In case you missed the news yesterday, this week all of The AIR Musical Specialty programs will be brand-new. That means that…Tuesday is once again “New Show Day” on The AIR.  As such, we have new episodes of  Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift for you. To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

Now, this week your humble blogger/radio host had a ton of work pop up that had to be dealt with immediately, so I had to cut corners to get a new show to you this week.

And I didn’t want to skip this week because we have a special programming event next week that will preclude us doing a new RFC then. So things will be back to normal the week after next.

Back to this week’s show, we open with new music from Sparks, and then our first hour is a mixtape that includes new music from Corduroy Brown, Skunk Anansie, Messer Chups, Monsoon, The Heavy Editors, Morcheeba and more.

Our second and third hours go back to an episode of Radio Free Charleston Volume Three, from May, 2015, back when we were on Voices of Appalachia/New Appalachian Radio. I picked this ten-year-old edition of the show because the first hour is just loaded with great local music, while the next hour brings you an assortment of music from Pere Ubu, the band fronted by Dave Thomas…who just passed away a few weeks ago.

So it’s sort of timely and respectful, in addition to being just a wee bit slapdash.

We don’t have links this week. They will return in two weeks so you can track down the artists. In the meantime, feel free to Google them.

RFC V5 226

hour one
Sparks “Hit Me, Baby”
Corduroy Brown “Doin’ My Best (Rodburn Hollow Sessions)”
Skunk Anansie “An Artist Is An Artist”
Rupesh Cartell “Hands of Glass”
Ghoulbox “Necrokiss”
Messer Chups “Souvenir of the Witch”
The Settlement “Riff Destroyer (live)”
Monsoon “Crack Our Codes”
The Heavy Editors “Human Nature”
Dinosaur Burps “Sophisticated Robe”
Morcheeba “Bleeding Out”
Marc Ribot “Death of a Narcissist”
Dark Entities “Undertow”

hour two
J Marinelli “Stop Paying Attention”
J Marinelli “Saturn of Clarksburg”
Dina Hornbaker “At Bay”
Brian Young “Swingin’ Man”
Whistlepunk “Spy Song”
Close The Hatch “Skull and Bird”
Trielement “Noodle Soup”
Timothy Price “Kashmir”

Charlie West All Stars-Veteran’s Benefit CD Band

“Walk This Way”
“Champagne and Reefer”
“Runnin’ Down A Dream”
“Barracuda”

John Lancaster “Jeruselum Syndrome”

hour three
Pere Ubu

“Waiting For Mary”
“49 Guitars and One Girl”
“Dark”
“Ubu Dance Party”
“Breath (Don’t Let’s Talk About Tomorrow”
“Rhapsody In Pink”
“Sentimental Journey”
“The Waltz”
“My Theory of Spontaneous Simultude”
“Love, Love, Love”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we offer up a new episode of The Swing Shift that collects some of the greatest hits of Artie Shaw, the thinking man’s bandleader. This show was assembled so quickly that I didn’t not have time to prepare a playlist. Thanks to the same sudden workload, all I can say is that it’s all Artie Shaw, and all the hits are here.

And it Swings, big time.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Thursday at 9 AM,  Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursdays and Sundays.

This week’s art is something I found in my old phone. It’s a digital doodle, done in Samsung Notes, and I’m pretty sure I did this while sitting outside the Ohio Statehouse while waiting to go see “To Kill A Mockingbird” a a theater across the street in June, 2023.

This was a rare instance of me having a stylus handy and actually being able to draw something useful on the phone. I probably tweaked the colors a bit after dumping it into the computer, but I’m not sure.

If I can ever figure out where Notes is on the new phone, I may do more work like this…if I remember to carry a stylus.

Of course, it’s probably easier to just take a picture.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a new episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also new edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

The problem is, we don’t have playlists for either show. Nigel Pye tells me that Psychedelic Shack is one of his favorite episodes ever, but he didn’t give me a hint of what to expect in it. Herman Linte didn’t have a playlist, but he promises a show filled with the music of the band, Focus, from the 1970s on Prognosis.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

At 8 PM you can hear stand up from Patton Oswalt on last week’s episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of progressive rock recorded live in concert on Prognosis. 

Next weekend is the weekend after Memorial Day, and that means that it’s time for WonderFest USA in Louisville. Mr. and Mrs PopCulteer are planning to attend for the second year in a row, and to get ready we’re going to re-share last years video, plus videos from 2021 and 2015. It’ll be fun to check out (and photograph) all the cool model kit builds, and it’ll be cool to see William Stout and Greg Nicotero again and we also have a book or two we want to buy from Anthony Taylor.

There will be panels devoted to Jaws, Star Trek, Lost in Space and more.  It’s loads of fun for Monster kids of all ages, and it’s just a four-hour drive down I-64 from Charleston.

You can read  more about this year’s show HERE, and check out our videos above and below.

We are in the midst of a run of The RFC Flashback that goes back to the most ambitious series of episodes in Radio Free Charleston history.  In June, 2011 I decided to try and do something sort of crazy. I’d managed to crank out Radio Free Charleston on a weekly basis before, which was no mean feat since the show was basically produced by me alone, with camera help from my now-wife Mel Larch and occasional help from other friends. For FestivALL 2011, I managed to produce eight episodes of Radio Free Charleston in under two weeks.

Part four of Radio Free Charleston‘s FestivALL 2011 coverage combines The East End Main Street Streetworks Art Auction with The Music Works/Songwriternight.com Songwriter Invitational. You’ll see plenty of the Streetworks brick art, plus MC Ted Brightwell (right), along with music from Sierra Ferrell, Don Baker, John Radcliff and John Lilly.

This was our fourth show in four days. After this we took four days off so we could record events during the second weekend of FestivALL, which we posted the following week. You’ll see the first of those shows in this space next week.

Also next weekend, FestivAll 2025 happens in Charleston, and it’s shrunk back down to one weekend and currently lacks an executive director, so I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to enjoy it.

The PopCulteer
MAY 23, 2025

So…it turns out I got something in common with the new Pope.

It’s not the Catholic thing. I was never serious about that. And it’s not the Chicago thing. He is from there, and Mel and I like to go there a lot (in fact, in a couple of weeks I may be blogging from there for a few days).

It’s not that we both have a collection of cool hats and lots of fancy shirts from Temu. It’s not that we both collect action figures (I don’t actually know if he does, but I collect enough for both of us).

Nope, that’s not it. The thing I have in common with the newly-minted Pope Leo XiV is that we both play Wordle.

You know Wordle. It’s the game where you get six chances to guess a five-letter word. The New York Times owns it now.

I’ve never mentioned it here in the blog because, well, it always annoyed me when folks would post their daily Wordle score on social media. I thought it was a little performative and got a wee bit obnoxious after a while.

But I did start to play it during the pandemic. And I got pretty good at it.

Weirdly good, in fact. More often than not I can solve it in two steps. I do this by choosing a different starting word every day, and by being pretty lucky.

About 900 days ago, with a 98% success rate, I did that thing where you register and sync your Wordle stats with your NY Times subscription so you can keep your streak going, if if you’re using a different device. Before I did that, I barely paid attention to my stats.

Worldle was just something I did at the start of the day as part of my ritual to get the brain started. But when I synced up my stats, something interesting happened.

First of all, it re-set my stats to zero, which was no big deal. I’d never shared my score or stats anyway.

Second, however, it also gave me the ability to keep a streak going. I hadn’t really tried to do that before because I couldn’t transfer my stats from my office PC, so it’d break the streak every time Mel and I went on a trip, or if I even just got too busy to Wordle once in a while.

At that point (after I realized that you need to do Wordle EVERY DAY when my first streak broke at five), I decided to keep track of how many days in a row I could solve the puzzle.

Then, in March of last year, for reasons I have still not figured out, my streak was snapped after 448 days.

I didn’t lose, and I didn’t miss a day. They just started my streak over at 1, with no warning. A check of very angry Reddit users showed that this happened to a few thousand people that same weekend, but nothing was ever done about it.

I was about as angry as a person can get when the fairly meaningless stats for a game, that they get to play for free and don’t discuss with anybody else, are messed up can get…which is to say, not much, really.

I also play the unofficial variants on the game, Dordle and Octordle, which are more challenging and more fun and require different strategies. These three games are part of my morning routine where I wake up, have breakfast and flex my brain a tiny bit while procrastinating about beginning work for the day.

If a streak snaps, it might bother me for about ten seconds before I move on. My current Dordle streak is over two hundred days, and I don’t keep track of any streaks at Octordle because you have to navigate to a special page to see them and I don’t care enough to do that

Back to Wordle, I was a bit intrigued by the phantom snapping of my streak, and I was wondering if it would happen again when I hit the same number of days. After solving Thursday’s puzzle in two steps again, I looked at my numbers, and realized that I’ve hit a couple of  milestones since my re-set.

By the time you read this, I also should have tied my longest streak. Saturday I’ll find out if I beat it, or if it starts over again.

But I won’t bother writing about it here again. I still find the whole Wordle stat sharing thing to be a little obnoxious. Still…for one time only, here goes…

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. I hope the headline wasn’t too clickbait-y. Check back every day for fresh content and all our regular features.

If you have come here looking for information on events related to that Bicycle thing that’s paralyzing Charleston at the moment, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I am bicycle-illiterate and still can’t wrap my brain around the idea of bicycling being a spectator sport.

But that’s just me. If watching people ride bikes is your thing, go to THIS WEBSITE for a full schedule of all the bike crap and related events happening all over Charleston.  You can find more details HERE. The only thing vaguely interesting to me would be the bands playing in the middle of all that, and they’re playing outdoors, so I’ll be giving that stuff a wide berth too, for health reasons.  I am glad I no longer work Downtown.

With that out of the way, here’s your guide to STUFF TO DO that does not involve bicycles, mostly in the areas surrounnding Charleston for the next week. I think it’s Memorial Day Weekend, so please remember responsibly, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Oh, and The Vandalia Gathering is this weekend, too. Good luck getting there. Maybe use the Greenbrier exit instead of trying to drive through Downtown.

As always, you should remember that THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS.  It’s just a starting point, so don’t expect anything comprehensive, and if you feel strongly about me leaving anything out, feel free to mention it in the comments. Also, if you have a show that you’d like to plug in the future, contact me via Social Media at Facebook, BlueSky , Spoutible, Instagram or Twitter.  I dont charge for this, so you might as well send me something if you have an event to promote. Note that some links look like they shouldn’t work because they have lines through them, but that’s just a WordPress glitch, so click on them anyway. They should still work.

We are also very happy to remind you that Cristen Michael has created an interactive calendar that is way more comprehensive than this list of STUFF TO DO, and you can find it HERE. Just click on the day and the event and you’ll be whisked away to a page with more details about loads of area events.

You can find live music in and around town every night of the week. You just have to know where to look.

Most Fridays and Saturdays you can find live music at Taylor Books. There is no cover charge, and shows start at 7:30 PM. Friday you can hear Crosby Tyler, and Saturday it’s That High Country Revival.

You can find live music every night at The World Famous Empty Glass Cafe. Mondays feature open mic night. The first Tuesday of every month sees the legendary Spurgie Hankins Band perform. There’s both Happy Hour music and local or touring bands on Thursday and Friday, and live bands Saturday nights. On Sundays when there’s a new Mountain Stage, musicians from the legendary WV Public Radio show migrate to The Glass for the Post-Mountain Stage jam. I hear that last week’s jam was epic.

Live at The Shop in Dunbar hosts local and touring bands on most weekends, and is a nice break away from the downtown bar scene.

Louie’s, at Mardi Gras Casino & Resort, regularly brings in local bands on weekends.

In Huntington, local institution, The Loud (formerly The V Club), brings in great touring and local acts three or four nights a week.

The Wandering Wind Meadery holds several events each week, from live piano karaoke to bands to comedy to burlesque.

The multitude of breweries and distilleries that have popped up in Charleston of late bring in live musical acts as well. I tend to miss a lot of these because, being a non-drinker, they fly under my radar.

Clendenin Brewing Co is a microbrewery with 4 themed lodging rooms in a 1920s bank building on Main St Clendenin, WV. They’ve been host a lot of musical acts lately.

Roger Rablais hosts Songwriter’s stage at different venues around the area, often at 813 Penn, next door to Fret ‘n’ Fiddle in Saint Albans and also at The Empty Glass many Tuesday evenings. You might also find cool musical events at Route 60 Music in Barboursville and Folklore Music Exchange in Charleston.

To hear music in an alcohol-free enviroment, see what’s happening at Pumzi’s, on Charleston’s West Side. You can also visit Coal River Coffee in Saint Albans for live music in an alcohol-free environment. This Friday at 7 PM  Coal River Coffee features Minor SwingI am looking to expand this list, so please contact me through the social media sites above if you know about more alcohol-free performance venues. The Huntington Music Collective has recently started hosting all ages shows at Event Horizon.

For cutting-edge independent art films, downstairs from Taylor Books you’ll find the Floralee Hark Cohen Cinema by WVIFF. Each week they program several amazing movies in their intimate viewing room that you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

Please remember that viral illlnesses are still a going concern and many people who have very good reasons are still wearing masks, and many of us, understandably, are still nervous about being in crowds, masked or not. Be kind and understanding  while you’re out. And if you’re at an outdoor event, please remember that it’s awfully inconsiderate to smoke or vape around people who become ill when exposed to that stuff.

Keep in mind that all shows are subject to change or be cancelled at the last minute.

Here we go, roughly in order, it’s graphics for local events that I was able to scrounge up online, which was tricky because I’m still using a VPN now, and Facebook thinks I’m in London, England and shows me events happening in Trafalgar Square…

Continue reading

Every May Mel Larch brings her listeners a special episode of Curtain Call devoted to the Tony Award Nominees for Best Musical. Since they were just announced a few days ago it’s time for the tradition to continue.

Wednesday afternoon on The AIR, you can hear samples of the nominees for this year’s Tony Award for Best Musical as Broadway is back to be saluted once again by Curtain Call.

You can tune in at the website, or you can just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player mere inches away from this text.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call. It’s our annual Tony Awards preview, with songs each from the five nominated musicals, but before that, Mel opens with a song from the musical, BOOP!, which was inexplicably snubbed, garnering only three nominations, for Costume Design, Choreography and for its star, Jasmine Amy Rogers as Best Actress in a Musical. Doing her part to right that wrong, Mel opens the show with Tony nominee, Jasmine Amy Rogers, showing why she should win the big award.

The nominees for Best Musical are…

Maybe Happy Ending A South Korean musical with lyrics written by Hue Park, music composed by Will Aronson, and book written by both Park and Aronson. This musical follows two life-like helper-bots, Oliver and Claire, who discover each other in Seoul later in the 21st century and develop a connection that challenges what they believe is possible for themselves, exploring relationships, love and mortality. It’s basically boy robot meets girl robot.

Death Becomes Her features a book by Marco Pennette and music and lyrics by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey. It’s based on the 1992 film of the same name directed and produced by Robert Zemeckis. The show is basically a bitch-fight between two immortal, stuck-up frenemies. As such, it’s a laugh-riot.

Operation Mincemeat is a musical comedy with book, music and lyrics by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts (known as the musical comedy troupe SpitLip) This show is their first full-length production and it’s a doozy.
The plot is based on Operation Mincemeat, a real-life Second World War British deception operation centered around the invasion of Sardinia. This story is told with slapstick hilarity that recalls the work of titans of British comedy like The Goon Show and Monty Python.

Dead Outlaw is a musical with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses. It is inspired by the life of Elmer McCurdy, a gunfighter in the 1800s who was shot dead, stuff, and went on to have a successful career in show business.

Buena Vista Social Club is a stage musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez and featuring the music recorded by the ensemble musician group Buena Vista Social Club. It’s based in large part on the aclaimed 1997 documentary of the same name directed by Wm. Wenders, and musically directed by Ry Cooder. The musical is set in Havana, Cuba and spans time from the 1950s to the 1990s, following the lives of four prominent musicians, the effect communism and the rise of Fidel Castro had on musicians at the time, and their eventual collaboration in 1997 on the landmark album Buena Vista Social Club. The original cast album is not due for release until after The Tony Awards, but Mel samples a couple of tunes from the original album that made it into the show.

Following the songs from the nominees for Best Musical, we get a taste of three of the four nominees for Best Revival of a Musical.

Check out the playlist:

Curtain Call 156

“Something To Shout About” from BOOP!
“World Within My Room” and “A Sentimental Person” from Maybe Happy Ending
“‘Til Death,” “That Was Then, This Is Now” and “Don’t Say I Didn’t (Warn You)” from Death Becomes Her
“Born To Lead,” “Bevan’s Update” and “Did We Do It?” from Operation Mincemeat
“Something From Nothing” and “Dead” from Dead Outlaw
“Chan Chan” and “Dos Gardenias” from Buena Vista Social Club
“Together, Wherever We Go” from Gypsy
“Sunset Boulevard” from Sunset Boulevard
“The Carnival” from Floyd Collins

The 2024 Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Pluto TV and Paramount + on Sunday, June, 8.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evenings starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

Prepare yourselves for three hours of brand-new Radio Free Charleston today on The AIR.  To listen to The AIR, you simply have to point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay here, and  listen to the cool embedded player found elsewhere on this page.  

You can hear Radio Free Charleston Tuesdays at 10 AM and 10 PM, with boatloads of replays throughout the week.

It’s a free-format extravaganza as we open this week’s show with a new track from Ghoulbox. We also have brand-new tunes from Novelty Island, The Heavy Editors, Peter Murphy, Tracey Bonham, Arcade Fire, The Kooks, Suzanne Vega and more.

Our second hour brings you long-form music, while our third hour mixes pop with Prog and Synthpop, and even tosses in some vintage Police.

You should stick around, as always, for our mystery bonus tracks at the end of the show. We’d tell you more about them, but then they wouldn’t be a mystery, now would they?

The links in the playlist will take you to the pages for the artists who have websites.

RFC V5 225

hour one
Ghoulbox “The House That Wouldn’t Die”
Novelty Island “Rainy”
Corduroy Brown “Biting My Tongue (Live)”
The Heavy Editors “The Sea’s On Fire”
Peter Murphy “Hot Roy”
Tracey Bonham “Jumping Bean”
Kerosene Stars “Kerosine”
Arcade Fire “Stuck In My Head”
The Kooks “Echo Chamber”
Suzanne Vega “Galway”
Ian Hunter “Fiction”
Ann Magnuson “Moonage Daydream”
Ron Sowell “Everything That Goes Round Comes Round”

hour two
Emmalea Deal & The Hot Mess ” “Sour”
The Settlement “Linger (live)”
Brass Camel “Zealot”
Living Stilts “The Puppet Massacre”
Elleven “Release”

hour three
Falling Stars “Waiting For Love”
David Synn “The Trifecta”
Tarja “Victim of Ritual (live)”
Marco Mattai “Human Again”
Magic Pie “Someone Else’s Wannabee”
Byzantine “Floating Chrysanthema”
SPACE FREQ “Trickle”
Blank Spaces “Courage Of My Convictions”
The Police “Don’t Stand So Close To Me (86)”

You can hear this episode of Radio Free Charleston Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM on The AIR, with replays Wednesday at 9 AM,  Thursday at 2 PM, Friday at 9 AM, Saturday at Noon and Midnight, Sunday at 8 PM and  Monday at 11 AM, exclusively on The AIR. Now you can also hear a different classic episode of RFC every weekday at 5 PM, and we bring you a marathon all night long Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I’m also going to  embed a low-fi, mono version of this show right in this post, right here so you can listen on demand.

After RFC, stick around for encores of last week’s episodes of  MIRRORBALL at 1 PM and Curtain Call at 2 PM.

At 3 PM we give you an encore of two classic episodes of The Swing Shift.

 You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM and 8 PM and Saturday afternoon, only on The AIR . You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Our art is new again this week, and it’s a pencil drawing.

Actually, it’s a “pencils” drawing. I used my Blackwing Palamino, a charcoal pencil, a wax pencil and even a cheap mechanical pencil, plus a straight edge and the better part of a Blackwing eraser.

I had this idea to try to draw Chicago’s “Bean” (otherwise known as Cloudgate) in pencil on copy machine paper…from memory.

I’ve spent hours looking at photos I took of The Bean in Millenium Park over the years, so this wasn’t exactly a feat of astounding ability. I knocked this out in three sessions over three days, and it’s far from perfect, but I’m happy enough with it.

It was another case of me fighting through a Myasthenia Gravis flare-up. This time stubbornness prevailed.

To see this week’s art bigger try clicking HERE.

Over in radioland, Monday beginning at 2 PM on The AIR, we bring you a classic episode of Psychedelic Shack, and then at 3 PM an also classic edition of Herman Linte’s weekly showcase of the Progressive Rock of the past half-century, Prognosis.  You can listen to The AIR at the website, or on the embedded radio player elsewhere on this page.

Psychedelic Shack can be heard every Monday at 2 PM, with replays Tuesday at 9 AM, Wednesday at 10 PM, Friday at 1 PM,  and Saturday at 9 AM. You can hear Prognosis on The AIR Monday at 3 PM, with replays Tuesday at 7 AM, Wednesday at 8 PM, Thursday at Noon, and Saturday at 10 AM.

At 8 PM you can hear the Simpsons sing on a classic episode of The Comedy Vault.

Tonight at 9 PM for the Monday Marathon we bring you ten hours of Sydney’s Big Electric Cat, focusing on a few special theme episodes.

This week we are going to refurbish and restore an edition of PopCult’s Sunday Evening Video that originally ran in this space way back in November, 2008.  Since that time, the standards for embedding video have changed, and many of these clips have vanished from their original spots on the internet. We’re going to do our best to recreate the original post from almost seventeen years ago, because the cereal talk in which we indulged earlier this week made us hungry for our once again-discontinued favorite cereal of all time.

I’m talking about Quisp. You know, the cereal from the 1960s that had the little alien with a Jerry Lewis voice on the commercials? It was the greatest breakfast cereal known to man. I get hungry just thinking of it. Tonight we’re looking at some of the classic commercials by Bullwinkle and Rocky creator Jay Ward, as well as a now quaintly out-of-date web commercial by John Kricfalusi (of Ren and Stimpy fame). Rather than posting a stack of videos, we have one classic, and one long compilation of almost all of the Quisp vs. Quake commercials, then the “new” commercial, which is 24 years old now.

The funny thing is, Quisp and Quake (and Cap’n Crunch) all had the same flavor. The difference was that Quisp was pleasantly chewy, whereas Cap’n Crunch would destroy the roof of your mouth, and Quake, which was shaped like rocks and gears or something, could actually draw blood. What I’m saying here is…stick with Quisp, if they still made it, that is. Quaker Oats once again discontinued this cereal last year. I guess it was just too perfect to exist the world we have now.

In this long compilation, watch as Quisp battles his rival, Quake, for breakfast cereal dominance. Quake goes through a few changes along the way.

And finally as promised, here’s Quisp in the 21st Century, by John K. and Spumco!