Sweatin' to the Oldies
Richard Simmons in striped shorts and a tank top, leading a high-school gym full of ordinary people through low-impact aerobics to 50s and 60s hits, on the VHS tape in every parent's cabinet. The first tape came out in 1988, but the sequels and the late-night infomercials selling them made it a 90s fixture.
Milton Teagle "Richard" Simmons weighed 268 pounds when he graduated from high school in New Orleans, and he built a career out of the weight he lost. In the mid-1970s he opened a studio in Beverly Hills called the Anatomy Asylum, with a salad bar named Ruffage attached, and later renamed it Slimmons: a gym that welcomed the overweight instead of intimidating them, where he taught classes himself. A recurring role on General Hospital led to The Richard Simmons Show, a daytime program that ran from 1980 to 1984, won Emmys and was seen on some 200 stations.
Sweatin' to the Oldies arrived in 1988, riding the aerobics boom that had already made home workout tapes a business. It was set in a high school gym, and Simmons pitched it as the chance to dance at the prom you always dreamed of: a run of 50s rock and roll and Motown hits, easy dance steps performed by a cast of ordinary people rather than a troupe of dancers, and Simmons in his trademark candy-striped shorts cheering everyone on. It became one of the most popular exercise videos of the decade, and the triple-platinum box later hung framed on the wall at Slimmons.
The 90s were when the tape stopped being a workout and became furniture. Sweatin' to the Oldies 2 followed, the series ran to five volumes, sold through late-night infomercials alongside his Deal-A-Meal diet plan, so that even people who never exercised to it could recite the pitch. Across his career Simmons' fitness videos sold more than 20 million copies. The image most people carry, the sparkly tank top, the shorts and the shouting, is the infomercial-era Simmons, which is why a 1988 tape lives in the 90s memory.
Simmons kept teaching at Slimmons until 2014, then withdrew almost completely from public view, resurfacing only in occasional posts to tell fans he was not missing. He died on July 13, 2024, the day after his 76th birthday, and was buried in his workout outfit. The tapes are still in print as a DVD collection, and the routine is exactly as easy to follow as it was the first time.
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