it worked really well.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_10: The guy starts reading the ingredients, it's all stuff that's been outlawed forever.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_10: It's all stuff well, no, no, like like chlorof I don't know, chlorofluorin fluorides or you know, stuff that basically depletes the ozone, really awful stuff.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_10: Um but but yeah, it worked.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_10: And so it was the Ronco Glass Froster.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_10: So they had another one called Popeel's caviar bait.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_10: Now, this was an upsell with the pocket fisherman.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_10: Any any guesses on this one?
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_09: Caviar bait.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_09: No, I can't even imagine what this would be.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_10: It was uh powdered form that came in a plastic bag, and you mixed it with water, and it made like little bait balls, like doughy bait balls that you put on your pocket fishermen to fish with.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_10: And the fish thought it was caviar.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_10: They loved it.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_10: They would, yeah, it was like and it came with enough to catch 50 to catch 50 fish.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_10: What did you do?
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_10: You mixed it with water.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_10: So it was just what what was it made out of?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_10: It was actually made out of fish eggs, partly, um, seaweed, uh, maybe vegetable and animal fat or something like that.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_10: But it was a powder, so it was all dehydrated.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_10: And you just imagine making little dough balls out of out of flour and water, right?
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_10: And and just kind of like adding a little water.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_10: It was it was like that.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_09: So it was the yeah, you don't have to worry about buying worms.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_10: No, no, and and you know, for 1995, you can catch up to 50 fish with it.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_09: It had enough.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_09: It's it's funny because the this is like you're it it portrays fishing as kind of an impulsive thing, like you're walking by the river, right?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_10: And you need a you need a fishing pole in your backpack or in your pocket, right?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_10: It's like, oh, I've got a fish, I've got a fishing pole.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_10: Um, he had a cookie machine that basically was just a I don't know what those things are called in restaurants that are, you know, they have the little um um triangular or cone-shaped and thing with the tip.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_10: So you would put the cookie dough in and squeeze it and it would come out in different shapes.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_10: Like a sand whistle for for cookies, yeah.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_10: Or or cookie cutters, I guess, but but instead of cutting the dough, you were actually putting it out in a shape.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_10: You had the bag of dough, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_10: Yep, yeah.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_10: Um, they had the egg scramble that we talked about earlier, they had the Ronco flower loom kit.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_10: Now, can you imagine what this would do?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_10: Uh what's what do you mean loom?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, loom, like yeah.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_10: Flower loom.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_10: So do you remember all these things that it seems like they were popular with grannies, kind of granny core, and then they were popular with hippies, but they were like flowers that you would make into a hat, you know, kind of a beanie kind of hat, or you would make it into a shawl or a blanket or a sweater.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, yes, yes.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_10: That was that was the Ronco flower loom kit.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_10: It was just a little crochet kit that came with yarn and like a pattern thing.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_09: I would love for you to make me a hat.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_09: Like wear that to Eeyore's birthday party, right?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, yes, yes.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_10: Uh they also had the um the tufting tool, the Ronco speed tufting tool.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_10: Now, uh you remember when latch hook was big?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah, yeah, I did that back in the day.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, my sister did.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_10: I I I I I dabbled, but my sister was into it.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_10: Sure, your s your sister, sure.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_10: It was it was a latch hook kit, you know.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, man.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_09: It's okay to admit it.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_09: I just did.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_09: It was fun, it was addictive.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, very, very granny core.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_10: I made a lot of rug rug art, you know.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, yes, and that was the thing is you can make this hundred dollar rug from our latch from our Ronco.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_10: It was called the Ronco speed tufting tool.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_10: Not a great name, honestly.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_09: We were just looking up that stuff a few weeks, a few weeks or months ago.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_09: I was gonna talk about that on a dead end one day.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, the rug art, and you can still get it, and it's not cheap.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_09: They still like people still do that stuff, yeah.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, well, it was.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's basically a you were just using different color threads following a pattern, and then you'd make an owl or a sheep or you know, a dog or whatever on on this pattern.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_10: Um, yeah, they had the steam away, which was a steamer instead of an iron, which was kind of innovative back then.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_10: They had the record vacuum by Ronco.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_10: Now, the record vacuum, have you heard of this guy?
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_09: Oh no, this I've heard of this one, I think.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_09: This this takes the dust off of your uh records, cleans your records and and which was a big thing back then because you'd usually like wear a sh use a shirt, an old shirt or something, and sometimes that would make it worse.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_09: Scratch the record.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_09: So for those of you who are under a certain age and didn't play with records back in the day, if you got like a piece of dust or a lint or something like that, it could really make your record skip or uh scratchy.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_10: So so part of what it did, uh supposedly, was it also discharged any static buildup on your record because part of what attracted dust to the record was static, but it was a vertical thing.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_10: You put the record in vertically and it would spin.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_10: Uh it had a little motor and little brushes or cloth or something that would spin, and then you would pull it out vertically and it would be all clean.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_09: This is a thing I think I asked my parents for.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_10: The Ronda.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_09: He really made the case on that for me.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_10: So there was a thing called Mr.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_10: Dentist, which was a basically an electric toothbrush.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_10: And my my favorite thing about the Mr.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_10: Dentist is in the commercial, it shows you know people using it, um, and how using a normal toothbrush isn't good enough.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_10: You need this because a dentist doesn't use a normal toothbrush, they use uh you know something that vibrates or spins.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_10: But it says at the end, it says, Um, buy two, one for your dog, and then it shows a guy brushing his dog's teeth and the dog's just sitting there smiling.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_09: So that's genius, and it's funny how the mr goes to the dentist on the microphone.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_10: Right, right.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_10: It's not the Mrs.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_10: or the Ms.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_09: The naming these things is probably half the battle, right?
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_10: Well, so yeah, we I've got some good names here.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_10: Um, I've got the Ronco roller measure.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_10: You imagine what the Ronco roller measure was?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_09: Is that like a measuring tape that's uh that's in that rolls instead of yes, so you can measure something by yourself?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, yeah, yeah, this is exactly you just recited the commercial for the most part.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_10: It had little you remember those little mechanical numbers that would spin, and when you got to nine, it would click over.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_09: Right, yeah, it's like a yeah, like an odometer.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_10: So there were there were three there were three numbers, so you could measure up to I think a thousand inches.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_09: Okay, right, which is great invention.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, the Ronco roller roller measure.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_09: You always don't have another person standing there that can hold the other end of the measuring tape.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and that that is one of the pain points they show in the commercial, actually.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_09: So and this was actually before the metal measuring tape, probably the They were still using cloth.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, because they they didn't have the rigid metal.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_10: Maybe they did, but now you now they're kind of rigid, so you can put them out about 10 feet before they collapse.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_09: But if you're using cloth, that really is a problem.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, absolutely.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_10: Well, now you got lasers, right?
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_10: You can just push your laser.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_10: Um, so they got into a little bit of a naming theme with the miracle broom, which was just a mini vacuum cleaner, the miracle sander, mini sander, handheld sander.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, these things are so diverse.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_10: They had the the so have you noticed in hotel showers, when's the last time you were in a hotel?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, probably last week.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_10: I'm in hotels constantly.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_10: So instead of instead of um little bars of soap now in the shower, a lot of them have these liquid dispensers.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_10: Have you noticed that?
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, so the the Ronco shower bar was the original of that.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_10: It it was a liquid dispenser for shampoo, soap, conditioner, but it had a built-in mirror so that you could shave and it had a little place to hang your your razor.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_10: And the mirror didn't fog up.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_10: I can't speak to that, but in the commercial it didn't.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_09: The next generation didn't v2.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_10: Sorry, you're gonna have to replace your Ronco shower bar with the Ronco shower bar V2.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_10: Um, so this was a really interesting one.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_10: They had the sit-on compactor by Popeel.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_10: So this sounded really dumb, and the commercial was really dumb.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_10: So, are you tired of taking out trash that's overflowing and breaking?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_10: Well, get the sit-on compactor bipopeel.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_10: You put it in, you close the lid, and you sit on the lid to compact it.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_10: I'm in, I'm in, I love that.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_10: I love that.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_10: And I guess I guess the heavier you are, the more you can compact the trash, right?
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_09: I can, man.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_10: So I I don't think there was any electronics or any any electricity or hydraulics or springs or anything.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_10: It's just literally you're sitting on the lid, and it kind of the way it looked in the commercial is there was the bowl, like the trash thing, and then there was like this little shaft that stuck up another six inches or so that you put the trash can in.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_10: And so when you sat on it, that little shaft would just go down, down, down a little bit.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I'm constantly pushing trash down so I don't have to take it out.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_09: I love that.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_10: So you you can use it, you can use your butt to do it instead of your hands.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_09: I'm gonna buy one.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_10: All right, this one you're gonna love, and I want you to guess what it was.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_10: This was called the Ronco splatter screen.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_09: Splatter screen.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_09: I think that this goes, I think I have one actually, if it's what I think it is.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_09: This does this go over a pan, yes, bacon grease.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_09: I have I have uh a set.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_09: That was a Ronco.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, the Ronco splatter screen.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_09: The problem is the handle is plastic and sometimes it melts, it burns, it gets melts if I don't put it on right.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, maybe they could improve on that.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_10: But um, the Ronco splatter screen, they had the tidy dryer.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_10: So the tidy dryer, have you heard of this one?
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_10: No, so it was a small dryer that basically just heated up, I guess heated up air and blew it around in a little chamber.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_10: And it was mostly for women's dainties or delicates.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_10: So pantyhose, underwear, bras, stuff like that.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_10: Slips, slips, yeah, teddies, maybe.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_10: Um, garters, all right.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_10: I love this.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_09: I love this section of the podcast where we just name ladies delicates.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_10: So put it in there.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_09: But girdle, is that a delicate or is that more of a sturdy?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_10: I I think today they like to be called spanks.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I don't think it's delicate.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_10: They don't go by girdle anymore.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_10: That's uh that's it's pretty un un PC, Alex.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_10: I so what's the name of the support?
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_10: You're canceled.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_10: The tidy dryer.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_10: But I haven't told you the best part.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_10: It had an attachment, an optional attachment, that you could put on top of it that had a hose.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_10: Now imagine your dryer hose that vents your hot air of your dryer outside.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_10: It was kind of like that, but it instead of venting the hot air outside, it vented it to a plastic sack that went over the woman's head and dried her hair.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, you know when you see so like that's very sustainable.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_10: There's a lot of you know when you see you know, when you see old ladies in the in the um salon with the curlers, and it and it advertised that it would fit over a full head with curlers, a full head of hair with curlers.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_09: So ladies' hairs back then, all had they all had the same hairstyle back then.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_10: Um, you were talking about this earlier, um, and I wanted to bring it up.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_10: It's the uh you were you were griping about your your maids, apparently you have multiple ones.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_10: Um have a made.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_10: You never heard of the have a name of the invention have a maid?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_10: The Ronco Have a Maid.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_10: It was a mop.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_10: It was a mop with a built-in ringer.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_10: So one of the first mops, now they have those ones where you kind of pull the lever and it squeezes the.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_10: I know you don't know about this because you don't mop your own floors, but uh the have a made had a twist thing, so you would turn it, it had a little handle, and it would like wrap around and squeeze the uh water.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_10: The way a mop works, Alex, is you get a bucket.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_09: I know, I know, and I know how the thing I thought that this came standard with all the mop buckets.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_09: They all have that now.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_10: It did after Ron Popeel.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, that's awesome.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_10: You're welcome.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, um, and he had other stuff like ornamental ice um um molds, so you could make dolphins and you know, stuff to go with your your shrimp and your oysters.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_09: You know what's crazy?
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_09: He didn't have probably well, obviously, he didn't have a website where you could find all the stuff.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_09: So you'd kind of wait, not at first, you kind of have to wait for the commercial to come around to find out how you get something right.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_10: Write down the phone number.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_10: Well, so actually, when he started, a lot of the stuff was sold in stores, and he would direct people to the store.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_10: So that was another reason why he would do it as local markets, Montgomery Wards, JCPenney's.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_10: He would direct people to the store where it was being sold, and that was part of the deal that he would do.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_10: That's why he would do local markets initially, was so that he could direct people to a store because he didn't have enough inventory initially to do to go national.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_09: You think if he came out today, he would be more or less successful because he'd have more outlets to get it out there, but also like everybody else could do that too.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_10: I think he was successful because he was the first.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_10: I think he was I think he was pioneering and he was in the right place at the right time.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_10: He was a good pitchman, but there's a lot of good pitchmen.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, basically, that's what influencers are today, right?
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_10: They're just basically doing commercials for whatever on YouTube or TikTok.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_09: But I think it's very admirable that he invented all this stuff and then pitched it rather than just being a clearinghouse for other inventors to and people copied him.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_10: People copied his stuff.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_10: Sure.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_10: So I want to I want to talk to you about two of his stranger, um, stranger inventions, stranger things that he came out with.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_09: Well, wait, before we do that, he would he would have had to have a patent on all this stuff, right?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_09: So people couldn't copy him for like 10 years, right?
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I I don't know how the patent law works, but he did patent these things.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, they were they were legit um inventions, and I think there were cases where um maybe people made a variation of it that was okay, but yeah.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_10: Um what does uh patent pending mean?
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_10: Does that mean you're selling your stuff while you're waiting for the patent to be approved?
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_10: Actually, funny you should say that because he talked about that in his autobiography.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_10: So patent pending is you filed for the patent, but the patent office has not issued the patent.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_10: The patent office may not actually issue a patent just because you file, but what it does, he said it was a it was a um sort of barrier for other companies because they knew if the patent went through and they had and the other company copied and invested a lot of money copying in it.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_10: Whoever gets that patent um application to the patent office first has the rights to it.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_10: So let's say I invent something really cool and 10 days later you copy me, but I've already put my patent application in.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_10: A year from now, I win the patent, then you can't you have to pay me damages.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_10: There's all kinds of things.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_10: Oh wow.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_10: In the meantime, though, you're exposed.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_10: I can you could be selling, yes, you could be competing with me, but but if you lost, like if I got the patent, then it's bad news for you.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_10: So it's kind of a withdrawal everything, yeah, and potentially pay me damages.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_10: Oh wow.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_10: So I'm gonna cough it up, Alec.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_10: So I want to talk to you about two of his stranger uh things.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_10: Have you ever heard of GLH9?
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_10: No.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_10: GLH9.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, I want to pay you the commercial for GLH9.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_02: GLH means great-looking hair.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Just spray GLH on, and it instantly covers your bald spot, leaving you with great looking hair.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_02: And ladies with thinning hair or bald spots, GLH solves the problem instantly.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: GLH is not a paint or a cover-up, it's an amazing powder that clings to the tiniest hairs on your head.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_02: It actually builds on itself, leaving you with great, great looking hair.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the GLH hair system is not expensive.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's incredible.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is the first time we've ever used this product.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, saw it on the uh infomercials, and I was skeptical at first.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh it works.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you what, I can't believe it.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've seen the commercial.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_10: Sounds like Barack Obama.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: I I just couldn't believe it.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it really looks great.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_10: So you get the idea.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_10: He he he totally lied.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_10: It is spray paint.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's not spray paint, but that's what it does.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_10: I I watched this commercial, and this guy's got a bald spot.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_10: You pick a color that kind of matches your hair, you spray it on the bald spot and kind of a round and blend it in with a comb.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_10: And and it it it actually looked good.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_10: Like it was surprising how much it looked like hair, but it's not anything but just a powder or a color that goes on top of your head.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_09: So but he hits all of the all of the marketing things where you know he knows what you're saying in the back of your head, and he he confronts that.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_09: It's not paint, it's not expensive, right?
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_09: It's you know, and all the objections, it's not just exactly, and you you're hitting all those before I can even almost form them in my head, and then by the end, you're like, Yeah, why don't I have one of these?
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_10: Brilliant.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_10: Because I have a full head of hair.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, you could say that anyway.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_10: Uh yeah, GLH9.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_10: Um, and then this one is even weirder.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_09: So I wouldn't for it's great-looking hair.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_09: What's the nine?
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, it's formula nine.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_10: It's like WD40, or it's it's it it took them nine formulas to get to the one that worked.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_10: You don't want eight GLH eight or two.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_10: No, no, no.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_10: Those would burn your skin.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_09: First draft.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, cause your head to explode.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_10: All right, so check out check out this one.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, this one is really out there.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_05: Cellulite.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_05: Cellulite, cellulite.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_05: No, there's cellul with the famous cellutrol massage glove, ivy extract soap, and ivy extract massage cream.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_05: Ivy extract has been of interest to beauty care since ancient times.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_05: Today its effectiveness is undisputed by millions of women throughout the world who use it faithfully.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_05: If your hips, buttocks, or thighs start to have an unsightly rippled look, use Cellia Troll's massage glove for a few minutes while in your shower or bath.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_05: With its special ivy extract soap inside, you massage hips, buttocks, thighs, or other problem areas.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_05: Follow with Cellia Troll's Ivy Extract Massage Cream.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_05: It acts as an exquisite supplement to your massage.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_05: And once your mirror shows you what you want to see, you'll have discovered the Cellia Troll experience.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_05: This Christmas, awaken the beauty of someone you love with the perfect Christmas gift.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_05: Cellutroll, under$12.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_09: Is it just a glove?
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_10: It's a glove with a soap.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_09: But then you have to buy the cream that goes with it.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_10: So, so actually, well, then no, it can't it came with it.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_10: You have to buy it again, yes, to get a supply of it.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_10: But um, but it was a kind of imagine a um uh like one of those little massagers that's that almost fits right in your hand, like a palm sander, and it had little nubs on it, and it kind of bent.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_10: So you would use that to massage your hips, buttocks, thighs, all your problem areas, and you use the cream on it, and then and then your uh problem areas would go away and you'd see what you wanted in the mirror.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_09: Oh my gosh, quit saying problem areas.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_10: I just like saying buttocks.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_10: So slightly did you notice a common trend among all of these?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_10: Um, like the end of every commercial, aside from where to buy it, there was one other thing that was really common.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_10: What's that?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: This Christmas get the new button here, too.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_02: It does hundreds of sewing, mending, and decorating jobs.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: And at only$4.99, it makes a great Christmas gift.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_11: Cunningham, Clark, and Sears Woolworth will come on Gomery Ward Medic, Scott's gray.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_10: Everyone made a great Christmas gift.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_10: So he really pushed.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_10: He would always push um not only to buy one for yourself, but to buy one for someone else, or if you were buying it as a gift, to get one for yourself too.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_10: Like he wanted to sell two, it was never just one.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_10: And he made it, he made it, he made it you know worthwhile.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_10: He made it uh cost effective to buy two.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_09: I wonder if he popularized the the idea of stocking stuffers too.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, you know, that the idea that you can get something small, but you can get it as a stocking stuffer.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_09: In fact, get two or three, yeah.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, that's genius.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_09: That's genius.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_09: It we probably don't give it enough credit now, thinking back, because everyone does it, right?
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_09: But if you're the OG on this, I mean you gotta pay some respects to the guy that or maybe not, maybe he's the one that took us off the cliff.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I mean, this is this is um what we talk about on this show, though, is that we've got these people that were so influential, and should we celebrate them or blame them for the way things are right now, right?
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_10: I want to play you uh uh one more clip, and I want I want you to you'll recognize this, I think, but I I want to kind of clear something up after I play this for you.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_04: In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, I remember this one.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_04: But this method doesn't work with a tomato.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_04: That's why we use the ginsu.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's a knife that no kitchen should be without.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_04: Can you even cut paper?
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_04: Can cut a slice of bread so thin you can almost eat through it.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_04: It cuts meat better than an electric knife and goes through frozen food as though it were melted butter.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_04: The ginsu is so sharp it can cut through a tin can and still slice a tomato like this.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_04: It can chop wood and still remain razor sharp.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_10: So actually, you're waiting for him, say, cut paper, but he does it after he cuts the wood with it, he chop chop slices.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_10: You can even cut paper?
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_10: May maybe towards the end.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_10: I don't know.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_09: But I just was fascinated by that when I was a kid because I was like, cutting paper doesn't seem hard.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_09: And then I tried it, yeah, and it is hard.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_09: And then I decided I needed a ginsu.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_10: Well, here's the thing Ginsu wasn't uh it wasn't Ron Popeel, it wasn't a Ronco thing.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_10: Really?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_10: It was it was a company called Quick Cut out of Ohio, and uh they were kind of one of the first companies to jump on this bandwagon and copy the style, the problem, you know, creating that FOMO, all of that stuff that that um that Ron Popeel and Ronco were known for.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_10: So yeah, a lot of people a lot of people would immediately assume Ginsu was Ron Popeel, but it wasn't.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_09: Oh wow, yeah.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_10: So a little bit about his personal life.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_10: Um, he got married in 1956 and then divorced in 63, and then remarried, and then divorced again, and then remarried.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_10: So he was married three times.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_10: He had um several daughters, some of whom are actually still alive.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_10: He had a sister, his brother Jerry, the one that had gone to the orphanage with him, tried to work with him a little bit, but ended up dying kind of young.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_10: Um, but you know, he he ended up being kind of a family man.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_10: He was actually um friends with a lot of people in Hollywood.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_10: He was friends with uh he he he mentions in um a podcast I listened to where he was interviewed, he mentions about going over to Flavor Flav's house and at Thanksgiving, and Flavor Flav wanting him to do the turkey in in the um rotisserie.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_10: Okay, you know, he he was definitely one of these guys that was living the high life in Hollywood, you know, he lived in California, but he got into something else that he wasn't really known for.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_10: Have do you remember the record label Ronco Records?
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, okay, everybody would remember about it.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_09: So it was I was it like Katel, where they would put out songs by not the original artists, and they would just rip them off, and it would be like no, so yes and no, yes and no.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_10: So K Tel, Time Life.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, remember Time Life would do these compilation albums?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_10: He was the first guy to come out with this idea of putting out compilation records of different artists, they were the original songs.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_10: Okay.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_10: They were not K12 K Tel copied him.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_10: Time Life copied him.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, um, but but Ronco came out with uh probably 75 or 100 different albums during their their life.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_10: Um but like best of records.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_10: I'm gonna read you the titles of some of them.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_10: Uh from 1971, there was 20 dynamic hits.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_10: From 72, there was 20 power hits.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_10: From 73, there was 20 fantastic hits.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_10: From 74, there was 20 Star Trek from 75, 20 original winners.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_10: They're just also basically 20 solid hits.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_10: They were they were mixtapes before mixtapes were a thing.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_10: 20 monster hits, 20 giants of rock and roll.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_10: Um now around 78, they kind of like got away from the 20 in the title.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_10: But I think if people were thinking about it, if you were getting 20 songs on an album or a double album, that was a pretty good deal, right?
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_09: And it was all the hits recently.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_09: They've had the that's what I call music, right?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_09: Have you heard of that?
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_09: Now that's what I call music.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_10: Now that's what I call music.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's kind of hard to it's kind of hard to do that now that you can stream everything, but at the time, this was this was innovative.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_09: I was gonna say, if you're having a party, you don't want to play all the songs from the same artist, and you don't really have shuffle or anything like that.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_09: I mean, you're playing, if you have a record player, you're playing all of side one, and the best you can do after that is play have it play another record, but you're playing all, you know, you're playing an hour of the Beatles and then an hour of yeah, whoever.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_10: And and and you're playing all the ones that aren't hits that people don't know.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_10: That exactly.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_10: So what do you have to do at that point once once the party starts going downhill?
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_10: You bust out the Mr.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_10: Microphone, yes.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_10: So freestyle it.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_10: So this was the 1978, uh, I think this was the disco, or no, this is the superstars, the Ronco superstars from 1978.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_10: I just want you to hear a little bit of it.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_13: It's new from Ronco.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_13: It's superstars, a great new album of original hits, giant hits by superstars like Donna Summer.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_08: They call me a super group.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_13: Kiss Alabama Days, great hits, the fabulous KC in the Sunshine Band, plus Jennifer Warren's Income Dam and John Fortobi, and more great songs by superstars like Silver.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_13: There's the face city rollbase, plus hits by Apple, the Little River Band, Stephen Bishop, and still more.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_13: You'll get Eric Carmen and the fabulous look! It's a great collection of super hits now on the Superstars album 599.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_13: 8-track take with cassette$7.99.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_02: Available at Bay Less House of Values, Value Giant 711 and Fred Meyer.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_09: And if you've never seen one of these commercials, the whole time they're playing the music, there's a scroll of all the songs.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_09: Only the one that you're hearing is bold-faced, and then there's other songs that you can read but not hear.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_09: And it was so captivating.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_09: Like, I gotta get this record, it's got all the good songs on it.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_10: It makes you feel like it makes you feel like the uh like there must be just so much gold on this.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_10: Because and I'm not hearing plus more, you know.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_09: That was the thing, is when they'd say, and more, and you think, I wonder what the more is.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and you couldn't just go to the internet and and ask what the track list was, right?
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_10: That was no, you had to go buy it.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_10: That wasn't a thing.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_09: Well, um they couldn't sell it in stores, you had to buy it on the you had to pick up your phone and call.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_10: Yep, that's right.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_10: You'd have to pick it up because because um record stores didn't carry them.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_10: I I have I did watch a few reviews of these records from then, and and especially the cassette tapes.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_10: I remember I did order a couple of the cassette tapes, and the quality was awful, like the way it sounded.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_10: Um, did you ever have a cassette where it had kind of a ghosted sound where you could you could hear like you'd push play and it was playing the side, but it was somehow not lined up right.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_10: So you were hearing backwards the other side just a little bit, and it was like a lot of those records did was.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_09: They wouldn't play the whole song.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_09: They play, it would just fade out like at three minutes.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's how they got 20 on one record, right?
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_09: A five-minute song, and then all of a sudden it would go away.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_10: I want to hear Rapper's Delight all the way through, right?
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_10: I want to hear all eight minutes of Rapper's Delight.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_10: Um, well, as we talked about before, you know, he was a household name famous for being inseparable with uh um inventions, entertaining, and these phrases, you know, set it and forget it, but wait, there's more.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_10: And here's another one you might not remember.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_10: Uh now how much would you pay?
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_10: You know, kept adding to it.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_09: And now how much would you pay?
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_09: But wait, there's and in yeah, exactly.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_09: And the part that I think is is effective is when at the end when they say not available in stores.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_09: Because you have to go out and buy one of these right now, and then you think, No, it's not available in stores.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I have to order.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_09: Or when they say uh operators are standing by.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_10: So um so they actually had two different tactics.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_10: As I was talking about earlier, um, sometimes he would um they would sell it at Woolworths, they would sell it at JCPenney's, whatever, some of these things.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_10: And what they would do on the package, he came up with the little logo.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_10: Do you remember this?
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_10: It was a picture of a television and it said as seen on TV.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_09: You still see that sometimes, like in the goof.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_10: Yep, so so that was if it was being sold in the store, it was, oh, I remember that from the infomercial, but then there were other cases where you couldn't buy it in the store and you had to dial and they would direct ship it to you.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_10: And you know one of the options for how you could pay for it?
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_10: COD.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_10: Yes, yes.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_10: You could save COD charges by sending a check or money order, or you you had to pay an upcharge if you if you did COD.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I love this.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_09: I love this.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_09: This this tickles a part of my brain I hadn't I hadn't uh thought of in a long time.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_09: I love this stuff.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_10: There was one more phrase that he was pretty famous for that that you know you you think of just being ubiquitous now, but this was Ron Papeel, plus shipping and handling.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_10: 1995, plus shipping and handling.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_09: And the shipping and handling isn't what he paid for shipping and handling, so it's a way to make more money for the fish.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_10: So did um did you ever order any of these things?
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_10: Like, is there anything like a I mean it's I did order a few of the records I remember, or my parents might have.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_10: I I remember having some of those KTEL and Ronco records back back in the day.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_10: I couldn't tell you which was which, but um I I don't think we ever ordered any kitchen gadgets, although I don't I do know my mom had a chop-omatic because I remember actually using it.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_10: No, we didn't fall for any of this stuff.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_09: And I was home too.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_09: I was home by myself and always wanted the stuff, but I didn't have a credit card or anything like that.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, you didn't no no COD.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_09: Just order it and tell them you'll pay COD.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_09: Eight years old.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_09: Um The only kind of things I ever got were from cereal boxes, and that's when you could only when you could pay with box tops.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_09: Right.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_09: I would always order those things, but no, never.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_09: But never deck of cards.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_09: Always wanted the Ronco stuff, but never, I don't think I ever got any of it.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I don't know if you remember um some of the some of the nods to uh Ron Popeel.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_10: There was um Dan Aykroyd had a pretty famous sketch.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_10: Do you remember that one?
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah, the bassematic.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_10: The bassematic.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_10: And and also um who was the guy that would hit stuff with a hammer?
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_10: Um yeah, Gallagher.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_10: Gallagher, he had the I think it was the Sledgematic, yeah.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_10: He had that thing.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_10: But one of the better ones, and I couldn't actually find it anywhere, but it was um it was Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, and it was the Popeel Galactic Prophylactic.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_10: Really?
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_10: I hadn't heard about that one.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_10: It it was a condom that you could order, and of course, you know, he's just going over first of all, it la it's guaranteed for 50 years, one condom, and he shoots a gun at it, and it's bulletproof, and it's uh you know, it stretches and uh all these things.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_10: But I could I couldn't actually find the clip anywhere, but I do remember that from Eddie Murphy back in the day.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_10: Um there were other references to him, the X-Files, uh, the show Sneakers, King of the Hill, The Simpsons, Old School.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_10: He was on the Daily Show, he was on the night the Tonight Show, he was on Late Night with David Letterman, he was on with Conan O'Brien.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_10: They've had shows um like documentaries and and profiles about him on CNBC, A E Biography, History Channel, Discovery Network.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_10: Uh remember Robin Leach Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_08: Uh-huh.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_10: Uh Ron Popeel was one of them, and he w was very rich and fairly famous.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_10: Uh CNN with Larry King.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_10: Um, I mean, he's been all over the place.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_10: People magazine, New York Times, etc.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_10: He also was big in helping QVC get their start.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_10: Now, are you familiar with QVC?
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_10: Of course, yeah.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_10: Uh, you know what it stands for?
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_10: I think the V stands for value.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_10: So it was um quality products, value, you know, based on the prices, and then convenience because you could order them right then and have them shipped right to your store.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_09: So he helped start that, huh?
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_10: He did he didn't found it or anything like that, but he actually was on it a lot.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_10: He became a regular regular pitch guy on QVC, and he set the world record for selling over a million dollars worth of Showtime rotisseries one hour on QVC.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_10: Um, he sold 150 hours or 150 units a minute for some period of time.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_10: So pretty crazy.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_10: But here's the thing you hear all this about Ronco, all these products, they actually filed for bankruptcy three times.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_09: Oh, really?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_09: Well, you know, these things were cheap.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_10: Two times had to sell a lot of volume in order to make money, right?
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_10: One time uh was in 1984, uh, they filed chapter seven, and they uh had a lot of debt, and he was at the helm, and he was able to kind of restructure things and make a deal with the bank and get the goods back, and then went and sold the goods and used the proceeds from that to kind of wipe or to start over, and his debt was wiped out.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_10: He sold the company in 2005 to a Denver holding company called FITEC and for$55 million.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_10: And then in 2000, and he's but he was still involved, he was still an inventor for the company.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_10: He just didn't, you know, he wasn't running it anymore at that point.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_10: 2007 they filed for bankruptcy again, and then 2018 they filed for bankruptcy a third time.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_10: And the company, Ronco, actually still exists, but they've had to kind of evolve and come back.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_09: Well, you know who kind of took the mantle too was Billy Mace for a while.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_09: Yep.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_09: Um who also uh is I think he died before Rom Papeel, actually.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_09: Oh really?
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_09: Okay.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think he I think he passed a like yeah, a long time ago.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_09: Um, but he kind of took that mantle, almost exactly the same type of pitching.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_09: Um different kind of product.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_09: He's the one that makes the boat that you you know, they spray the stuff and it the boat won't leak, you know.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_10: Yep, yep, yeah.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_10: All the all the um uh chemical miracle products.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_10: Remember the remember the crazy glue commercial where the um construction guy puts it on his hat and then he then he pulls himself up and like no hands, super glue.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_10: Um I don't know.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_09: Effective stuff, man.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_10: Demonstration.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_10: Show, don't tell.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_10: So Ron Popeel passed away on July 28th, 2021, um, surrounded by family, went peacefully.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_10: And you know, still probably less today than he was 10, 20 years ago, but still pretty significant in the world.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_10: People still look at him and and think about somebody who really changed the way we eat, drink, think about food and inventions.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_10: But um Weird Al, as I mentioned earlier, uh Weird Al Yankovic had a song called Mr.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_10: Popeel.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_10: Now, are you familiar with the song?
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_09: I think so, yeah.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_09: I think I think I am.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_10: So it was on the album Weird Al Yankovic in 3D.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_10: And what's cool about this song, I did not know, so I I had that album.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_10: I was a huge Weird Al fan growing up.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_10: I had the record, I had the actual vinyl record of this.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_10: And I didn't know who Mr.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_10: Popeel was, but I always thought the song was funny.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_10: I was like, oh, this is and I knew it was ridiculous TV infomercial stuff, but I didn't realize it was all attributed to one person.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_10: But I just found out that on the um on the song, there's a female singer, and that's uh Lisa Popeel, who is Ron Popeel's sister.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_10: And she turns out she's a professional singer.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_10: She did this with Weird Al.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_10: Weird Al sought her out to be on this song with him, and she continued to work with him as a backup singer and actually went on tour with him on his strings attached tour in 2019.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_10: So nice.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, little tribute.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_10: So that's Ron Popeel.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_10: I love it.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_10: Well, I think we should go out with a little Weird Al uh tribute to Mr.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_10: Popeel.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_10: So thanks everybody.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_10: Um, operators are standing by, so be sure to call in order now because we've only got a few of these left.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_03: I need a Ventramatic.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_03: I need a pocket bedroom.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_03: I need a handy appliance on the round board.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well let's start with it.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_03: I want a time from fanny.
• 1:16:11
  SPEAKER_03: I want a man from leather.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_03: I want a crazy glue mine on the bottom of a bed.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_03: Mr.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_03: Ball Mr.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Falls, it's not You can even do it.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Oh no, not how am I gonna make my old final start what I do?
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's not full than any dog.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_03: Just look what else to the order today.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_07: You get a ghetto knife and a smokeless battery.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_07: Mr.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_07: Popeil, Mr.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_07: Bobel.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_07: Mr.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_07: Popeil, Mr.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_07: Popeil, Mr.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_07: Popeil, Mr.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_07: Popeil, Mr.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_07: Popel, Mr.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_07: Popeil.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_03: Make me fire dark way.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Make me fire fast.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_03: Make me take it fast, make it take me off.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_03: I want it.