Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Pointless Nostalgia Video, Seasonal Fare, Videocracy

Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past: Marvel Floats

As a kid, the highlight and lowlight of every holiday season for me was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was the highlight because, duh, huge balloons. It was the lowlight because, even to a child, it had some truly cringe-tacular moments.

For some strange reason, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has always (or at least always in my lifetime) simultaneously tried to appeal to both kids and Broadway aficionados. Why did they try to do this? I don’t know, because Times Square is sort of close to Herald Square? Makes as much sense as any other explanation.

They also tried to shoehorn various celebrities into the festivities. Some were established, or at least recognizable. Some were clearly being foisted on the show by some agent hoping to establish a client. (If a singer was “performing” his/her “smash hit single”, it was a virtual guaranteed said single hadn’t even been pressed yet.)

Regardless of their status, said celebrity would probably be inserted into some sort of float or setpiece in which their presence was superfluous at best. And often asked to sing, even if (often especially if) they were not known as a singer. (“Here to perform a medley from Damn Yankees, please welcome Abe Vigoda!”)

This was extremely frustrating to a little kid. When you’d see the opening credits for the Parade and see something you loved teased as coming up soon, naturally you thought that said thing would be presented in a form you loved. If you were told Masters of the Universe would appear, you assumed they would resemble the cartoon you watched every day. You didn’t expect guys in weird, foamy costumes fake-sword fighting on a 15-foot float.

In that spirit, I present this video from the 1989 (first captured and shared with the world by the excellent X-Entertainment.com, which has a plethora of Thanksgiving Parade videos and period commercials as well). It features a float by Marvel Entertainment, full of all your favorite Marvel characters, and of course Melba Moore too, because…huh?

Ms. Moore sings “I Need a Hero,” addressing many of the lyrics to Captain America and Spider-Man (who’s too busy crouching to pay her much attention). She had a few hits in the 1980s. “I Need a Hero” was not one of them. This is something the Parade is notorious for doing, having some random person sing a random song in a random setting, thus assuring that everyone involved looks intensely uncomfortable.

Compared to some performances I’ve seen, Moore is in Laurence Olivier territory. She’s game enough to get caught in web-type-thing and climb through a manhole. But no one else has much room to maneuver, and the Marvel heroes and villains don’t fight so much as they lightly tap each other and shift from one foot to the other. The Hulk in particular looks like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

By the end of the video, everyone is bopping along to the beat, regardless of affiliation. You can see both Doctor Doom and Luke Cage rockin’ out as the song fades away. Moore has united them all with her R&B song stylings.

Weird? Of course, but no weirder than the Marvel float from 1987, which did not include Moore or any other practitioners of the quiet storm arts. It was just a lot of low-impact aerobics, featuring the exact same float seen above, most of the same heroes, and the soundtrack from Back to the Future.

Captain America is prominently featured, as he saves Wolverine from being shoved by bad guys, zaps Doctor Doom to death, and briefly passes by RoboCop without comment (and before you say RoboCop wasn’t part of the Marvel Universe, he was, smart guy). 

Two things that confuse me more than the presence of RoboCop: Why does Dr. Strange look like Frank Zappa, and why is The Hulk a bad guy?

Pointless Nostalgia Video, Videocracy

Internet Gauntlet Thrown: “You’re Gonna Win!”

1 Comment

When I love something, it’s usually due to a combination of factors, but I can always pinpoint one element and say, “This exemplifies why this is awesome.” Like how “Clowntime Is Over” might be the best song ever, but whenever I listen to it, I lose myself in how perfect the bassline is. Or like how The Jerk is an indisputable crowning achievement of 20th century comedy, as represented by the duet between Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters where she suddenly without warning breaks into a trumpet solo.

In this vein, there was an ad for Comedy Central that ran in the early/mid-1990s that was so intensely dark, non-sequitir-y, and perfect that it is the gold standard by which I judge such promos. And I do judge promos. Constantly. I’m judging even as I type this.

This commercial was shot in black and white. A prisoner is being led to the electric chair. Tight shots on his panicked face. Beads of sweat break out on his forehead. A priest gives him halfhearted last rites. He shoots a hopeful glance at the phone on the wall, hoping for a pardon. Nothing. He is strapped in. The helmet is put on his head. The clock ticks closer and closer to midnight. Any second now, he will pay for his crimes.

gonnawin.pngAnd all of a sudden, an acoustic bass is heard. The prisoner looks off to his left. The camera cuts to a corner of the room, where a jazz trio is performing; a vocalist, a drummer, and a bassist. The singer is a pompadoured hipster-crooner in sunglasses, singing right at the prisoner with exaggerated hand gestures the following lyrics:

You’re gonna win!
You’re gonna go!
You’re head of the pack,
You’re king of the show!
You’re on the move
Straight to the top
You’re way out in front
You’ll never stop!
You’re gonna win!
You’re gonna WIIIIIIIIIN!

Halfway through the song, the prisoner is smiling and tapping his feet. Yeah, everything’s gonna be okay! And it ended with the tagline THINK POSITIVE: COMEDY CENTRAL.

Everything about this ad was great, but the one detail that really got me was the trio’s drummer. He had this insane wide-eyed grin, almost Cheshire Cat-like, looking straight at the camera. It was monstrously funny. I used to draw little recreations of the trio in my high school notebooks. That’s how much I loved them.

This ad popped up in my head recently, so I decided to troll through the internet and look for it. Surely someone had captured its majesty in YouTube form so the entire world could enjoy it and make racist comments about it (since all YouTube videos, regardless of content, attract racist comments).

Well guess what, Internet? You have failed. Failed miserably. Because there is no video representation of this ad ANYWHERE on your series of tubes. For shame.

Sure, you can find later permutations of the ad, like one where a guy comes home to find his wife boning the plumber, and another where a guy takes a dive in a runaway elevator. Not good enough, internet. The death row ad was the ne plus ultra. You need to supply the original and you need to do it posthaste.

I have literally dozens of VHS tapes from this period with episodes of MST3K. It’s very possible one (or more) of them has this ad on it. But you know what? I’m putting the onus on you, Rest of the Internet. Haven’t I done enough to immortalize the commercials of yesteryear? “Yes,” says everybody.

So get on the stick, you guys. I want this thing on my desk after Thanksgiving or heads are gonna roll.

Pointless Nostalgia Video

Pointless Nostalgia Video: BoKu

Commenting on yesterday’s McRib-related post, Brian Dermody had a trenchant observation about the resolute “1991-ness of the 1991” ad. There is something exquisitely early 90s about this commercial. The jittery teal lettering. The man’s Parker Lewis Can’t Lose haircut. His shirt with the Trapper Keeper-esque random geometric shapes. It’s like a heavily moussed time capsule.

Brian also invoked the memory of another ad campaign I had not thought of in quite some time: BoKu, starring Richard Lewis. Thanks to the standup boom of the 80s and a hit sitcom Anything But Love, co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis (well, a sitcom that was on the air, anyway), this was truly the golden age of Richard Lewis.

The neurotic humoredian parlayed his fame into a sweet gig for BoKu, a quixotic attempt to get adults to drink juice boxes. Of course, they didn’t call them juice boxes, and they didn’t have straws, but they were clearly drink boxes to any discerning eye. So who better to emphasize their adulthood than Richard Lewis, that paragon of early 90s grown-up-ness, the living embodiment of the I-don’t-quite-what’s-going-on-itude of this era.

These commercials are prime examples of why I like ads so much: because they perfectly encapsulate the era during which they were made. Ads are not meant to stand the test of time. They’re meant to be consumed, either consciously or subliminally, then discarded.

How could you understand the early 90s, the ennui of the First Bush years, the strange economic nervousness of the post-Black Monday years, the nascent rumblings of grunge, Generation X, and rave culture? An era that, to someone who did not experience it, doesn’t seem to have any characteristics at all? You could read a novel from this time, or watch a film or television show, and you might get a sense of it. Or you could watch this ad and know it in 30 seconds.

See? Now you don’t have to put season one of thirtysomething in your Netflix queue. You’re welcome.