A portion of the final episode of "Planet Three," the program I had been doing for several months in the Friday night/Saturday morning midnight to 3 am slot. This aired on January 31, 1981 and the theme of the evening, which should be painfully obvious to pick up, is "goodbye." You'll hear a computerized voice repeating that throughout, along with all sorts of musical farewells. (That computerized voice came from a mysterious 800 number I had discovered, which simply answered "Hello, enter user number" and would say "goodbye" when you couldn't enter a valid one. It was highly unusual for the time and none of us were ever able to figure out what it was.) There were also a number of allusions to John Lennon, who had been killed the previous month, a particularly traumatizing occurrence for anyone involved in music at the time.
Considering not a single word was ever spoken throughout the history of this program, the whole thing must have seemed really strange to the casual listener. The show ended with an apropos excerpt from "The Wizard of Oz" and our usual spacey outro. And for the first time, the words "Planet Three" were played in a non-backwards form and an underwriting announcement that really made no sense was also shared. The announcement said that "Planet Three" was made possible through "an arrangement with Kilkenny Design Workshops, Butler House and Castle Yard." Kilkenny Design Workshops was an Irish research and development center that was found at random in a phone book, with Butler House and Castle Yard being two nearby locations. It was designed to confuse the hell out of anyone who actually looked into it.
The following week this timeslot would be taken over by the show that eventually would be named "The Voice of Long Island," all episodes of which are available in our archives.
