From KCRW, this is Lost Notes.

Hey, friends, meet Richard Parks.

Hey, remember back in the 80s, like when we were kids,

and like almost every fast food kid's meal you could get had a flexi disc in it?

No, I do not remember that because it took a whole decade to convince my mother to even let us walk by a McDonald's.

I'm Solomon Giorgio.

Richard is a food writer and a documentary filmmaker.

And you're holding one right now.

What does that look like?

It looks like a postcard.

It's the size and shape of a postcard, but it has a very thin sheet of vinyl plastic on one side.

With the circular grooves that you would have on a record.

I'm so concerned that I've gotten so many of these during the 80s and did not realize that it was a record.

Well, you might have.

You might have.

Because at one point, McDonald's printed 80 million of these things.

And Richard tells me, someone almost threw out a very, very valuable flexi disk.

Somehow it was worth $1 million.

From KCRW, this is Lost Notes.

It was a cold day in Galax, Virginia in 1989, and a boy named Scotty Landrith was

home alone looking for something to start a fire with in his family's old wood stove.

Rifling through a stack of old newspapers, Scotty noticed something shiny and black.

...