Monthly Archives: December 2009

Holiday Triumphs 2009

Holiday Triumphs: “Low Tidings”, the Flapjack Christmas Special

flapjack2.jpgAs previously stated, I love Cartoon Network’s The Misadventures of Flapjack. It is one of the craziest, visually innovative, and funniest kids cartoons in existence today. But my love recently transformed into MEGA LOVE, because The Baby and I watched the Flapjack Christmas special, “Low Tidings”. It may be the greatest Christmas special of the last 10 years. For real.

In the Flapjack universe (which I explain a bit in that link above), every winter they celebrate the miracle of Low Tide Day, when the waters beneath The Docks recede and children hang their boots over the side in the hopes of getting presents from Poseidon if they’ve been good. But the bad kids get “sacked”: thrown in a sack by a gang of angry, muscly mermen and tossed around violently (kinda like a maritime version of Krampus).

Bubbie the Whale (who does double duty as Flapjack’s mother figure and house) always leaves The Docks during Low Tide season because she needs water to live. Captain K’Nuckles (Flapjack’s adventuring mentor and negative role model) always leaves because he’s rotten and doesn’t want to get sacked. He still harbors childhood trauma from his own youthful sackings. But Flapjack wants to see what Low Tide Day is like (and sings many badly rhyming songs to this effect), so Bubbie leaves him and K’Nuckles behind.

Flapjack marvels in the wonder of the season, while K’Nuckles desperately tries to find a hidey-hole so he can avoid a merman beatdown. Unfortunately, much of The Docks’ hiding places are already occupied by other miscreants. In his effort to avoid a sacking, K’Nuckles engages in more bad behavior that makes a sacking even more likely than before.

I don’t want reveal too much about how the plot resolves itself. Suffice to say, Poseidon rethinks the whole “pummeling people with sacks” thing and decides to change many features of Low Tide Day, thus resulting in a more Christmas-y holiday .

“So it doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad anymore?” cries one desperate Dock resident.

“Nope, pretty much everyone gets a present now,” Poseidon nonchalantly explains, and spirits himself away.

I’ve never seen a special that so captured the wonder and mystery of the holidays while equally depicting the sadness and weirdness of them. Maybe A Charlie Brown Christmas, although in a very different way, of course. Flapjack even managed a subtle poke at religion, via Poseidon’s benign but totally arbitrary rules for his followers.

As much as the show seems to aim jokes and references at parents, kids
love it. At least my three-year-old does. I realize she may not be the
best barometer of what all kids will like, since she has a fondness for
The Simpsons, Predator, and destruction. But I say, if your kid doesn’t like Flapjack, just write him/her off. You know they’re never gonna be cool.

This special is nothing short of genius. I demand the entire world watch it and prepare a 500-word essay on why it’s the greatest thing ever.

Holiday Horrors 2009

Holiday Horrors: The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)

For other Holiday Horrors posts, click here.

The Chipmunks are one of those things I still don’t quite get. Who let them happen? Even before the terrible movies of the 00s, and the not-very-good cartoon of the 80s (which I saw every single episode of five times), how did they start in the first place?

Fifty years ago, there were no songs where grown men sped up their voices. Then, Ross Bagdasarian realized that (a) he could do this, and (b) it sounded kinda funny to him and not at all like scraping styrofoam on a chalkboard.

Shouldn’t the public have rebelled against this idea when it was first presented to them? “Hold on a second. Why do we want this? And why exactly is a 40-year-old man’s voice all sped up supposed to sound like a chipmunk? And why are they singing about Christmas? And why is he always screaming at them? What’s his problem?”

My theory is because Bagdasarian slowly acclimated people to this horror by releasing another “speedy voice” song, “The Witch Doctor”. That song only used fast vocals in the chorus and became a number 1 hit, so it deadened the public’s ears to the monstrosity he would unleash upon them during the holiday season.

Still, shouldn’t someone have realized how hideous this was? Especially when the Chipmunks “appeared” on The Ed Sullivan Show to “sing” the song in the form of creepy puppets, as you can see here (speed ahead to about 2:30, unless you want to see some bad Alvin imitations of classic artists and/or The Fresh Prince).

Then again, I don’t want my kids blaming me for terrible things that happened during my adulthood. I’m guessing the list would start with either the Iraq war or Crazy Frog. So let us pull triumph from horror and watch yet another Patton Oswalt “video”, as he talks about the joys of playing this song on a record player v e r y   s l o w l y .

Holiday Triumphs 2009

Holiday Triumphs: Yet Yet More Holiday Ads, 1985

This is the last batch of vaguely-holiday-related ads for the season, I promise. They all come from yet another tape in the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives. This one was dominated by a CBS airing of The Wizard of Oz around Christmastime of 1985.

Again, very few of them have actual holiday content. But since they all come from Christmastime broadcasts, they remind me of spending a wintry evening indoors, watching network TV because, hell, what else was I gonna do on a December night?

1985 marked some of the heaviest fighting of the cola wars. Coke and Pepsi faced off in a no-holds-barred battle which left no one unscathed. Brother fought against brother. Millions were left homeless (but refreshed). You can find out more in Ken Burns’ 19-part documentary.

Coke’s commercials tended to be dismissive, rarely mentioning Pepsi by name and emphasizing the ubiquity of their product. Pepsi was more directly confrontation, as you can see in this ad. Some time in the distant future, an archeology professor and his students tour the ruins of a 20th century home. He seems well versed in the mores and folkways of this era, except for one object which stumps him.

Quite a big eff-you to the folks at Coke, as was their snagging of Michael Jackson, biggest pop star in the universe, to promo their beverage. Unfortunately, he suffered serious burns while filming an ad for them, due to faulty pyrotechnics. So Pepsi had to turn to another big artist. He didn’t have quite the explosive stage presence as Jackson, but he could dance on the ceiling.

Pepsi also put on some thrilling action sequences, as in this ad for Pepsi Free. Notice the weird banging cans at the end of the ad? I seriously tried to do this eight billion times when I was a kid. I did not succeed in recreating it, but I did succeed in spilling tons of soda.


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