Category Archives: Videocracy

Seasonal Fare, Videocracy

My Favorite Video of the Year

1 Comment

In the giving spirit of the season, I want to share you my favorite video of the year. If you read this site, you know the kind of videos I gravitate toward, and so you’d probably think I’d pick some weird old commercial or that amazing compilation of Russian drivers. Worthy choices, but I have gone in a different direction, something you’ve probably never seen if you don’t have grade school-age children or aren’t 10 years old.

Being the father of a young girl, I am often subjected to Disney Channel’s wide array of programming. Some of it is actually pretty good (Phineas and Ferb, Gravity Falls). Some of it, not so much. One afternoon, we found ourselves watching Make Your Mark, a dance competition show that fell right in the middle of the pack. At the very least, it was light years better than Austin & Ally or Jessie, two Disney Channel shows so awful they make my teeth itch.

The big highlight of Make Your Mark was a segment in which the finalists go backstage at a theater where Justin Bieber will soon be giving a concert. The kids are then surprised with a visit from Beebs himself. He shakes their hands and watches them dance and gives them a little pep talk. It was very cute to see these kids freak out over meeting their idol.

And yet, as I watched this scene, I couldn’t get past one very strange element. Take a peek (it’s less than two minutes long, won’t kill ya) and see if you can spot it.

Did you notice that Bieber enters on a Segway? He also shakes kids’ hands on a Segway, beatboxes on a Segway, delivers a motivational speech on a Segway, and exits on a Segway. He does not get off the Segway for one second.

When I saw this show live, I rewound the segment–no joke–eight times, because I was sure I blinked and missed a part where Bieber hopped off the Segway. Nope! He stays atop it the entire time. While this scene is surely edited from much longer footage, it seems pretty clear from what we’re shown that he never once left his vehicle. What a bizarre, imperious thing to do. It’s the kind of power play an ancient duke would have pulled, if only Segways existed in Elizabethan times. “The Earl of Hartfordshire only greets commoners while riding his Gyro-Perch.”

Is there a better demonstration of Modern Celebrity than this? Dedicate yourself, never give up on your dreams, and you too may some day get to meet your heroes. But, your heroes probably won’t deign to remove themselves from their royal litter.

Not long ago, Bieber was like these kids, dreaming of the big time. Now, he’s filmed from behind, shown towering over these kids from a lofty mobile dais, lecturing them on working hard and keeping their families first before speeding away on his magical chariot.

Well, Merry Christmas everyone!

YouTube Comment of the Week

YouTube Comment of the Week: Smurfs Pasta

Time was, you were nobody unless you got your own canned pasta. In the days of my kid-dom, every cartoon character was immortalized in semolina form by Chef Boyardee or Franco-American. Any resemblance between the pasta and the character(s) they were supposed to represent was purely coincidental; most of the shapes looked more like amoebas than anything else. They all tasted the same as well, industrial fake cheese and processed tomato sauce tang. I know because I ate every single one of these pastas at least once. I was a carb completist. (Although I feel that by calling these things “pasta,” I should have to apologize to some kindly old Italian grandmother somewhere. Perdonilo, nonna!)

The Smurfs received this tribute, of course, since they were on TV for roughly 73 years. Was the pasta blue? Of course not; such technology did not exist yet, and let’s pray it never does. The Pasta Smurfs looked and tasted exactly like the Pasta Pac-Man and the Pasta X-Men, which is to say carb-loaded blobs swimming in Campbell’s tomato soup. Uniqueness, verisimilitude, and taste were not the goals here. The goal was to make a canned pasta that you could put a cartoon label on so dumb kids (like me) would beg for it. Mission accomplished.

However, I do understand that the mere sight of these items have a nostalgic pull for folks of a certain age, myself included, which is why I found the comment you’ll see below this clip oddly endearing. And odd. Though no more odd than the commercial itself, in which Papa Smurf reacts to a Gargamel-induced food shortage by transforming a bunch of Smurf houses into Smurf pasta. Thanks, Papa Smurf! Now I’m no longer hungry but I have to sleep in a ditch!

Honorable mention for this comment that points out a continuity flaw in the ad copy:

YouTube Comment of the Week

YouTube Comment of the Week: Chef Boyardee

This Chef Boyardee commercial is an amusing artifact from the 1980s, and typical of a certain genre of ad seen at this time. You see, by mid-decade, people were starting to be more health conscious, as exemplified by the aerobics fad (and to a lesser extent, the jazzercise fad). Corporations recognized this trend and acted accordingly. Not by actually making their products healthier, mind you, but by insisting their products were healthy enough as is, thank you very much.

The usual tack these ads took was that [PRODUCT X] gave you energy to get through your busy day. Take, for example, this Snickers ad, which obliquely endorses the idea of chowing down on a candy bar at 10am to tide over a hungry construction worker until lunchtime.

This Chef Boyardee commercial takes a similar approach. Kids and adults alike with active lifestyles are seen chowing down on Chef Boyardee products because they have “no preservatives.” Either Chef Boyardee has a very different definition of “preservatives” or he’s lying. There’s no way pasta can sit in a can for months at a time and still be edible without some kind of Franken-science involved. If you encased a mummy in a can of Beefaroni, he’d be unchanged a millennium later.

Of course, I’m not here to argue the healthy benefits of Chef Boyardee. I am here to point out a comment that was recently posted underneath this video. Enjoy.