Gleaming the Cube T-Shirt

Being the 10th Caller: The Art of Winning Radio Contests

When I was a kid, I learned the secret to winning radio contests. It had nothing to do with the telephone I owned, or possessing any sort of super-human dialing skills. No, what I learned one summer is that radio DJs also give away stuff in the middle of the night, and very few people listen to the radio at 3:00 AM. When you’re the only person dialing the radio station over and over, your odds of winning things go way up.

Which is how I won, among many other things, this promotional Gleaming the Cube t-shirt.

Skateboarding was huge in the 1980s. My friends and I all had skateboards and we spent plenty of time practicing tricks and building ramps and tearing holes in the knees of all our pants. We also read lots of skateboard magazines, listened to skater music, and watched any movies or television show that featured skateboarding.

As excited as my friends and I were when he heard a new skateboarding movie was about to come out, there was worry that this one might “jump the shark,” so to speak. Some of my favorite skaters at the time were Tas Papas, Christian Hosoi, and “Gator”, all of whom who went to prison at different times. Gleaming the Cube starred Christian Slater which gave it a little bit of cred to teens — Slater had appeared in Heathers and The Legend of Billie Jean (Pump up the Volume, The Wizard, and Young Guns II were just around the corner.) It also featured Tony Hawk, and if you weren’t there you might not believe this, but Tony Hawk was not considered very cool in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, the guy won almost every contest he entered, but he was this tall, lanky kid with a pink helmet who did a lot of “flippy” tricks that a lot of skaters hated. Gleaming the Cube was starting to feel a little… “Hollywood.”

All that Hollywood stuff aside, my friends and I all wanted to see the movie, despite none of us knowing that “gleaming the cube” even meant. (Apparently it was a reference to a goofy interview question that appeared in Thrasher Magazine a few years prior.)

I’m sure you’ve heard radio DJs giving away concert and movie tickets before. Sometimes listeners will have to answer a simple question and sometimes all you have to do is be a specific caller. When I was a kid, if I was in my bedroom, my radio was on. I listened to it while playing on my computer, doing homework, and while I slept. There were many times after school when I heard DJs giving things away and like every other kid listening, I dialed as frantically as I could, over and over, hoping to win. The first telephone I owned didn’t even have a redial button. I would punch the station’s seven digits into my phone, hold it up to my ear, and the minute I heard the hint of a busy signal, I’d tap the hang-up button with my other hand and repeat the process as quickly as possible.

The speed at which this was performed often led to mistakes. Occasionally I would misdial the station’s number and more than once — and this was the worst — I got so into the pattern of dialing and hanging up that occasionally I would dial, hear the other side of the line start to ring… and then I would hang up. NOOO!!!

With thousands of listeners all dialing the radio station at the same time, competition was tough. I never won one of those dialing contests during prime listening hours.

But!

I have always naturally been a night owl. Even today, I see midnight more worknights than not. As a teen, 10:00 PM was lights-out at my house. By 10:30 I was back up, sneaking a flashlight under the covers to read a book or, later, quietly doing something on my computer. During breaks from school, like over summer vacation, I would stay up until three in the morning every night.

Gleaming the Cube was released on January 13, 1989, which meant radio stations were giving away tickets during Christmas break, the couple of weeks we got out of school each year. I was playing on my computer with the radio on (low) when I heard the DJ announce he was giving away a pair of tickets to see the new movie, Gleaming the Cube. All you had to do was be the 10th caller.

I dialed the number and the DJ answered. “You’re caller number one, call back!”

I dialed again. “You’re caller number two! Call back!”

After ten calls, the DJ answered again. “Congratulations! You’re the 10th caller!”

That’s how I learned nobody dials radio stations at three in the morning.

There was a period of time when my parents spent a lot of time driving me back and forth to the radio station to pick up prizes. I didn’t win a lot of contests, but I saw my fair share of free movie tickets (most of which came with a poster or some other swag). A few years after this, right before I got married in the summer of 1995, I won a pair of tickets to attend the grand opening of Planet Hollywoodin Dallas. That’s another bizarre story.

My Gleaming the Cube tickets came with a poster and this long sleeve t-shirt. The front of the shirt featured the Gleaming the Cube logo, which you can see above. Down the left sleeve was the movie’s title along with the 20th Century Fox logo… both printed in pink. Listen, I’m a secure dude these days and even have a couple of pink shirts hanging in my closet, but back in the 80s when I was 15, dudes wearing pink was less common. It was the type of thing a guy could get his lunch money taken over.

Pink or no pink, I wore that shirt until I outgrew it and the poster stayed on my wall for longer than it should have. The movie was okay and kind of came and went. It was more about a weird murder mystery and a disgruntled teen coming around than it was about skateboarding, but it contained enough skating scenes — and actual skaters — to hold our attention for a month or two.

Even if I knew what gleaming the cube meant I’m pretty sure my skateboarding friends and I never accomplished it. While I may not have been the best skater among my friends, I was, at least for a time, the best radio contest winner.