I’m leaving work, headphones jammed into my ears and a large box under my arm. I’m in that vague, annoyed space of not paying attention to much of anything, of wishing I was home already, and feeling like every step I have to expend to get there is a personal insult. It’s a little after 6pm. The early evening is a little windier and chillier than I anticipated. I wish I’d worn a jacket.
A few blocks up on Hudson Street, I spot a woman in a red tank top, revealing a few tattoos on her upper back and arms. I haven’t seen her face yet, and still she looks vaguely familiar, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. She must feel me looking at her, trying to figure this out, so she turns her head, in that I’m-not-trying-look-behind-me-but-I’m-totally-turning-my-head-so-I-can-see-this-person-peripherally. That’s when I figure out that this person is Janeane Garofalo.
In the span of nanoseconds, this revelation brings to mind a few distinct memories from my misspent youth. The first is that, during my college years, I had the habit of running into random celebrities in the streets of Manhattan and somehow scaring them to death.
How many of my previous Internet Gauntlets have been satisfied? Let’s see, by my calculations…ZERO. Someone has to step it up, people, and it seems that someone is me.
My plan was to do a new Internet Gauntlet Thrown for an ad I haven’t seen in many a moon. It was for a line of toys in the late 1980s called Spy Tech. I never played with them, as I was a little older than their target audience by the time they debuted. However, I did enjoy the Spy Tech ads, which were a perfect encapsulation of a very childish, very 1980s brand of paranoia. Here’s an example.
I love this ad so very much, for so many reasons. It taps into a very basic fear/hope that all children have: Adults are engaged in evil, nefarious schemes they must hide from kids AT ALL COSTS. Naturally, when kids think things are being hidden from them, they must try to uncover them. Kids like to think that they may become entangled in a great mystery or adventure which only they can see to its conclusion (see: every cartoon made in the last 50 years).
Spy Tech could only have come from the 1980s, a time when children were told that an endless series of mysterious strangers were trying to capture them and take them away in a windowless van, never to be seen again except on the back of a milk carton. Of course, you were never told exactly why this might happen, so the sensible response was to FEAR EVERYONE. Like in this ad. “There’s a stranger on your block!” That’s all we need to hear! Better follow him to the movies, kids!
The kicker: These kids really have stumbled on something. They’ve so unnerved The Stranger that he tells his contact in the movie theater ticket booth, “Cancel the plan–they have Spy Tech!” The contact, looking more annoyed than alarmed, hastily places a CLOSED sign in the window. Joke’s on her, though; the CLOSED part is facing inward, so everyone will assume the theater is still open.
The universe of the Spy Tech ads has two features that nowadays would at least be questioned, if not banned outright:
Kids can go off by themselves and shadow potentially dangerous strangers.
Anyone even slightly different is deserving of suspicion and should be monitored as closely as possible.
There were many Spy Tech ads, all of which followed a similar template. In another commercial, a couple of kids track the new couple who moved next door, who just MUST be up to something. It ends by revealing these seemingly mild mannered professionals have a living room full of surveillance equipment of their own! Gadzooks!
But my favorite was one I’ve been hunting down for years. It has the typical Spy Tech scenario: kids surreptitiously follow a weirdo on their block. Why is he a weirdo? Because he has shifty eyes and whistles loudly on his way to work. Better make sure he’s not in a sleeper cell!
Hounded by a crew of amateur spooks, The Whistler stops at a newsstand. He does not make eye contact with the man behind the counter. He does not even stop as he picks up a newspaper. He simply says, “They have Spy Tech” in an ominous growl and moves on his way. The man at the newsstand, panicked, squeaks out “They know!” And, scene.
The reason this one always cracked me up is because it was so vague and menacing. All the other ads are fairly explicit in some way or another that demonstrate the tailed strangers are spies. This one leaves so much to the imagination. The Whistler just grabs his paper and passes along the bad news to his contact, who tells us nothing more than THEY KNOW! It always killed me.
I’ve been looking for this ad for years. Years, people. Not only could I find no one else who remembered it, but I also couldn’t find anyone who remembered Spy Tech itself. How soon we forget! I began to wonder if I’d exaggerated the memory, or even imagined it altogether.
Well, it turns out, if you want something done, you gotta do it yourself. Deep in the bowels of YouTube, I finally found this commercial again, and yes, it is everything I remembered, and more. The quality is substandard even by YouTube’s yardstick, but I think the essential Spy Tech-iness comes across. You’re welcome, Internet.*
* Keep watching after the Spy Tech ad for an awesome Cheerios ad featuring Bo Jackson, as well as some more relics from this glorious era in the history of kids commercials.
I remain ambivalent about the news that you-know-who has been turned into chum. Not that I’m sorry he’s dead, but the mere fact that he’s in the news dredges up 9/11 all over again. And not just that date, but everything that happened thereafter, an entire decade of shit. Amazing things happened in the last ten years–to me and the world–but when taken in aggregate, weighing all the pluses and minuses, I think you have to say that overall, Shit won the 2000s.
If you’re in New York right now, you’ve no doubt noticed that “celebrations” over this news have been sparing and almost universally subdued. We hate being reminded of it. We’d finally entered a time where you didn’t see footage of the towers collapsing every time you turned on the TV. Well, that’s over. I saw the burning World Trade Center on the boob tube again several times last night–on SportsCenter. Didn’t need that, ESPN. Nor did I need the takes of Derek Jeter or Charlie Manuel on what this means for America, or endless loops of that douche in the Utley USA jersey tugging at his shirt like we just beat Bin Laden in Olympic basketball. Stick to what you do well, ESPN–whatever that is.
In a much more trivial sense, this event also reminds me of the people who tried to exploit 9/11 for everything it was worth to make a quick buck. People who, almost universally, did not live in New York or Washington DC or have any real, personal connection to what happened. People who saw one of the greatest tragedies in American history and immediately thought, “How can I use this to my advantage?”
Here’s a prime example, one that I don’t recall from when it came out. I’d guess few of you out there do, either. It came to my attention via the tweeting of @irabrooker, and it’s a song by The Royal Guardsmen. This band first catapulted into fame with their tune “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron,” which used the Peanuts cartoon strip as a springboard for a novelty tune. It was given the blessing of Charles Schulz, who was not a big fan of rock music but also had trouble saying no to people. (His biography paints him almost as a victim of the enormous marketing of his creations, which is probably a stretch, but it seems like he genuinely did not know how to turn something like this down.)
When I was a kid, I spotted a “Snoopy vs. The Red Baron” album at my local library. It had a drawing of Snoopy on the cover, and there was no indication (to a kids’ eyes, anyway) that this was anything but a purely Peanuts-related endeavor. Being hugely into Peanuts at the time, I took it home and was monstrously disappointed. I still remember how angry I was, how deceived I felt. So I’ve had a beef with these guys for quite some time.
The Royal Guardsmen recorded many variations on this theme over the years (most notably a Christmas-y one), desperately trying to ride Snoopy’s coattails, before sinking back into obscurity by decade’s end. Then, they reformed in the mid-2000s to record a brand new “Snoopy as fighter pilot” tune. Maybe you can guess where this is going.
Yup, it’s “Snoopy vs. Osama,” which according to Wikipedia “became a hit on the Dr. Demento Show” in 2006. (So he’ll just play any garbage that’s labeled “funny,” huh?) I guess when you’ve already made a career of sorts riding the coattails of a beloved cartoon character, it’s not that far a leap to jump on the Benefiting from Tragedy Bandwagon.
This song was released six years after the death of Charles Schulz, a pacifist and quietly, reasonably religious man who probably would have had a problem with this jingoistic, violent tune. Doing the math, 2006 was also a full five years after 9/11, when even the most hawkish of Tom Clancy types were saying, “Alright, enough with the ‘courtesy of the red, white, and blue’ nonsense.” I can’t decide if I’m more offended by its naked exploitation or for being so late to the party. Or for the song itself, which makes the curious decision to emulate the sound of Reckoning-era REM.
Here’s hoping we can take all the crass, lowest common denominator, 9/11 exploitation crap like this and give it its own burial at sea.
I’m leaving work, headphones jammed into my ears and a large box under my arm. I’m in that vague, annoyed space of not paying attention to much of anything, of wishing I was home already, and feeling like every step I have to expend to get there is a personal insult. It’s a little after 6pm. The early evening is a little windier and chillier than I anticipated. I wish I’d worn a jacket.