Mr. Column

I’m really a Spaceball. I know that. When I was a kid we watched our tape of it constantly. My siblings and I ruined countless adult dinner parties with our insistence on reciting lines and doing voices from the movie. The first string of words my little brother ever uttered was “Hot…Too Hot”. Swear on a stack of Bibles, that is true. Ask my mom. You won’t be surprised to hear that his second sentence was a mangled version of “Hello my name is Inigo Montoya. You keel my father prepare to die”.
I realize now it’s a little embarrassing to harbor this secret love of Spaceballs, especially because my favorite movies as an adult are Mel Brooks’ good movies. I’m not delusional about its objective quality, but at least Spaceballs has more jokes than High Anxiety, which has precisely three. And one of them is just a gag from Blazing Saddles. Spaceballs has a metric ton of goofy, lowest common denominator appeal. The bits are all so childish and sincere. And it has a lot of swears.
It makes sense that the new cartoon would be lowbrow and raunchy, but I was hoping for more of a silly and sweet “Virgin Alarm” deal rather than a boob-centric Tripping the Rift type of humor. I mostly hate the show, but I admit I genuinely cracked up at a couple of jokes. I can’t see why adding Yogurt’s wife and another -arlene helps things, but hearing Mel Brooks recite the Konami code was pretty thrilling. The animation is so crummy and weird, and Dark Helmet is so stupidly tiny as to render the whole thing unfunny. But if I look on the bright side, maybe now we’ll get Spaceballs the Cereal.
 

Jay

I’ve recently re-discovered The Critic on this crazy cable channel called Reelz. They play one episode over and over again for a week, then switch to a new episode which they play nonstop for a week. Its odd for sure, but its worth the unruly DVR list to rekindle my romance with that show and see the amazing writers’ credits which include a handful of Simpsons geniuses and Judd Apatow. The Critic captures just the right combination of highbrow and lowbrow references. I can’t think of any other show that could get away with a throwaway reference to a movie like Picnic at Hanging Rock, nerdy law school trivia and Supreme Court justices, all while finding a way to rhyme “genitalia” with “Australia”. Sure, one can sometimes tell they wrote some jokes at the last possible moment cause the lip sync doesn’t really work out, but we can forgive such things when they have Jay’s dad drive a monster truck into Picasso’s masterpiece and scream, “Take THAT, Guernica!” The episode with the extended appearance of an animated Siskel and Ebert brought tears to my eyes. By the by, there’s a great clip of the two on their real life show critiquing the first three episodes of The Critic as being too sitcommy and not focused enough on the fascinating life of the movie critic. I’m pretty sure they were being serious.

I suppose I’m feeling the pull of early nineties New York nostalgia. You know that Mighty Aphrodite, Dream On, early Seinfeld milieu, when the city still seemed to hold a soupVon of danger. The Critic was a great platform for cut away jokes about Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, but it also managed to be a warm, sweet little view of city life. The show is full of Woody Allen, cab driver and doorman jokes and uses some beautiful watercolory images of Manhattan. But I do go on too much about New York. I romanticize it all out of proportion.

 

Follow That Bird

At karaoke recently I finally noticed the writer’s credit on the Three’s Company theme song was one Joe Raposo, whose name I revered even as a little kid. He wrote all the classic, dark and jazzy tunes from Sesame Street’s best years like C is for Cookie and Sing. My personal favorite is Everybody Sleeps, which immediately conjures up fuzzy images of friendly hobos and snuggly kittens. It made me think about the olden days of The Street, before the green screen reign of the soulless Elmo. I tried to watch some clips of Elmo and that peppy orange one, but the sound of their voices cuts through me like a knife.*
Recently I also caught Cookie Monster on The Colbert Report, who threw out some hip jokes to win over the young crowd of Manhattanites, who initially made hostile murmurs at the mention of “Veggie Monster”. We’re hostile because we all grew up watching those millions of cookies come spilling back out of his black felt mouth, and we turned out OK. They did make sure we knew not to bring cookies into the library though. I feel like Sesame Street didn’t always have such an obvious, annoying agenda. A kid could just chill with a juice box and watch a rolling rubber ball do its thing. And find me someone who doesn’t love that crayon factory. The Street was at its best when it was ponderous and abstract.
Also, can they cool it with the hipster guest stars? Don’t preschoolers know how to count to four already by hearing that Feist song on incessant ipod commercials? Back in the day we had classy guests like Madeline Kahn and Cab Calloway. Not one hit wonders with bangs. Now if they had Smokey Robinson running from that giant floating U parent groups would freak out cause it probably fosters stalkerist tendencies.
And anyway I think it’s clear that I still haven’t gotten over Mr. Hooper.
*Secret trivia: One of the fiery things in Labyrinth has Elmo’s voice (Kevin Clash), which bumps them up into a cosmically annoying level.

Me Like Commercials

I defy anyone to prove they grew up with better local commercials than those of us who grew up in the Chicagoland area. We expatriates, sprinkled across this land like ambassadors of meat, harbor secret knowledge about how that old car is worth money, where you can always save more money, and what to do if you’re unemployed or underemployed (or out of high school or soon will be). Nobody would jump in their car to rush over to the Calumet Meat Company, but that company joined the rare crew of the catchy and adored once they changed their name to Moo & Oink and got a guy in a pig suit to wave for catfish! and screeeam for ribs!
Eagle Insurance gave us the gold standard for crummy but hilarious. Two women out for an afternoon drive, possibly on their way to Aaronson Quality Furniture (home of the credit connection), are shocked when something large lands on the roof. Upon exiting the vehicle, they gasp in amazement at Eagle Man, who informs them of the low rates they can get from Eagle Insurance to fix their car, which Eagle Man has just ruined. It was a brilliant scheme that kept Eagle in business all through the nineties when they could afford to hire irritating local shock jocks to be in their commercials.
Chicago’s greatest claim to fame is Empire carpet.  The creepy yet lovable Empire carpet guy helped to sear that number jingle into our young Midwestern brains from birth. I still shudder to hear the national commercials, with that awful 800 tacked on to the 588-2300 like a swear word inserted into a beloved nursery rhyme.
Now of course, they live on in memory and to be sung in rousing chorus in the drunken company of other locals. At home in Queens I have to settle for the new, weird East Coast commercials like Bob’s Discount Furniture and Nissan of Manhattan. In that little gem, people on New York streets turn in horror, looking up at the sky expecting yet another Cloverfield, but instead see a giant Nissan dealership, growing to the size of half a borough, uh, cause Nissan of Manhattan is big, or something.

 

Gross

So I have a set of early 80’s reprints of the first twenty issues of X-Men. The Kirby covers and pages are all there, but instead of ads for model kits and x-ray specs, these feature Atari and CBS Saturday morning (which is how I learned there was an animated Happy Days show*). Mr. Lady Geek and I grew up during the Jim Lee years, and this early batch of X-stories were unknown to us until we got these X-reprints.
The first several issues offer little of note, except for a few phoned-in panels and the weirdness of “regular” Angel who can’t cut anyone up with his wings that don’t shoot missiles, and “regular” Beast, who in these stories seems to be little more than a short, obnoxious gymnast. 
However, I found one panel that reveals a disturbing abandoned subplot. After telling the kids to search out a new mutant he has sensed, Professor X calmly lights a pipe, and meditates on the fact that he can never reveal his love for Jean Grey, a minor recently entrusted to his care. When Jean arrives at the mansion for the first time, Beast, Angel and Cyclops immediately turn into drooling idiots, and most of the stories revolve around their attempts to get more face time with her. She mentions how she left the protection of her parents’ home to come to this mysterious school. Now she begins a new life of repeatedly fighting the Blob, while at “home” she is beset on all sides by weird, aggressive suitors, including her would-be mentor!
Also, Professor X’s logic sucks. He thinks; “Oh, if only I wasn’t her legal guardian and teacher, and she a confused teenager far from home…and surely no girl of her caliber would date a man in a wheelchair!!” Well, I got sour news for ya, Jack. If she’s so shallow that she wouldn’t date a handicapped guy, she’s definitely not going to overlook your baldness. And Beast, seriously. If Jean won’t date the differently abled rich fellow, she’s probably not going to hit the malt shop with you. Also, I think Scott looks so “grim” because he is wearing a blue plaid suit.
Actually I think this subplot might have been pretty juicy. As far as I know, Professor X’s secret love for Jean Grey is mentioned only fleetingly a few times in the history of the X-Men, but it gets a pretty high rating on the dirty scale. If they had seen it through til the seventies when Wolverine came around, we could have enjoyed a love X-rectangle. By the time Psylocke rolls up, it could have been an X-pentagon.
*Apparently, they had a time machine.

 

If You’re Not Into the Whole Brevity Thing

Frankly I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched my copy of The Big Lebowski, which is in my top five favorite movies of all time. I’ve done the Lebowski Challenge, have the extended unofficial soundtrack with every single song and bored many a friend with long, impassioned rants about Bill’s Castration Theory. You may not read the backs of your DVD cases, since you’ve already seen it and don’t need a synopsis to convince you of its merits. I feel the need to let someone else know what crime against art has been perpetrated by whatever opt-out housewife or dumbass intern wrote the piece of garbage synopsis on the back of the Lebowski DVD. I’ll reprint it in its entirety to prove to you how asinine it is:

“The Dude. One cool guy. Who one day comes home to find two thugs have broken in and ruined his favorite carpet- the one that made the room “hang together”. Thing is, they did it because he’s got the same name as one of the richest men in town. Lebowski. But hey, no problem. He’ll get even. At least he’ll get someone to pay for the carpet.”

Ignoring the poor grammar and sentence construction (I suppose we could write off “thing is” as being in the parlance of our times), this was written by either someone who has never seen the movie, or someone who has difficulty keeping thoughts in their conscious mind for more than five seconds.

The Dude isn’t even really that cool. Nor would he ever be concerned with something so petty and arbitrary as “coolness”. The Dude transcends childish labels. Also, he never refers to it as his “carpet”. Just placing quotes around a phrase that never appears in the movie is stupid enough, but reading on the back of the case that the Dude’s “carpet” made the room “hang together” made me lose faith in humanity. And he isn’t out for revenge, or to “get even”. The Dude just wanted his rug back.

You may think I’m being petty, or that this is insignificant in the face of modern war, famine and pestilence. You would be right. But this movie deserves better. Whoever wrote this DVD case synopsis, I hope you’re happy. You made me cry.

 

May 2008

Don’t hold this against me, but I am about to reveal the most normal, least nerdy phenomenon I have ever been a part of. But you must have sympathy for me: The New Kids on the Block were brilliantly designed to attack a chemical in the brains of little girls. They might well have been robots constructed and programmed by the evil genius producer Maurice Starr. Whatever their origins or motives, NKOTB consumed my life when I was nine. Donnie Wahlberg was my ultimate favorite New Kid. See, he was the tough one, Joey was the youngest one, Jonathan was the sensitive one, Danny was the ugly one, and Jordan was the fifth one. To me, the others were just filler. I had eyes only for Donnie. Using the little cardboard picture stand on the back, I would sometimes stand my giant Donnie button up on my third-grade desk and stare at him all day. Standing against a grey Glamour Shots canvas backdrop wearing a jean jacket and a massive gold peace sign necklace, his face wore a look that seemed to call; “C’mon with me, Girl. I’ll make all your dreams come true”. Then in red ink, Donnie (or some pimply-faced record company monkey) had written an inscrutable message. Above a peace sign and what I assume was his signature, he wrote: “Peace Out on the Strength”. I studied this inscription for hours, thinking it might hold the key to Donnie’s soul. I dreamed of the day when I would be able to crack the code, to fully understand what deep and troubled things went on in Donnie’s mind. Now my late-twenties malaise is compounded by the fact that not only am I not currently living with Donnie in the My Little Pony Paradise Estate, but also that his message turns out to be as meaningful as “Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine”. I may also never recover from seeing Donnie as the shivering maniac who shoots Bruce Willis at the beginning of The Sixth Sense. I think the New Kids should have been placed into cryogenic freezing chambers in 1991 so that they could be thawed out now, as their fans hit 30 and could really use a distraction from trying to choose a career while paying off their student loans.

April 2008

The simultaneous emergence of that YouTube video of Malibu [fig. 1] discussing his recovery from “the most bodacious hit of [his] life” and the new American Gladiators show has sparked a Gladiator Renaissance in my house. “The Renaissance” basically consists of Two-Buck-Chuck, an overstuffed paisley chaise lounge and watching a lot of Original American Gladiators reruns on some really high up cable channel. The new version is mildly entertaining, but it can’t hope to touch the early nineties élan of OAG. Hosted by the peerless Mike Adamle (who stayed with the show for its entire run), each episode was a window into a magical fantasy warehouse full of bad perms, closeted lesbian accountants and the soft, malignant pop of that tennis ball gun (the former two often went hand in hand). The other day I saw a contender who was an exotic dancer from St. Petersburg. And that was the guy. Wonderful. Is there any sight more thrilling than Nitro and Gemini teaming up to host a shut-out Atlasphere? The brilliant strategy of maneuvering those giant steel hamster balls to trap both contenders in a corner and then keep them there is practically Napoleonic. OAG also featured unintentionally hilarious commentary, which delivered to our ears such delightful lines as “Ice is bewildered by that stalemate” and “Zap oh-so-close to getting those legs around Kristi”. Subtle homoeroticism aside, OAG has been entertaining me since those heady, friendless summer afternoons spent alone with comic books, carpeting and cable TV.  I haven’t yet been charmed by the new Gladiators (Wolf, Helga, et cetera), but I suppose it must have been easier back then to hit any local gym and find a bunch of photogenic roidheads willing to wear crotch-pinching harnesses and tight, tight ponytails. Don’t forget about the outfits, which always came “oh-so-close” to nipple reveal. We salute you, Original American Gladiators, for everything you’ve given us.

March 2008

I really hope Where the Wild Things Are  turns out to be a terrifying, brain-melting, child-warping movie. At least as weird and scary as the movies I loved as a child. I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t been scarred for life by bizarre entertainment ostensibly intended for children. Despite being mortally afraid of every second of  The Dark Crystal, as a kid I couldn’t get enough of it and watched it incessantly. It wasn’t until I took Advanced Visual Soul-Searching in graduate school that I revisited another horror from my childhood: the 1985 TV  Alice in Wonderland with Carol Channing (and a cast chock full of ancient scary actors: “Look, kids! Donald O’Connor!”) and an 8-foot rubber Jabberwocky suit which sent me screaming out of my darkened living room. My mom, once she figured out what I was screaming bloody murder about, said “Honey, are you sure you aren’t just scared of Carol Channing?”
 
Other distinguished members of the “Scared the Piss Out of Me Club” were Lady Elaine from Mr. Rogers, the Skeksis, and pretty much everything from  Neverending Story . The horrors of the unlabelled black VHS tape haunt me still. Your mom tapes a movie for you off HBO and there’s a Cryptkeeper commercial on there and you don’t sleep that night.   
 
It’s time for Did you know: The actor who does the voice of Chamberlain in The Dark Crystal also appears in the adult-brain-warping experience that is Shock Treatment.  He is also known as Pontius Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar (stage and screen!) and has a bit role in The Shining as the guy who’s not the hotel manager who talks Jack into becoming caretaker of the Shining Hotel. That’s right kids, the mysterious Barry Dennen is the official hero of this column. My point is; I hope  Where the Wild Things Are completely flips out a whole new generation of kids. Maybe then kids would stop being so lame.

February 2008

I was one of those kids who always rooted for Skeletor. Just once I wanted to see him prevail and the full weight of his tyranny come down on the land of Eternia. It’s not even that I wanted He-Man to fail, it just wasn’t fair that he never failed. There was no chance for any of them: Mumm-Ra, Gargamel, Dr. Claw…why couldn’t Gargamel just once catch a Smurf and eat it? You know, keep things on an even keel. Raise the stakes a little. How great would it have been if it was even remotely possible that that dress-wearing bald alchemist (?) might drop a Smurf into his single can of beans on a hot plate. It could even be a disposable red shirt like Flimsy Smurf or Engelbert Smurf. Did anyone else out there hear that in the last episode of Inspector Gadget it turns out that Dr. Claw and the Chief are one and the same? What a thrilling idea! The Chief, roiling mad over all the accidental combustions he has been subjected to by Gadget’s incompetence, finally gets his comeuppance by slowly lowering him into a vat of acid. Delightful!
 
I guess this love of villainy explains my enduring, entirely unhealthy crush on Dr. Gaius Baltar, my favorite character on Battlestar Galactica . And I am not talking about James Callis, although he is a hot little piece of casserole. I’d sprinkle crumbled up shoe-string potatoes over him any time. No, I must fully confess that I mean slimy, selfish, disgusting President Baltar of Cylon-occupied New Caprica. Wearer of bespoke suits, cultivator of stubble. I love Baltar at his worst: leering and lascivious.   I could be his Felix Gaeta, only I wouldn’t bother helping the frowny-face “resistance”. My goal would be scoring a tricked-out suite on a Basestar where I would enjoy comforts like Sunday morning mimosas with Six, ping-pong tournament with Baltar, Centurion hide-and-seek, eating some kind of nutritious Cylon gruel. For a while last year I spent a lot of time writing Mrs. Gaius Baltar on all my notebooks, much to the chagrin of Mr. Lady Geek, who tried to balance out the universe by watching football. Of course, I’m in total Baltar withdrawal, and reduced to closing my eyes and listening to Richard Wolffe on MSNBC. What can I say? I love an evil genius.