Since the game show is TV’s most ephemeral genre, its fans have an especially active community on YouTube. The uploaders—a mix of hardcore tape traders and casual fans who happened upon an old VHS trove—have brought back to light shows that, in some cases, haven’t aired anywhere for decades. In this series, I’ll take a look at a few forgotten would-be classics that I think hold up well.

Time Machine

Watch a clip here.

Host: John Davidson

Originally aired: 1985

Forgotten because: It was short-lived, lasting only 80 episodes or so.

What makes it great: OK, it’s not great. But it’s interesting. There haven’t been many game shows based exclusively on date recall, probably because the conceit wears thin quickly. Time Machine barely pulls it off, yet it does indeed pull it off, with a nice variety of games and an irresistible play-along factor. Great set, too

I don’t know why John Davidson kept getting emcee jobs in the ’80s. He’s not a complete loss, sure, but there’s a Sisyphean quality to his hosting: He’s always trying to catch up to the show, but as soon as he gets there, it’s moved on without him. Davidson’s friendly, he looks good in a suit, and he locks onto those cue cards with the force of the Federation’s finest tractor beams. That’s about it.

Watch the clip linked above—Davidson is ill at odds from the start, flubbing his little joke about the morning news. You can discern his internal process for handling contestants: He picks one fact about each contestant to remember and then structures all his remarks around that fact. For the first game, John builds a little billboard in his brain that reads “RON: LIKES BOATS.” The next billboard says “SHIRLEY: IS A NURSE.”

I like when Davidson refers to the clothes washer in a Tide ad as a dishwasher.

Game-show fans know this is a Reg Grundy production by the opening drum roll, a staple of Grundy’s more successful ’80s games, Sale of the Century and Scrabble. Charlie Tuna, the announcer here, also did Scrabble, and his voice is one of my favorites.

Another Reg Grundy staple comes after John says that the prize package is worth $24,000. The resultant “Yeah! Woo! OW! Wow!” crowd noise was used with unapologetic frequency on Grundy shows. Which is an odd production choice, because it sounds artificial from the first time you hear it—even as a kid I found it weird that the same people went “Yeah! Woo! OW!” every time a jackpot was announced. Not knowing the concept of audio “sweetening,” I presumed they were show staffers who reacted the same way every time. (It never occurred to me that something on television would be fake, heaven forfend.)

Further viewing:

• Part two and part three of the above episode.
• Another episode, in not quite the same sparkling quality, but watchable: part one, two, three.

On the recommendation of Chris Dahlen, by way of his excellent review in the A.V. Club (world’s greatest publication), I downloaded Braid, a 2-D platformer that allows the player to manipulate time in increasingly marvelous ways. Speaking of time, the game was released in August, and I am a stupid dumb jerk for going so long without playing it.

Braid’s basic trick is the rewind button, which allows your character, Tim, to travel back in time as far as you’d like. In fact, the game will not let you die. If your character gets hit by a monster or lands on some spikes, Braid freezes the action and demands that you rewind to a point in time before you mucked things up so badly. It reminds me very much of the tool-assisted speedrun process that I documented a few months ago. When you’re making a TAS, you use the emulator’s savestates to preserve your mistake-free progress. If you screw up, you back up to the previous savestate and try again. Braid has taken that dynamic and made it part of the game.

And that’s just the first few levels. As you progress through Braid, the time trickery gets more ornate. You encounter small parts of the world that exist in their own immune timeline, such that when you manipulate time, they stay right where they are. A shadow Tim appears, repeating any past actions that you erase with the rewind trick. It all sounds very sci-fi and mindblow-y, but the game introduces the new concepts carefully, so that you know what’s going on, and wordlessly, so that you feel like you figured it out yourself. Once you discern how time is warping in each environment, you have to apply your new skills to some fantastic puzzles. One puzzle, “Crossing the Gap,” tortured me for hours, but I refused to let myself peek at a walkthrough. Good thing, because that made the eureka moment that much better.

Maybe the game would have been good enough with the time gizmos and puzzles, but as Dahlen writes, “This isn’t a game about time, it’s about memories, and how they can be repeated and eventually rewritten.” Of course, memories are themselves about time—they are how we perceive time. Braid narrates itself with a short written prologue to each level that frames the platformer action in a larger narrative of distorted self-perception. This story culminates in a final level that runs forward, then backward, to the most startling ending to any game I have ever played. In a heartbreaking instant, it all makes sense—Dahlen again: “understanding this isn’t meant to make you feel like a hero, so much as a liar.”

A common tactic in game reviews is to judge a game’s value on the amount of time you can spend playing it. Here again, our technical conception of time fails us. In dollars-per-hour terms, Braid, at about 6 hours of play (give or take) may not be the greatest value at $15. I can’t remember any game since Ico that has moved me like Braid has, though. It would be better to judge this game by the time you spend thinking about it rather than the time you spend playing it. I’ll never forget Braid. Play it. (Also, read Dahlen’s review.)

I ate a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch last night. That was a mistake. You should not eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch late at night. It messes with your head, makes you all twitchy, and you have weird dreams as the sugar and cinnamon swirls you’ve ingested assault the blood-brain barrier.

If you compare the nutrition labels, Cinnamon Toast Crunch has as much sugar per serving as most other sweet cereals, but when you look more closely at the serving size, which for Cinnamon Toast Crunch I believe is a single flake, the story changes.

I don’t care because Cinnamon Toast Crunch tastes awesome. It was a brilliant innovation in the field of breakfast technology. In 1984, the cereal potential of miniature marshmallows had been largely explored, so the good people at General Mills decided to miniaturize another sugary snack. Their masterstroke was to restrict their palette to the world of breakfast food, making the morning delight of cinnamon toast both more convenient and more potent. This is why they succeeded where Cookie Crisp failed. (It’s not a surefire formula, though, as the atrocious Waffle Crisp demonstrates.)

That was almost a quarter-century ago. Where is breakfast-cereal innovation today? At the grocery store, all I see are variations on the old standards. Either they contort a classic into a flavor combination that should not exist (cf. Chocolate Lucky Charms¹) or they toss in “real fruit!”—i.e., freeze-dried nuggets that, in a past life, resembled fruit.

My sense is that America’s formerly great cereal industry has run out of ideas, but to confirm that my hunch wasn’t just nostalgia, I decided to take a look at the numbers. I assembled a list of the top selling cereals, as of 2008, from the data provided by breakfast-cereal enthusiast Topher’s Castle. My list included the top 13 cereals on the market (Topher’s chart only breaks out 15 individual brands), as well as each manufacturer’s top five. I excluded Quaker Oatmeal Squares because I couldn’t find any historical data for them (you’ll see why that’s important in a second). I excluded Malt-O-Meal cereals entirely because, c’mon.

I took that list, cross-referenced it with the cereals’ debut years, mostly according to Wikipedia, and put everything on a Dipity timeline. Each cereal is placed according to the year it came out. Click on each entry for some context by way of a pithy comment or two.

Click the “View in Dipity” button for a more expansive look at the whole timeline (Dipity is kind of glitchy, especially in the embedded version, so I recommend clicking through). Note that a little “+” at the bottom of the timeline means there are more entries to display (click on the “+” to view them). Sometimes the Dipity software collapses entries because it is lazy.

What you’ll notice as you browse the timeline is that the period from 1952 to 1969, especially the 1960s, was a boom in cereal development. The 1980s saw a few notable blips, but since then the landscape has been barren. There are no entries past the notable 1989 introduction of Honey Bunches of Oats. Since then, the industry has rested on its laurels.

Where will the next great cereal idea come from? Do we need a cereal Manhattan project, or should the government fund thousands of cereal garages across the nation? I am not content to watch cereal and milk become a dying art.

I’ll probably update the timline with more cereals as I think of them, as the top-sellers hardly comprise everything that General Mills et al. have to offer. If you have anything you want me to add, let me know.

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1. I shamefully admit that I won’t turn up my nose at a bowl of Berry Lucky Charms. ↑

(I even plugged Robot Village in an interview for Metrotwin, a new travel site I’ll be contributing to on occasion. Mere hours after the interview was posted, complete with my statement that Robot Village was my favorite place in the city, they announced their imminent closure. This does not bode well for my future recommendations. The Curse of GONY?