Normally I would drop a vintage episode of Radio Free Charleston‘s video show into the weekly “RFC Flashback” post on Saturdays here in PopCult, but this is a very special episode, and it’s well outside the chronological presentation of our video shows that’s been happening in that feature since January of last year.

What you see above is one of the lost episodes of the show. There were four of them, but now there are only three. This was actually the oldest of them. The video you see above has been out of circulation for almost a dozen years. I tried a new tack in searching my labrynth of hard drives on the Fourth of July, and found a copy of the show encoded as a .VOB file from where I’d burned it to DVD in 2007. This made me positively giddy and I dropped everything and immediately remastered it so I could upload it in time for today’s PopCult post. I’m even writing this while the new file is rendering.

Making this even more fitting, July 4, 2006 was the official premiere date of the first video episode of Radio Free Charleston.  I hadn’t planned to do anything to mark the 18th anniversary of my show’s return from the dead, but then this fell into my lap organically, so here you go.

From June, 2007, comes episode 21 of Radio Free Charleston, featuring Under The Radar, The Ghosts Of Now, a short film by Sean Richardson and Alon Kutchinsky, plus vintage beer animation. This episodes is called “Yellow Submarine Shirt,” and except for a brief period when it was hosted by MySpace in 2012 this is the first time it’s been seen in PopCult since early 2009.

Under The Radar returned with a song written by Charleston’s rock n roll recluse, John Wallace.  “Dog Day Dallas Doo Dah Demons” is a musical ode to JFK conspiracy theories. The Ghosts Of Now made their second appearance on RFC with “Patton’s Blues.” I am a huge fan of Sean and Alon’s controversial short film (read the comments under the original production notes) and I’m thrilled to have it back online as part of the show.

The production notes for this episode can be found HERE, and they include a mention of the show possibly going weekly, which we did indeed manage to do a few times over the last eighteen years. As you may know, Radio Free Charleston is currently running as an annual show as a video program, but you can still tune in to our radio show every Tuesday for three hours of great local and independent music and free-format radio on  The AIR.

Now I’m going to see if I can get this lucky looking for the other three missing episodes of the show!