Of all the store catalogs I used to comb through to plan birthday and Christmas wish lists, the Best Products catalog was one of my favorites.
I loved going to that store. Whether it was testing out the keyboards by playing "Axel F" or drooling over the G.I. Joe aircraft carrier, I almost always saw something to covet.
The pneumatic tube system they used always fascinated me. You'd write down the number of the items you wanted, handed it to the person behind the counter, and they'd put it in a tube, and SHOOOP--it would get sucked up into the ceiling.
Anyway, I was looking at an old catalog--from 1983--and came across this gem.
This is the Hasbro E.T. Roommate--Product 358010HF if you're writing this down. For the low, low price of $49.97, you too could have this creepy-as-hell hamper/toy chest/cat prison.
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night and bumping into that thing, especially if you were as little as the kid in the picture. I liked E.T. as much as the next kid, but come on. And what's with the Amy Winehouse eye makeup he's got going on?
"They tried to make me go to fed lab, I said phone, phone home..."
I think I've mentioned before that after reading The Golden Turkey Awards, my introduction to the world of crap movies, I made it a goal to see all the movies listed in the book.
The 1970s, as I'm finding out by watching old crappy movies, was a time of high-concept cinema. Literally, no matter how brain-crackingly stupid the premise was, it didn't keep a movie from being made.
This was the era, after all, of the Bee Gees' musical wonder, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I always wondered if the Beatles actually saw the movie, and if so, what they thought of it.
But I digress.
1972 gave us the antidrug, pro-Christian turkey vampire biker horror movie Blood Freak. 1976 unleashed Chatterbox upon the world. I'm a little at a loss as to explaining the premise of this comedy in a mildly tasteful fashion.
Really struggling here.
Okay, any impressionable or easily offended types, you may want to stop right here. I won't blame you.
Here it goes:
A lady discovers that her hoohah (to use the clinical term) can talk and sing.
I excrete you not; this was a real movie. In The Golden Turkey Awards, it was a nominee for "Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography," but alas, was beaten (so to speak) by Him, a movie about, well, you look it up. I have my limits.
Now technically, I haven't watched Chatterbox yet. I don't know exactly when I'll get around to it. I mean, seriously, what kind of a mood do you have to be in to watch a talking hoohah movie?
Long before Fight Club, I was one of a number of kids who participated in fighting activities that were expressly forbidden at my school.
Even a nerd like me threw caution to the win and engaged in the fights. There was no elaborate setup; often you and your opponent would just throw down.
But first you needed to prepare, and that meant a trip to the school library at lunchtime. That was where you got your gear.
All the professional pencil fighters swore by the NFL team pencils from the library vending machine. Occasionally, some joker would try to play with one of those Husky pencils that you get in kindergarten--you know, the ones that are as big around as an elephant's leg. But those weren't considered regulation gear.
Many a quarter vanished into that machine, and in addition to dispensing pencils, it also dispensed fate.
In mid-80s Northern California, two team pencils were coveted over all others: the 49ers and the Raiders. If you managed to get one of the red-and-gold or silver-and-black marvels, you had a better chance of winning your pencil fight. The Steelers and the Jets were acceptable second-tier teams.
If, however, you were unlucky, your the machine would puke out teams such as the Browns or Colts. You might as well have snapped those in half yourself rather than risk embarrassment.
Every pencil fighter had his style, but the general approach was the same: while securing one end of the pencil in one hand, you used the other to flick the metal end, at which point the middle of your pencil--the meat, if you will--clashed with your opponent's.
You weren't supposed to try to hit with the metal end; in fact, that was the dangerous part. Every flick had the potential to smash the living crap out of someone's finger by "accident."
But assuming you made the regulation pencil-to-pencil contact, you and your opponent took turns, hoping each hit would be the one that splintered a pencil into oblivion.
The audience took pains to obscure the view of the fight from any teacher, lest the fight get canceled. But once they heard the telltale crack, they got louder and more sure of who was going to win.
We nerds had a bit of an advantage, as it was not uncommon for the badass kids to make such a show of delivering the famed one-hit fatality that they snapped their own pencils.
And suggesting that said badass was only pencil fighting to compensate for anatomic deficiencies usually didn't go over very well.
In any event, even if the nerd won, he'd lose; the badass would just grab the winning pencil and snap it in his face.
I just read that Strawberry Shortcake is getting a redesign. This puzzled me, as I thought this had already happened, but I guess it's a reredesign.
According to this article, the line of dolls will be more "fruit forward."
Which means, I presume, that in addition to spending "her time chatting on a cellphone instead of brushing her calico cat, Custard," The Peculiar Purple Pie Man will also be absent.
If you're already wondering "Um, dude, why do you care about dolls? Like girl dolls, anyway," I might remind you that I have a daughter.
Also, I was the only XY at all-XX birthday parties in elementary school, so I'm quite familiar with Strawberry Shortcake and Hello Kitty and all that kind of stuff.
When we got our cat, my first suggestion for a name was Custard because it was the first thing that came to mind. That was nixed pretty quickly, and I came up with Muffin, because you know, Strawberry's friend was Blueberry Muffin...
Honestly, I don't know why I was pushing for a Strawberry Shortcake-related name. The only thing I can think of was that I was trying to impress a girl in my class. I had this unfortunate tendency to do things just because girls asked me to.
Remind me to tell you about the Jeff the Cuddly Kitten Incident sometime.
Um. Right.
Anyhow, why does she have to have a cell phone and not a cat? You can identify with a fictional character without them being exactly like you (not that my daughter is getting a cell phone any time soon).
How much like Superman am I (aside from the cape)? For that matter, how much like Strawberry Shortcake were girls of the 1980s?
Their hair didn't smell fruity; it was either Johnson's Baby Shampoo or at the most, Jean Nate. They didn't dress like Holly Hobbie rejects, though in fairness, I do remember one classmate wearing a bonnet on a field trip.
Instead, the design is veering a little too near Bratz territory for my tastes, so I'm hoping I won't be begged by my daughter to buy these fruit tarts for her.
If you didn't know, I post teeny things to Twitter, whether they are glorified status changes ("Me am sleepy. Zzzzz.) or gags I couldn't work into a whole blog post.
I also have an autopost to pull whatever blathering I've posted here recently and make a Twitter post of that as well.
I've been using Twitter since February, so I thought I'd look back and see if there was anything worth posting here, partially because this cold is still kicking my ass and I'm really too tired to think of anything clever, and partially to give you a sampling of what you're missing by not following me on Twitter.
Now keep in mind, "follow" is Twitter's verb, not mine. I would go more for "deliberately put up with pointless meanderings for the hope of a nugget of laughter," but that might be a little too long, and we don't want to give Twitter more reasons to be down, do we?
Idea of the minute: A Tetris game with oranges, lemons, limes, etc.: Citris. 10:49 AM March 10, 2008
You know, it says something when you switch to a Barry Manilow song to avoid hearing a Michael Bolton song. 03:12 PM March 25, 2008
Viagra turns 10! Hard to believe. So to speak... 08:40 AM March 28, 2008
Would a zombie vampire be easier or harder to defeat? 03:13 PM April 04, 2008
My Tweetcloud lists words that should never be seen together: manilow, marshmallow, marshmallows, masturbating, mcdonaldses 01:24 PM April 07, 2008
Thought for the day: Ra was apparently *not* the god of cheerleading. 10:00 AM April 10, 2008
How have they not used ELO's "Turn to Stone" for a Viagra ad? 01:54 PM April 11, 2008
CleverUserName I sometimes wonder about inappropriate things, like are there "adult" Jell-O molds? I don't really want to know, but still... 02:21 PM April 24, 2008
Pubic Zirconium would be a great name for a band. 12:20 PM May 02, 2008
A movie I can't believe hasn't been made yet: Ax-wielding killer targets defrocked priests---Axcommunication. Rated R. 04:18 PM May 08, 2008
And the most recent:
Waiting for a pro-pornsite story so I can use the headline "Naughty URLs need love, too."
So if this is the kind of thing you want interrupting your busy day, join the club.
The ever-enterprising Michelle Collins at Best Week Ever has compiled a list of The 50 Best Pun Stores.
I love these things, because unlike most people, I admit to liking puns. Puns, of course, are like the flatulence of the joke world; everyone can make them, and most of them stink.
That said, if I ever become a restaurateur, I have a few restaurants in mind:
My Tony Roma's competitor, Ribs For Your Pleasure; Donut Make My Brown Eyes Blue; my bakery, Pie R Squared (no round pies here; that's part of the gimmick); and of course, my sushi restaurant, Eat Me Raw.
However, I had nothing to do with the naming of the following restaurant, no matter how much I wish I had:
I'm still working on getting over this damned cold. My brain feels just fine, but my body feels like it was beaten by little men.
Through the miracle of science, we're able to see what my body says to my brain when it tries to make me move. We truly spare no expense here. There aren't any words, but I think you'll get the idea.
There are very few things I haven't seen on the Internet--whether I actually wanted to or not.
That said, I've still managed to steer clear of watching "Two Girls, One Cup," though I've seen videos of people seeing it for the first time. Now that's entertainment. Likewise, I've also avoided the even more repulsive "Four Girls Fingerpainting."
Now if you have no idea just what in the hell I'm blathering on about, consider yourself lucky. And for the love of God, don't look it up. Same goes for Goatse and Tubgirl. You can get a (mercifully) picture-free explanation at Wikipedia, but trust me, you don't want to know.
The lure of the forbidden is hard to resist. Half of you are more tempted to look this stuff up every time I say not to, so don't blame me. That's how I learned about most of the big Internet shock sites.
You think, "Well, come on...how bad can it be?"
*CLICK*
"MY EYES!OMGWTFBBQ!!11!"
I don't know what the next gross-out video meme is going to be. I mean, how do you top what is essentially a rickroll with poo?
Of course, by the time you read this post, e-mails will be crossing the globe, daring friend worldwide to check out "Three Girls, a Yeti, a Frozen Turkey, Two Grapefruits, Half a Tub of Cool Whip and the Collected Poetry of Rod McKuen."
Some songs will always remind me of summer, no matter how many times I hear them. I used to listen to my radio while I waited to fall asleep every night. If I was lucky, a relatively cool breeze would blow in just over the head of my bed, a respite from the day's oppressive heat.
And when I say summer, I lived in a part of California where we had two seasons: hot and cold. Summer to me could very well have been in April, but when you're wearing shorts and still sweating your ass off, it seems summery.
Interestingly, the three songs that remind me the most of summer despite having heard them a bajillion times in the years since they were new all came from the same summer. So now I'll make a little like Casey Kasem and do a mini countdown.
3. "All I Need is a Miracle," by Mike + The Mechanics
Released in March 1986, this had been a radio staple for a while by the time it seared itself into my memory. At the end of sixth grade, we had a pool party. The radio was tuned to the local Top 40 station, and for one of the few times that school year, I didn't feel like a total outsider.
Sure, I wore a T-shirt in the pool because I was self-conscious and I wore my glasses so I could, you know, see, but I didn't get much crap about it that day. Everyone was busy having fun.
You know how when you're a kid, everything compresses to a single point sometimes? For a moment in that pool, with this song playing in the background, everything just kind of came together and I actually felt happy. I thought that maybe seventh grade wouldn't be so bad. For that brief pinprick in time, there was hope.
Happy moments come fairly rarely in middle school, so it's not surprising that they stay with you.
2. "Human," by The Human League
Released in August 1986, I don't think this hit the charts till at least September, by which time seventh grade had started, but it was still pretty hot. Plus, since that feeling of hope hadn't quite panned out thus far, it suited my melancholy attitude. I know it's not really about feeling alienated, but since I felt that way in junior high school, anything the slightest bit sad was an anthem for not fitting in.
"What Am I Doing Hanging 'Round" by The Monkees served a similar purpose, so you see how little I paid attention to the lyrics. What can I say? I was emo before emo was emo.
1. "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off," by Jermaine Stewart
Now it's not so much that I particularly liked this song, though I kinda did. But it hit the charts in May 1986 and was in heavy rotation--one of those songs they played every hour.
It didn't occur to me at the time that the song referred to AIDS; I just thought it was a song about abstinence in general. And honestly, selling abstinence to a hopeless nerd is like selling Crayolas to the blind. Though I have to admit that I was puzzled even then. The message I got: Sex = bad; drinking cherry wine = A-OK.
Seemed to me that if you drank enough cherry wine, you had a better chance of taking your clothes off. But I was a miserable, cynical 11-year-old, so I could've been wrong.
Still, this morning, more than 20 years later, I heard this song on my way to work, and for a second I was back in my bed, waiting to fall asleep and hoping for a cool breeze.
I'm trying to stave off the latest cold to bless our household, so to conserve brainpower, here is yet another example of how almost everything is funnier set to the music from The Benny Hill Show.
And yes, I know it's called "Yakety Sax," but if I say that, then I have to explain for the benefit of those who don't know that it was used as the theme for the show, and I don't really want to go to the trouble of typing all that.
Amazingly, next year marks the 50th anniversary of Ed Wood's epic Plan 9 From Outer Space. Director John Johnson and Darkstone Entertainment plan to mark this occasion by releasing a remake called simply Plan 9.
Why is this exciting?
Well, the plan (so to speak) is for this remake to be a serious attempt at a horror film. No lovingly campy reproduction here. They're out to make this a scary movie.
Now this interested me because obviously, I'm a fan of B-movies, but also because I've often thought of rewriting cheesy sci-fi and horror movies as writing exercises.
When you distill Plan 9's plot into its most basic form, it has potential: Aliens reanimate the dead.
Of course, they wanted to do so to prevent Earth's scientists from creating a doomsday weapon, and you wonder why plans 1 through 8 were unsuccessful, but that's overthinking things.
So you know I'm going to be all over this when it comes out, just to see if they can make an Ed Wood movie scary.
This made me think of other movie distillations that didn't really work when they were originally released but still have hope as a remake. Even bad movies can have good ideas.
I'll list them, and you try to guess them. Then I'll post the answers tomorrow.
Killer targets women and uses parts from each of his victims to create a composite body.
Eight people are the only survivors of an alien attack on Earth.
Ordinary man discovers he likes the taste of human flesh.
A murderer is reincarnated.
Mutated animals terrorize the world.
Well, that'll do for a start. To get you in the right frame of mind, here's Ed Wood's original classic.
OK, now I love playing Guitar Hero, and I have a Nintendo DS, but sweet monkey danish, this makes baby Jesus cry.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a video promoting Guitar Hero for the DS. I keep telling myself that this is intentionally asstastic, but I'm really not sure.
I feel like kicking myself in the ass just for sharing it with you, but you really have to see it.
Make sure you watch it all the way to the end. If you don't actually feel measurably dumber after watching it, you are a better person than I.
Harvey Korman died today. Dick Martin died Saturday. I spent a lot of time watching both of them on TV growing up, so I thought I'd give them a shout-out.
In addition to providing the voice of The Great Gazoo on The Flintstones, I knew Harvey Korman as one of the players on The Carol Burnett Show, where he showed superhuman ability in keeping a straight face when paired with Tim Conway.
One of my favorite bits was where Conway's character is lamenting the loss of a cousin (or something) to a shark attack. The story goes on until he gets to this line:
"She would have made it if she hadn't been wearing her lucky ham..."
I wish I could find a clip of that because I'm not doing it justice; granted, I was very young at the time. I might be missing a few details.
In high school, I rediscovered him in such epics as History of the World, Part I, where he gets one of the best lines in any movie ever:
"Your Majesty, you look like the piss boy!"
Here's a bit of Harvey Korman in action. The first clip is mildly not safe for work because of language, and the second one, a little more not safe for work (brief boobage); you've been warned.
I loved hearing him laugh. If you heard it, you know what I mean. You can pick it out of a crowd easily.
While I recommend watching anything these two were in, you can get a taste by cruising YouTube and other places. Here's an episode of Laugh-In, followed by some bloopers. Listen for the laugh. You'll know it when you hear it.
Saw this on a pole at Second and Mission today on our way to the BART station:
Pardon my crap photography skills; I took it with my phone while trying not to look stupid. It says "LOLCAT | Responds to CHEEZBURGER | Please to call | 515-862-1000."
OK, so what does that mean? I enlisted the help of the crack Siftin' Research Squad (I looked it up on Google).
I think I might just check it out. For 8 bucks, you get "nerdcore hip hop songs with 8-bit instrumentals, electro-pop, and sexy r & b." How can I resist?
As clever as the sign was, that's the second most interesting animal-related sign I've seen. It's going to take a hell of a lot to top No. 1:
With so many shows being released on DVD, you'd think that for someone like me, I could watch all the old shows like I watched when I was little.
For example, the Looney Tunes Golden Collections have tons of awesome cartoons and extras. But so far, I haven't seen any of the later Warner Bros. cartoons that were a staple of Saturday mornings of my youth, watching the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on CBS.
So when I found this clip on YouTube, hearing the first few seconds of the music from a late Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon really brought back memories.
For a second or two, I was 6 years old, clad in my Superman pajamas, nursing a bowl of Apple Jacks on my trusty TV tray.
(the clip is a bit loud, so turn down the volume)
It's these little things that I enjoy almost more than the prospect of getting to see one of my favorite shows in its entirety; the stuff that most of us forget.
Just the little bit of music they played to introduce the cartoon is something that I forgot until I saw this video. But as soon as I heard it, it was like, "How could I have forgotten it?"
See if you can last through this whole compilation. My thanks to WREYNetwork for uploading these gems.
