This week depart from our normal chronological presentation of classic episodes of Radio Free Charleston to zip back  just one day short of five years to a programming stunt I pulled here in PopCult.

On December 23, 2013, Every hour, for ten hours, I posted a “PopCult Christmas Treat.” These were videos that ranged from less than a minute, to six and a half minutes long (with most on the short side) and they contained various bits of cool stuff left over, or newly-recorded, from the Radio Free Charleston Archives. You will find among these ten clips full songs by The Laser Beams, Radio Cult and the trio of Sasha Collette, John Lilly and Jonathan Wood, plus some short films and vintage animation from Frank Panucci, vintage toy commericals and a few repurposed interstitials from the show.

Each clips was posted with this description: “We’re doing something new this year in PopCult. Your PopCulteer, whose generosity knows no bounds, is giving you TEN SURPRISE VIDEO GIFTS! “What are they” you ask? Well, you won’t know until you open them and find out. They might be previously-unseen performances by acts who have appeared on Radio Free Charleston. They might be short bits of animation. You could even find classic toy commercials in the mix.”

As an experiment in blogging, it was a failure. A couple of the clips have been watched a few hundred times, but others rank among my least-watched YouTube clips ever. The thing is, when you combine all of these Christmas Treats together, as we have done here today with the embedded playlist, they meld together like an ersatz episode of Radio Free Charleston, minus the host segments. The total package is just about the same length, too.

That’s why we bring them to you today, in the holiday spirit of weirdness and randomosity, and in the realization that, since hardly anybody watched them the first time, they’d seem BRAND-NEW to most of our readers!