Selects: What Is A Mold-A-Rama?

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:31on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A man with Down syndrome tries the impossible, the grand slam in turkey hunting. Four 53 hits, we're legal shooting right. And he gives us this one last just, and he pitches off. And when he pitches off, he flies right into the gun barrel. I said to the cameraman, do you have him? He said, shoot him. I said, Justin, shoot. You can download this episode and others from Lines and Tines with Spencer Graves on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside.

1:11It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals. Hey everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of Checking In on the Black Effect Podcast Network. And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season whole and empowered. New year, real you. Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Chuck here on a Saturday. I hope you're enjoying some breakfast cereal and maybe watching cartoons on the telly.

1:50But maybe take a pause and listen to this curated episode from February 2018. What is Moldarama? Uh, I'm not even going to tell you what Moldorama is if you don't know. It's not gross. It's not something that lives on your walls when it's too humid. It's actually a pretty cool, fun machine from days gone by. So I hope you enjoy this episode all over again right now.

2:17Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

2:27Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, Arama. There you go. You know, it's kind of funny that you did that little do-do-do-do, because I'm going to go ahead and plug this right off the top. Okay. We're doing this show on Moldarama, which, spoiler, is a machine that made and still makes these little plastic things. But has maybe one of the worst trade names ever. Moldorama? Yeah. So I'm going to go ahead and plug this. There's a YouTube video from this young lady where she shows off her Moldorama little plastic toys that she's collected.

3:18Carpetbagger.org. Oh, yeah. Moldorama. Just look up that YouTube. She is adorable and she's the best. And when she shows her suitcase full of Moldorama plastic toys, she does a little song. And it's just adorable and great. I got to check that out. I saw her use one of the Disneyland Toy Factory Moldoramas. Yeah. I saw that. So I know who you're talking about. She's great. So that was nice of you, Chuck. Well, let's wait for everybody to come back from watching her YouTube video, shall we? Okay. Let's wait for, I think, five or six minutes. And done. Yes. Time passes faster here at Stuff You Should Know, doesn't it?

3:57It does. I'm 80 years old. So, like you said, Moldorama, I've seen it described as a factory in a case. Okay. I thought that was a pretty apt description. But for those of you who don't know, it is basically an on-demand injection blow-molded plastic toy dispenser. That's a technical definition for it. And while that might not make sense yet, it all will make sense in about 30 or so minutes. All right. How about this? Picture this. All right. Let's start over. Wait. Should we edit my part out? I don't know. Let's leave this all in. All right. Good. Picture this. You walk into a room. Let's say it's the Sears Tower, now Willis Tower.

4:46Is it Willis? Oh, yeah. That was Willis Tower. Sears Tower. Who keeps calling it Willis Tower? Stop that. Sears Tower or a World's Fair or something. And there is a machine that looks sort of like a jukebox from 50 feet away. Oh, yeah. That's a good way. And then you walk up closer to it and you're like, oh, wait. What is this weird mechanical thing? Let me put in 50 cents, and right before your very eyes, it will mechanically create a little plastic toy of an alien or a building or a lion at a zoo, and it will spit it out, and you will say, that was just melted from plastic and molded and shaped and given to me right in front of my eyes.

5:31What a fun, neat thing. Right. And you'll say all this after you recover from fainting from the fumes of melted plastic and then get up and get your toy out, which is good because they say that you should wait a half a minute for your toy to cool before you grab it from the mold-o-rama. Right. I think that was a pretty good job you just did of describing it. And I think this is super neat because this reminds me of a bygone era like where I went to Nashville recently and went to Jack White's Third Man Records. And he has one of those booths where you can go in and record a record. What did you record?

6:09Well, I didn't do it. I chickened out. What I wanted to do was go in and sing a little song for my daughter and give it to her as a record. And I was thinking like, what could I do? What do I know in my brain by heart? because they have a little guitar you can take in there. And it was such a small room, and it was in the room with everything else. And I just got weirdly shy. Like, I don't want people to hear me. You got shy. Jack White made you shy, huh? Yeah, I didn't want to do it in front of people. Like, if there was literally no one in there, I would have cut 10 records. Oh, I got you. You should have stuck your head out and been like, can you all just leave for a little while?

6:44Just trust me. Wow. But anyway, this reminds me of those days gone by where you could cut your own record. Or, you know, they had these really cool machines at fairs and things that they just, I mean, now I guess you can still get your picture taken and printed digitally. Or the Penny Smasher that's still around, too. I see that compared to this a lot. Yeah, those are cool. Not really, but still. It's an apt comparison. I will just say I'm surprised that my brother doesn't have a Moldorama in his basement. So I am too because there's a guy who collects these things called Moldville, and I saw videos of his collection.

7:21Did you see this? Yeah. It's like a warehouse full of mint-conditioned Moldorama machines. This guy must be richer than an astronaut. He's got so many of these machines. And you're right about it evoking the memories of a bygone era. But what's crazy, Chuck, is that these things are still in use today. hey, you can find them all over the country. Yeah. And they're still working. And this is what's amazing to me. They are the original machines that were made for about a seven-year period during the 1960s. Every Moldorama machine that you might encounter, including 10 at the Toledo Zoo, by the way, were built in the 60s and have been operational ever since.

8:07Should we talk about the history? Well, first, let me ask you this. Did you ever use a moldorama when you were a kid? No. Oh, you didn't? No, and I'm dying now to go do one as an adult. So they're still around? Yes. They're still around. They're still around. I actually got one. There's this thing in Toledo called, well, actually it's in Maumee, which is a suburb of Toledo, but it's called Children's Wonderland. And it's like this amazing 3D Christmas walkthrough diorama, basically, that just nothing can put you in the Christmas spirit as a kid better than Children's Wonderland. And at the end of this, there was a Moldorama machine, and it made a gold, smelly, plasticky angel.

8:51It was kind of boring, a boring Christmas angel, but it was mine, and I was so glad to have it. And I have no idea what happened to it. I'm sure it broke pretty quickly. But I was like, holy cow, I've had one of these before. I had no idea what it was called, that it was Moldorama. But I looked it up, and I actually found the angel. Well, I think that's the cool thing about these as a kid is it's not putting your quarter in a gumball machine and seeing all those things and one of them falls out. Right. This is made just for you right in front of your face. Yep. Pretty cool. All right. So now can we go back in time?

9:24Yeah, yeah. I'm done. I'm done nostalgizing. All right. Wait, what is it? Reminiscing? Sure. Okay. Nostalgizing. I think that's a word, right? It is now. All right. We're going back to 1937 in the winter when one J.H. Miller, Tyke is his nickname. I don't know what that comes from. Was he little? Not that I saw. Well, because it's spelled differently, T-I-K-E. Yeah, I don't know what it means. Anyway, of Quincy, Illinois, he made figurines. He and his wife made figurines, and they needed a replacement for his nativity scene. And I guess his little baby Jesus was decapitated by his dog. He needed a new one.

10:08And he couldn't find a place to sell him just one little piece. Yeah. You got to buy the whole nativity scene. And he was like, well, what am I going to do with that? Yeah, he said, I just needed one. And you can understand the department store's position. Like if they sell you just one piece, there's a whole set that they can't sell because who wants that set without the one piece, right? Unless it's like maybe a donkey. Maybe. I remember the donkey. That was a good one, though. That was one of my favorites as a kid. But anyway, he and his wife said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take these lemons and make them into lemonade in the form of making our own little plaster replacement figure.

10:45And apparently they were pretty good at it because they ended up doing this for a living and founding a company doing this because the Germans evidently had the market cornered on nativity pieces. And when World War II came around, they said, nein, für euch. Right. And we had a shortage. Yeah. All we wanted was liberty figures is what they called them during World War II, not nativity because the Germans had supplied us with nativity figures. So American-made ones you could call liberty figures. Is that like freedom fries? Right. I think they actually called sauerkraut liberty cabbage. I'm not kidding.

11:22So the tyke and his wife established this company. and in World War II, it really kind of grew because they cornered the market and they just kept going from there. And then about 10 years after World War II, they decided to move from plaster. And by the way, he started selling nativity figures, individual ones to those same department stores who would only sell them sets before, which I think is kind of sweet revenge. But they moved from plaster figures to plastic and got into a type of injection molding where air is blown into it, which saves on plastic and creates a lightweight plastic figurine.

12:05And really, honestly, nothing says 1950s Midwest more than plastic nativity figures. You know? Probably so, yeah. Made by a man named Tyke. Yeah, I mean, they did pretty well for a little while, I guess. I'm not sure exactly when the company was founded. But if in 1937 he came up with this idea and they went bankrupt in 1959, it sounds like they added some good years in there. Yeah, they did. And I did not see why they went bankrupt. I saw they were nothing but successful. I don't know. I don't know if maybe they sunk a bunch of money into these machines and it just didn't quite make it or what.

12:41But he was very successful. He had a line of plastic toys that kids would buy by the fistful at the local Five and Dime or novelty store or something like that. And he had lines of like dinosaurs, I think toy soldiers. But the one that really put his company on the map as far as kids were concerned were called Earth Invaders. Yeah. Also known as Miller Aliens. And there was a line of tons of them. But the one that is still today the most prized of all was the Purple People Eater. Oh, yeah. And it actually inspired that song from the 50s, which I didn't realize that song was quite that old. but the song about the one-eyed, one-eared flying purple people eater, that was based on Tyke Miller's creation from the 50s.

13:28I think it was the other way around. I don't think so. I think the song was based on the figure. It says here the purple people eater was inspired by the hit song. Oh, I read that as the opposite. Thanks. Good catch, Chuck. I think that's the case because that song was a big hit and there were all manner of purple people eater souvenirs and things. Gotcha. It was a big business back then. Thank you for that one. No problem. We would have gotten some email from like three people on that. Tyke's a great grandson. Yeah. Little Tyke. So in 59 or 60, they went bankrupt, and it was right around this time where he said, all right, I've got this idea for an actual vending machine that could make these things on demand, and he was successful.

14:15He licensed this thing, actually, to what would eventually become Amerimark, which everyone knows that company is still around. At the time, they were called the Automatic Retailers of America. And he developed these machines with them. And in 1962, at the Seattle World's Fair, they premiered there doing little space needles and monorails. And Buddhas. And Buddhas for like 50 cents, which is about four bucks today. So it was not a little cheap thing. It's not like sticking a dime in a machine today. Right. No, they were definitely expensive, but they were a huge hit at that Seattle World's Fair.

14:53That was what, 1962? Yep. So in 1964, at the New York World's Fair, they blew up. They went from a couple of machines in Seattle, I guess three machines in Seattle, to as many as 150 at the New York World's Fair from 1964 to 1965. And even more than just having that many more machines, they also had branded machines, right? So like if you were a company like Sinclair Oil or Disney, and you wanted to just kind of give people an extra little amazing experience, you could license and brand your own Moldorama, and they had plenty of those at the World's Fair. Some pretty cool ones, too. Yeah, so like you said, anywhere from Disneyland to Montreal's World Expo, and that's the cool thing is at Disney World or Disneyland there could be, I think they were some of the characters that were actually acting like they were working the machine.

15:54Right. It's kind of clever. Or if you're in Montreal, it's going to be Canadian Mounties or maybe an Eiffel Tower. Right. If you could contact the company, get them to make you your own signage, I guess, to put on the machine. And then most importantly, they would sculpt and then manufacture a mold from that sculpture, whatever you wanted, say your logo or your brand or something like that, some sort of statuette that had that. You could set it up and people would take home your little branded tchotchke. It was pretty cool. It was a big hit in the 60s. And to Aramarker, ARA at the time, they were like, well, this is great.

16:40But apparently they were just looking at the whole thing as a proof of concept because they had their sights on not just like on-demand novelties, but on-demand everything. Like on-demand dishware, on-demand jewelry, on-demand combs, on-demand ashtrays. That they felt like this was the future. Because at the time, you know, the early 60s, plastics was the future. It was pretty soon everything was going to be made in plastic and no one was ever going to have cancer from it a day in their life. Right. You know? It was a plastically optimistic time. That's right. And in the end, they manufactured about 200 of these machines over a seven-year period.

17:17But by 1971, they said, you know what? ARA said, we're getting out of this Moldorama biz. Yeah. Should we take a break? Yeah. We're going to go press together our own little moldy dinosaur and be right back.

17:38and Josh, stuff you should know.

17:47Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

18:21I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:55All right, Chuck. So ARA gets out of the biz. And it's kind of understandable why. There's a couple of big problems with molderama machines. One, they're expensive to manufacture. They were like apparently$3 ,600 per at the time. That was back in 1962, so just under$30 ,000 today per machine. It's a lot of money for a little vending machine. And then also, once you set these things up, they required almost constant attention. You had to go refill them with plastic. You had to top off their fluids. You had to fix any parts. You had to keep them clean. You had to get gum off of them because, again, these are interfacing with little kids.

19:36so there was a lot of maintenance and upkeep to them as well so Aramark said we're done in the 70s they sold off their machines to a couple of different groups yeah I mean this is a mechanical like hydraulic machine that required like oil and antifreeze that was it was no uh I mean if it sounds like and I mean I guess we can go into the process a little bit it gets a little wonky for my taste. Okay. But I guess we should talk a little bit about how these actually work, right? Yeah, we kind of have to. And it'll be fun, I promise. You ready? Well, I will say this. First of all, there are hydraulics.

20:16Yeah. And there are these two molds, and you can go on YouTube and look at how these things work. It's pretty neat. These two molds, it's basically one half of the little toy on each side. Oh, yeah, like a three-dimensional sculptured statuette. Yeah, so they move toward each other with these hydraulics, and they're pressed together, forms a big seal, and it ends up being hollow on the inside. That's kind of a big point to make. It's a negative of the sculpture. Yeah. So then there's a couple of holes in the bottom that lead into that sculpture cavity. And into that, you inject hot plastic. Because one thing that a lot of people don't realize about the mold-o-matic is just beneath this work surface that is the floor of what you can see, below that is a vat of 225 to 250 degree Fahrenheit molten plastic just sitting there bubbling hot.

21:22Yeah, little pellets. They feed it in little colored pellets. Right. Although for a little while they actually had just kind of neutral pellets that they used colored powder. Right. But they at least wised up there and said, why don't we just color the pellets and just stick with the one color? Yep. And then so the system has a closed steam system that runs hot steam through coils. That's crazy. That runs through these plastic pellet vats, this plastic pellet vat, and it melts the pellets and then keeps them molten. So then when the mold seals up above come together and form that seal, hot plastic is injected into the mold and fills it up.

22:07That's right. Hot plastic injection. Great band name. Yeah. And then these things obviously have to be cooled pretty quick like in order for them to, I mean, what, solidify? Is that the right word? Mm-hmm. But when they do come out, like you said, they are warm. And I'm surprised. I mean, this seems like something that you could not create today without there being so much liability on your hands. Well, again, they still are in use. You can still go to the Toledo Zoo, to zoos all over the Midwest and Florida and tourist attractions and rest stops. And you will find these things still in use. It's just so funny to me that it literally says on the little door that you open, hold upside down while it cools.

22:49Don't let the molten plastic drip on little Timmy's hand. That's exactly right. So we got the injection molding part done, but there's one step that we missed, and that's the blow part that makes it injection blow molding. And this is how these companies manage to actually make money. And one of the reasons why the Moldorama tchotchkes are so fragile is that they're hollow inside. So the mold is filled with hot plastic, and then compressed air is blown into it. And the compressed air does two things. One, it pushes the plastic against the mold, so it completely covers it, and it takes on the shape of the mold, right?

23:31And then it also blows the excess plastic out the bottom, so it's hollow. And then that excess plastic goes back into the vat. And it's reused, right? Reused, exactly. So it might use enough plastic at first to make 10 of these things or five or something. I'm just totally guessing here. But then it reuses it by blowing it out the bottom and making it a hollow object rather than a solid one. Right. Okay. And then it comes out hot. They say, wait 30 seconds or half a minute, I think is how they put it. And the reason why they say hold it upside down is because there's still that hole at the bottom that that little hot plastic can, like you said, burn Timmy's hands.

24:11That's right. The smell, Chuck. You've never smelled anything like it. Do you remember the smell? Yes, I can remember the smell. It was, it's, it's at the same time pleasing and totally noxious. Interesting. Like as a kid, you're like, oh, it smells weird and cool. But as an adult, I'm sure you'd be like, this is going to kill my whole family. And it's going to kill my great grandchildren somehow. Well, back then no one cared. No, they didn't. You know? And like we said, tons of upkeep. You know, you've got steam, you've got hydraulic fluid, you have antifreeze. sometimes cold water but i would suspect antifreeze in most cases yeah uh and until the 1970s like i said you had um uh powdered coloring i mean this whole thing is uh i'm surprised they didn't explode at any point yeah one of the other things that i really admire about this is that again these the machines that are still in use today that still work just as well as ever today were built exclusively from 1962 to 1969 when Aramark was making them.

25:15And then these things also, because they put off these terrible fumes, they're kept outside. So they've been sitting in the elements for 50 plus years. And they still work. They're pretty well-built machines for sure. I think they've got some now that they have been able to move indoors. Yeah, from using a different type of plastic, I think. Yeah, it's crazy that these things had to be outside. Yeah, and they still are. Most of them are. Really? A lot of them have like kind of built in little canopies over them or something like that. But if you look at the canopies, you can tell they're kind of new.

25:49They've been outside basically for 50 years. I'm so going to be on the lookout for these now. So there is a website, Chuck, called Waymarking, W-A-Y-M-A-R-K-I-N-G.com. They have a comprehensive list of every single mold-o-rama in use today in the United States. And they have, like, actual, like, longitude and latitude coordinates if you wanted to, I guess, geocache your way to them. Well, what I want is an app that will text me when I'm within 500 feet of one. Oh, that's a good idea. There's a$10 app. And by$10 app, I mean you would make$10. Yeah. Although people are crazy for these things still, as we'll see.