• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, February 5, 2014

It turns out that Hulk Hogan, Mary Lou Retton and the California Raisins will be turning the lights out in about 500 RadioShacks after they get done clearing out all the merchandise and shelving left over from the Eighties, the Wall Street Journal’s Emily Glazer reports this morning.

If you haven’t seen the spot that was on most folks’ highlight reels from Sunday’s Super Bowl, here’s the “official version.”

“According to people familiar with the matter, RadioShack is planning to close around 500 locations in the coming months. It isn’t clear which of RadioShack’s roughly 4,300 stores will be closed and when exactly the closings will begin,” Glazer reports. 

The decision evidently represents a charge in strategy from just a few months ago.

“RadioShack executives last year suggested the company would resist shrinking its store footprint as they focused on reinventing the brand’s image,” Glazer writes. “Stores might close in one section of a neighborhood to set up shop in more highly trafficked locales, but the number of outlets would stay the same, the executives had previously said.”

Time’s Harry McCracken liked the new spot a lot when he viewed it online after the game, saying it “avoids the lameness” of the retailer’s 2009 “The Shack” rebranding campaign.

“It’s a funny, self-effacing ad, which confronts the electronics retailer’s reputation for being somewhat less than cutting-edge by depicting Kid and Play, John Ratzenberger as Cheers’ Cliff Clavin, 1984 Olympics darling Mary Lou Retton, Child’s Play’s Chuckie, Hulk Hogan, ALF, Erik Estrada as Ponch from CHiPs, the California Raisins, Q*Bert and other icons of the 1980s ransacking a dowdy RadioShack of its VCRs, fax machines and boom boxes,” he explains, if you still haven’t viewed the video.

McCracken also selects some vintage RadioShack spots that are “loads of fun.” But them’s the old days.

“We really want to disrupt the marketplace and tell people that we’re not the RadioShack they think we are,” RadioShack’s SVP and CMO Jennifer Warren says in a “behind-the-scenes” video that also features short interviews with many of the stars of the spot. 

(No, not Jennifer Warnes, speaking of the highlight events of the Eighties. Warren, who got into the advertising and marketing game after appearing in some commercials herself, was one of Ad Age’s 2013 “Women to Watch.” Writes Natalie Zmuda: “She’s taken to heart a piece of advice she got from the founders at GSD&M, specifically Roy Spence: “Jump off the building, and grow your wings on the way down.”)

“From a strategy perspective, we wanted a cross-section of people who were at the top of their game in the ’80s,” Warren tells Yahoo TV’s Jeremy Blacklow.

“We just started throwing names out in our brainstorming sessions, and we came up with a list of 50 or 60 people and then categorized them and went after our favorites at first. We had a fun debate over those who some of us either knew or didn’t know. And we ultimately decided that it would be fun for folks to sit around at a Super Bowl party and talk about recognizing their favorites or learn about those they didn’t already know.”

The overhaul comes in the nick of time. On Saturday, I found myself in need of an optical cable to hook up a new sound bar — a refurbished one purchased cheaply on Woot, tellingingly — and recalled that there was a RadioShack near where I was at the time. 

Well, they only had one in stock amidst a lot of empty merchandise prongs and it was 12-feet long, about twice as much cord as I needed. I walked out but returned when I discovered that the six-foot cable at the Kmart down the block — a retailer in the same precarious time warp, as Ashley Lutz’ photo essay revealed on Business Insider last November — would cost me 33% more than the 12-foot one. 

But then the RadioShack clerk, using a hard-sell that was itself out of the Eighties — the 1880s — did his darnedest to try to sell me an $2 insurance policy on the cord. I declined. But I bought the cord and, if nothing else, it helped to make Bruno Mars just a lot more resonant than the game or the other advertising this year.