Monthly Archives: December 2010

Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Pokemon Christmas Medley

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

pokemonxmas.jpgWanna feel old? Kids now in college grew up with Pokemon. It’s been around long enough to cycle back into the area of nostalgia, just like G.I. Joe and Transformers have for folks of my generation. In Japan, I think Pikachu was elected to the Senate.

Though I’m too old to be in the Pokemon wheelhouse, I totally understand why it was so popular with younger young’uns. It has all the elements necessary to hit kids right where they live.

For starters, the hero of the show was a kid, which is the quickest shortcut to kids’ show success. It had an enormous universe full of characters and a vocabulary all its own, which capitalizes on kids’ obsessive tendencies. And the show itself was really just one arm of a multi-tiered assault of Pokemon related things to buy and do, like its Magic the Gathering-esque card game and roughly a bazillion licensed items from backpacks to differently sized backpacks.

But as I’ve said repeatedly on this site, you should never confuse nostalgia for quality. If you loved Pokemon as a kid, that’s fine, but seen with adult eyes, it’s a terrible show. Not any worse than the stuff I watched when I was seven, mind you, but still terrible.

Naturally, Pokemon produced a gaggle of Christmas-related fare, because the franchise churned out more junk per square inch than any toy line since Masters of the Universe. Just in time for Christmas 2001, they released Pokemon Christmas Bash! Because in a world still reeling from the attacks of September 11, we all needed something to help us heal and strengthen our resolve. And what better to unite us than an album of Pokemon-themed Christmas songs, with instrumentation from the finest keyboard technology 1987 had to offer?

Or, more accurately, Christmas-themed Pokemon songs, since the holiday was was dwarfed in most of the tunes by the importance of naming as many of the characters as possible. But it’s one thing to compose brand new songs about Pokemon that barely mention the holiday (like the immortal ballad “I’m Getting Santa Claus a Pikachu for Christmas”). It’s quite another to shove the names of your dumb characters into beloved carols, which is what they did with this Pokemon Christmas medley.

If you know nothing about Pokemon, this will sound like another language to you. Every third word is the name of a character or a move or something else Pokemon-universe-related. If you did grow up watching it, I’m guessing this will inspire in you some serious cringing. If you can listen to this more than 30 seconds at a time, you are a stronger person than I.

And if you find this grating, be aware that somewhere out there is a German-language version of this album (Pokemon Weihnachtparty!). I could not find any audio of that online, and it’s probably best I didn’t, as I’m pretty sure if I heard it I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a month afterward.

Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Marshmallow World

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

“Marshmallow World” is one of those marginal Christmas-y tunes that inexplicably remains at the fringes of the Yuletide canon. It is not among the top ten most popular holiday tunes, or even the top 100. But you are guaranteed to hear it at least once a year over a PA system if you dare go shopping in an actual brick-and-mortar store. It survives for the same reason that shows like According to Jim remain on the air for so long: nobody loves it, but nobody hates it, either.

They say you shouldn’t go food shopping when you’re hungry. You probably shouldn’t write lyrics when you’re hungry, either. That’s the only explanation I have for verses like this:

It’s a marshmallow world in the winter,
When the snow comes to cover the ground.
It’s the time for play, it’s a whipped cream day,
I wait for it the whole year round!

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly,
In the arms of the evergreen trees;
And the sun is red like a pumpkin head,
It’s shining so your nose won’t freeze!

It should be a songwriter rule that if you start to write lyrics like this, just get up from the piano, take a stroll, and go get a sandwich. If you don’t, you might start composing love songs about pot roast.

These words weren’t written by a hack, either. They’re the work of Carl Sigman, a lyricist who worked with composers like Duke Ellington and wrote tons of songs. He wrote the lyrics to “Ebb Tide,” which are simple yet gorgeous. (It’s most famous as done by the Righteous Brothers, but I’m partial to Frank Sinatra’s version.) But even a skilled craftsman can have an off day. Or a gotta-bang-this-out-before-I-get-lunch day.

But if nothing else, “Marshmallow World” is partially responsible for this hilarious clip from a Dean Martin special from the 1960s. Dino and his buddy Frank stomp down a flight of plastic stairs, almost run each other over in the process, then sing the song with all the care it deserves. Which is to say, they yell-sing it and flit around in mock-balletic moves, clearly annoyed that they have to perform this dumb song about marshmallows.

Oh, and did I mention they’re very obviously smashed? Enjoy!

Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Classic Media

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

Earlier this week, I did a post on the awful He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special. I gave the show a proverbial smackdown, but it was all in good fun and we all had a jolly good laugh. Of course, there always has to be Grinch at every holiday gathering, and the turd in my punchbowl is Classic Media.

A few days ago, I received an ominous email from YouTube that one of the clips I posted from the special “may have content or media that is owned or licensed by Classic Media.” I’m very sensitive to stuff like this, because I once had a YouTube account that contained a treasure trove of old commercials and other weird clips, but lost it all thanks to several baseball-related clips. MLBAM fiercely guards its copyrights, and even though the footage I posted will never, ever, ever, and also EVER be released by them in any form from now until the seas dry up and the cities turn to loam, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

Not wanting to endanger my YouTube account, I decided to just take down the clips. They died so that the rest of my video library could live. A moment of silence, please.

Truth be told, this was my fault for posting the clips in the first place. Had I done two seconds of googling, I would’ve realized the special was recently released on DVD, and therefore generally available, and therefore the clips were liable to be noticed by the makers of said DVD. And while the clips illustrated my points, I think you could understand the special’s horror without them.

But you know what? Fuck Classic Media in the pants is what. Do they think the clips I posted on my site, digitzed from a 25-year-old VHS tape, are going to dissuade people from buying their DVD? Are my lo-fi efforts really cutting into their bottom line?

Trust me, the only reason you buy this hunk of crap is nostalgia. It has absolutely no intrinsic value otherwise. You’ll want to watch it because you saw it as a kid. And the people who feel this way will go ahead and buy the stupid DVD no matter what I post on my site. I could have thrown up the entire special with an extra soundtrack of me farting throughout it, and not one less person would have bought this thing.

So thanks, Classic Media, for reminding me that even at Christmastime, there are people with nothing better to do than sic lawyers on poor schmucks who have no recourse. Happy holidays!