Since podcasting got its humble beginnings in the mid-2000s, there have been a number of podcasts that have focused on theme parks and roller coasters. However, there’s just one “Original” Theme Park Podcast, and that’s CoasterRadio.com. What begun as a 5-man show that was supposedly last one summer in 2005 has evolved into podcast that has produced just shy of 600 episodes over the last 15 years.
A long-time listener of the podcast, I wanted to reach out to Mike Collins and E.B., hosts of CoasterRadio.com to learn a little more about the podcast and the hosts behind it as they celebrated their 15th Anniversary on April 25. Luckily, they agreed to an interview, which we’re going to break into three parts (because there was so much discussed!)
Coaster101: You guys started the show in 2005, and there were five of you. You guys admit to not being the biggest theme park fans when you started the show. What was the inspiration behind starting a show about theme parks and roller coasters from guys who classified themselves as fairly casual fans?
EB: It was Mike’s idea. We all worked together at a little public television station in the Washington D.C. area. That place to started falling apart and we all started going our separate ways. Mike had the idea of doing some internet radio show as a way of us all getting back together again to do something creative together because we really enjoyed working together and he called us up. He’s like, “There’s this thing is called podcasting, guys.” This is 15 years ago.
CoasterRadio is older than YouTube by just a couple of months. That’s what I like to remember. And we were like, “I don’t know what that is means.” And he’s like, “Don’t worry, come on over, we’re doing a radio show for the internet.” And that’s kind of where it started. And Mike you just kind of picked the topic. You basically thought, “I don’t know, this will work.”
Mike: Yeah. I had always thought that it would be fun to do a radio show about theme parks. And was just this weird idea I had in my head and I’ve even gone so far as to look for places to do it. I remember even looking at like there were like internet radio stations that were run by Cable Systems.
I was looking at that like I was just looking for to do a “Morning Zoo” style show where you’d still talk about movies and pop culture and TV shows and music, but you’d also talk about theme parks and it was amazing. Right at the time that EB was talking about, our work was starting to crash and we are losing our production projects. Right about that same time, I had read about podcasting and I think when we signed up on our podcasting host, there were less than 200 podcasts at that point. Now there are like over a million total.
Mike: So, we decided just to see what would happen if we did a radio show that you’d hear on radio stations in mornings, but instead of just talking about whatever and play music, we’d talk about theme parks. And I think, EB, didn’t we say we would last the summer and that would be it?
EB: Yeah.
Mike: We had no idea. Well, of course, I mean everybody says that with the creative projects: “We never thought it would do anything”, and then it goes on for 15 years.
Coaster101: You guys you thought it would last the summer and then with the first go-around of the show you stopped recording after two and a half years. Why’d you stop recording?
Mike: I think we did 80 episodes total and then, the dreaded burnout happened where we were just exhausted by CoasterRadio. I think what exhausted us most is that we physically had to get together to do it. That’s what’s so funny about thinking about 15 years, there was no easy way to do video conferencing or audio conferencing and the very early on audio conferencing was not good, it was not good enough for a radio-style program.
It was just getting exhausting in getting together every week, and everybody would have to come to my house. I’d have to set up all the equipment and I think after doing it for two years we were kind of just burnt out.
Coaster101: Your equipment, just like everything else, has probably modernized itself a lot over the last 15 years. How were you guys recording 15 years ago?
Mike: It was so funny because EB and I and all the other guys, we came from a broadcasting background. So, we were using whatever broadcast equipment we could scare up. We had an actual like radio board, a mixing board, we had microphones, but we were recording back in 2005 onto a CD burner. We were recording onto a CD. There were no digital recorders back then or if they did exist, they were really expensive. For those first eighty episodes, we were literally recording to a CD, and then I have to rip the audio from the CD to edit it.
EB: Well, I remember now that you mentioned that Mike, I was remembering that I didn’t even have an iPod. I didn’t have a way to listen to the podcast that we were making and I remember getting CDs listening to them. I had those because of you made copies of the CDs for CoasterRadio for season one.
Coaster101: Man, how times have changed, right?
Mike: Exactly, right? Because who even listens to CDs now? But that was how we were kind of passing around the episodes that we were doing. And people would burn them for their trips. Like people who didn’t have an iPod or couldn’t afford one or didn’t want to buy one, they were burning episodes, a CD so they can play them in their car.
Coaster101: This may be a dumb question. How many episodes could you get on one CD?
Mike: think was it five or six maybe?
EB: It depends on the compression. You could put a bunch on there.
Mike: You get a bunch. I remember, people at least saying they got maybe even like five six seven episodes per CD, depending on how long the shows were.
Coaster101: After a two-and-a-half-year hiatus and the egging on of longtime fans, (guilty as charged, sorry). You guys came back and you kind of jump back in and it was just the two of you. What was the reasoning behind that?
EB: I relocated from the DC Metro area up here to Indiana, and by that time, the technology was catching up. The Internet was getting better and better in general, and Mike was like, “Hey, we should do this again. We should bring back CoasterRadio, just me and you.” And I think we can do it and we can just do it from our own houses together.
Mike: Yeah, and it was funny because back when we did the original show, we said we’d never do it that way. I think EB, you might even say that, as you said, “We will never do a show via Skype”, and it’s just the technology caught up and made it to the point where you could do it and it could sound like you were in the same room.
Coaster101: This is something I’ve always just kind of wondered. Why was it the two of you guys and not Greg and Mario and Flava?
Mike: EB, tell me if you agree with this. I think that those guys did the show just because it was a fun thing to do, but they weren’t ever necessarily gigantic park fans.
EB: None of us were, none of us were really. I mean even you, Mike, you went to Disney a lot. You were a big Disney guy and you like Kings Dominion, you like Busch Gardens and you probably went at least once a year.
I was definitely in the same group with the other guys where I wasn’t an amusement park fan. I wasn’t a roller coaster fan. I probably hadn’t been to a park since I was a teenager. But I think when Mike said, “Let’s do it again.” I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it again.” Now the podcast was fun and I started being an amusement park fan, right? I think maybe that started with us going to Holiday World for the first time discovering a park outside of my own region. That was a big influence there in that first couple of years. The Pennsylvania Theme Park road trip again discovering some parks with that. So, when Mike said, “Let’s do it again, let’s bring it back.” I was like, “Yeah.” And I’m in the midwest now, there’s a whole new realm of parks that I can start getting to for the podcast.
Mike: I think the other guys just had moved on in their lives and were doing other things and they were sort of in the same boat where maybe they went to Kings Dominion once a year, maybe they went to Busch Gardens once a year. They even said it at the time, because we invited them all back and they were just like, “Yeah, we just don’t have time for it. And we also don’t know enough about it to sound like we’re educated on the topic.”
EB: Well, that was a big criticism of the show early on, wasn’t it?
Mike: Yeah, early years, not only the years where it was The Joint Chiefs everybody all together. That was a big criticism that we didn’t know anything but even when you and I got back together, just the two of us for years, people were still criticizing us because “Oh you guys haven’t been down to Texas yet. Oh, you guys have never been out to California. You guys have never been da-da-da-da-da.” There’s a lot of that.
EB: We don’t get it as much anymore. I think now that the criticism is, “Oh, you’ve never been to European Park. You’ve never been to China.” Mike, you’ve been to Europe for a couple of parks.
Mike: Yeah, a few but not as but not enough.
EB: Yeah, it will never be enough. Never be enough. “You haven’t been to every park yet? Poser.”
Mike: Until you and I get to six or seven hundred coasters, it’ll always be that.
You can follow CoasterRadio on all of the social media channels: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram, and visit their website (because the name of the show is the name of the site: CoasterRadio.com) and stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview where we’ll talk with Mike and EB about how the Podcast has evolved over the past 15 years.
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