Tag Archives: patton oswalt

Baseball, The Funny

Get Metsmerized! with Tom Scharpling and Patton Oswalt

metsmerized.jpgAfter yesterday’s screed about the sorry state of the Mets and their desire to kill their idols, I thought some levity was in order. So please enjoy this clip from The Best Show on WFMU from August 18, 2009, in which host Tom Scharpling and famous comedienne Patton Oswalt listen to and riff on the only thing worse than the current Walter Reed ‘controversy’: “Get Metsmerized!”

“Get Metsmerized!” was the brainchild of George Foster, the Mets’ first big free agent signing (and first big free agent bust). Like many of his teammates, eve before the 1986 season began, he figured the team would have a great year. (Even as a Mets fan, I’d say Tom’s description of the ’86 Mets as “sociopaths who could hit baseballs” is pretty accurate.) So what better way to capitalize on a great year than a hastily produced rap song? The Chicago Bears had such a big hit with the “Super Bowl Shuffle” the year before, so surely this would be a big hit, too!

It was not, for the eight billion reasons you’ll hear in this clip. Hip-hop was still in its relative infancy, and in most people’s minds, rap was something that anyone could just do. “It’s just talkin over music! A kid could do that!” Foster and his chosen teammates (Darryl Strawberry, Doc Gooden, Lenny Dykstra, Rafael Santana, Howard Johnson, Kevin Mitchell, Rick Aguilera, and Tim Teufel (!)) proved this wrong once and for all.

As Patton points out, “They even yell off-key.” He also notes that roping poor Santana–who could barely speak English, let along rap–into this mess borders on “a hate crime,” and it’s hard to argue otherwise. Run DMC, this is not.

In an effort to make up for “Get Metsmerized,” later in the 1986 season, the entire team collaborated on a song/video (“Let’s Go Mets!”) that actually wound up being a local hit. While it is also cheesy and 80s-rific, it sounds like “Good Vibrations” compared to this atrocity.

Many, many thanks to @arfortiyef for supplying the clip you’re about to enjoy. You guys should probably follow him on the Twitter and read his site, too.

The Funny

The Difference Between a Chump and a Champ is U!

Thanks to the graciousness of host Tom Scharpling, I was able to visit the WFMU studios in beautiful downtown Jersey City during the second Best Show marathon program this Tuesday. To say this was a thrill would be a vast understatement. To say that it made me one with the cosmos and eternity itself…that’s probably an overstatement. So let’s say the experience was somewhere in the middle.

It was amazing to see the sheer amount of work that goes into the marathon, from all of the Phone Slaves taking pledges to wrangling all the premiums to feeding the assembled host (which was amazingly done by WFMU’s own Terre T, one of the coolest people in existence). It felt a lot like being backstage at a Broadway production or a live TV show circa 1957, with folks coming and going at breakneck speed in confined quarters to make sure everything ran as smoothly as possible. Except that not a single person involved received a dime for their work. It was all, literally, a labor of love.

And as if witnessing The Best Show raise an unbelievable $80K+ for WFMU wasn’t enough, I got to see funnymen Patton Oswalt and John Hodgman lend their talents to the cause. I also captured some of these moments on video, thanks to my lil’ iPod. The picture quality is not stellar, but the audio is pretty good, and their historic import compels me to share them with you. (You can hear the actual show here.)
Continue reading The Difference Between a Chump and a Champ is U! →

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 .