New Site Update: Them YouTube clips below will totally not work. Not sure who’s to blame, MLB or the Rocket. In either case, this post is provided for historical purposes only.
When I was an MFA student, one of my workshop leaders, a writer of some renown (brag), told me that villains must be understood. Our class was wondering out loud if there could ever be a Great Bush Era Novel. He said that if such a novel were ever written, it couldn’t be an angry screed or political tract.
Even if you were no fan of George W. Bush (which I doubt anyone in the room was), your book couldn’t succeed on blind hatred. You could not portray Bush as a mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash-type, or an incurious dolt. For such a book to work, he said, you would have to find some way to sympathize with him. Anything less would both fail as fiction and
trivialize an entire administration.
That doesn’t mean pardoning or condoning The Evil That Men Do. But villains in black hats are boring. Gray is much better, if scarier, because it makes us realize that given the right circumstances, virtually anyone can find themselves doing unspeakable things.
I dredge this up in the wake of the Roger Clemens debacle. Anyone who reads this site should know my feelings on the Rocket. I’ve poked him with a stick once or twice. Several times, in fact. In my mental Hall of Infamy, he’s one of a very select group of people I’d like to go away and never see again. If he became a hermit and lived out the rest of his days in a cave somewhere, I wouldn’t shed a tear.
Thanks to The Interweb and roughly eight billion cable channels, even the niche-iest of shows has a chance to find its audience. This was not the case even 10 years ago, when there was very little hope for an offbeat show, unless you expand your definition of “offbeat” to include “Bill Cosby verbally torturing his children”. If a show couldn’t succeed in the strictly middlebrow world of network TV, it had no future.
Every now and then, a show with a cockeyed view of the world and a bold spirit would sneak onto a network lineup. Such a show would inevitably be either retooled or shuttled around the schedule until it suffered death by underexposure. These kinds of shows were, inevitably, the kinds of shows that I loved as a kid. I was attracted to complete lost causes–the television equivalent of a dog at the pound with one eye, half a tail, and the mange.
Some of the shows I’ve loved and lost were later lamented, rediscovered, and given a proper DVD release. Thanks in part to the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin , Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks has received the belated acclaim it deserves. There was a great series on the now-defunct Trio network, Brilliant But Cancelled, that highlighted awesome shows like EZ Streets (aka The Sopranos Before The Sopranos ).
There is one show I loved as a kid that has yet to get its day in the sun. I mean, I absolutely worshipped this show. This show should never have been made in the first place, because it had every odd stacked against it from day one. But if it had been come out more recently, I’m convinced that it could have run for 15 seasons or more.
The show was a The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, a Saturday morning cartoon that ran for only one season (1988-89). It starred an animated version of the titular character, voiced by Martin Short. It also featured the voice talents of a few of his fellow SCTV alums Joe Flaherty, Catherine O’Hara, and Andrea Martin. And for an
extra dollop of crazy on top, it also featured Jonathan Winters.
The use of popular songs in commercials has been much maligned, and rightly so. I don’t mean when a relatively new tune by a relatively unknown band is used in an ad. The landscape of the music industry has changed so dramatically that I realize an up-and-coming group has to find new ways to get exposure. This would have once raised the hackles of my Punk Rock Sensibilities, but I’ve mellowed with age. I still wanna strangle whichever Chevy exec greenlighted the “This Is Our Country” ads, though.
What I’m really referring to is commercials that use very popular songs of the past. Songs that were huge hits, are still played constantly on the radio, but are nonetheless co-opted for ad campaigns. There’s a whole generation of kids who probably think Who’s Next was penned as an album-length homage to Nissan. But hey, I’m sure Pete Townshend really needed the cash.
However, at the same time that I hate Robert Plant transforming into a Cadillac spokesman, I’m not 100 percent sure this is any worse than the commercials of my youth. Back then, music was generally used in commercials in one of three ways:
1) A new, snazzy jingle about your wonderful product. Usually sung by a full-throated man or woman, or in the most hateful example, a chorus of screaming kids. *shudder* 2) An old standard that commented on the action in the commercial, however vaguely. This would almost never be the original version of the song, but performed by a Generic Commercial Crooner, invariably off screen. 3) A popular song with rewritten lyrics.
And this last example haunts me to this day. Because I watched a bajillion hours of TV as a kid, I have tattooed on my brain alternate versions of famous songs. And when I hear these particular songs, I immediately think of the ad-altered versions.
My favorite example was by Wendy’s. This commercial features Kool and the Gang reworking their hit “Celebration” to laud the arrival of Crispy Chicken Nuggets. I have no idea what it was about this commercial that made such a huge subliminal impression on me. As you’ll see below, there’s nothing particular outstanding about it. Unless you consider a guy juggling chicken nugget boxes outstanding.
Regardless, this commercial became imprinted on my psyche. It’s inexplicably famous in my household. To this day, whenever me or any of my brothers hear this song, we sing along There’s a party goin on right here/Crispy Chicken Nuggets are new and here this year…
I am equal parts delighted and disappointed that I was able to find this ad on YouTube. Because in my memory, this ad was like one of those borderline racist McDonalds commercials, with lots of black folk shufflin’ and jivin’, double dutchin’ and eatin’ fast food. Which is pretty much what The Media told us all black people did in the 1980s. That, and live in beautiful Brooklyn brownstones with broods of preternaturally witty children.
This video will prove that my memory was inaccurate. In fact, you’ll see it’s mostly white people dancing like idiots. You will, however, see some preteen popping and locking, because it was impossible to show a black kid in a commercial in the 1980s and have him not breakdance.
I don’t expect you, the reader, to see anything special in this ad. But if for some reason you do, please let me know what it is so I can finally find out why it haunts my dreams.