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Curious City

Mold-A-Rama-Rama! The Secrets Behind Chicago's Plastic Souvenir Empire

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8642 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2015

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How a Chicago-area famiHow a Chicago-area family turned cheap plastic souvenirs into a nostalgia empire.ly turned cheap plastic souvenirs into a nostalgia empire.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region,

0:06.2

and investigate, report.

0:08.0

Explore.

0:08.9

From WBEZ.

0:13.8

This is John Fasiel.

0:15.8

I'll get to our question in a second, but first, a story about a rock star.

0:20.6

Not about sex, drugs, or trashed hotel

0:22.9

rooms, but one that takes place in a museum. The stories from Ben Blackwell, head of production

0:28.9

at Third Man Records, Jack White's label. In 2005, The White Stripes were playing Chicago,

0:35.5

and Jack White and some friends went to the Museum of Science and Industry.

0:39.3

Body Worlds was sold out.

0:40.7

And so we just kind of checked out everything else.

0:42.6

And there was a mold machine there that had a green wax John Deere tractor mold.

0:49.0

And Jack put the coins in.

0:50.2

I remember standing there with him looking at the machine.

0:52.4

He was like, look at how fucking cool this is.

0:54.5

Look at those dials moving.

0:56.0

Like, this is so bad.

0:58.5

Jack White was freaking out about molderama,

1:01.8

a space-age-looking vending machine that makes little plastic souvenirs right before your eyes.

1:07.7

You insert two bucks, hot, melted polyethylene is shot into a mold that clamps together,

1:13.6

pulls apart, and kicks out your dinosaur or tractor or whatever. It's warm and smells slightly

...

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