Director's Notes - Episode 247: Rerun (Patreon)

I was recently in Arizona visiting family, and my aunt (who’s a patron of this show and maybe reading this? Shoutout Aunt Lori!) was telling me about a long-running but long-gone local Phoenix area children’s show called Wallace and Ladmo. It unlocked my own memories of the former (long-gone) Oregon-based children’s show that I grew up with, Ramblin’ Rod. 

Ramblin’ Rod wore a signature red cardigan that was covered in pins and buttons, hosted Smile Contests with the kids in the studio audience, and arrived on set in a fake wooden tugboat. I spent almost every morning with him for years, and then when I started to grow up, just kind of forgot he existed. 

It got me thinking (while eating a burrito on that cloudy Arizona day) that local children’s shows were once a real phenomenon in this country. That there were literally thousands of Captains and Uncles and Misses and Clowns, existing in thousands of Ranches and Treehouses and Tugboats and Jungles in almost every major city in the nation. 

And of course, that got me thinking about Night Vale and what a local kids show there might have looked like when Cecil was growing up. And just like me, Cecil would probably wonder, where was that show host now? What happened to him? Did he simply cease to exist when everyone stopped watching, like a mythical creature that relied on the attention of children in order to survive? Or was he still out there somewhere?

A Wikipedia search revealed that Ramblin’ Rod died of a stroke in a thrift shop a few weeks before I graduated high school. But in Night Vale, there is no Wikipedia (that I know of)—so whether or not certain things or people exist is a lot more indefinite, and that means anything is possible. 

-Brie Williams

May 2024