RIP Alex Chilton

I'd never explicitly heard of the Box Tops, but this song has been wending its way through my brain for the last couple of days:



I think as a rock n' roll pop song it's kind of perfect: 2 minutes. Catchy melody. Straightforward lyrics about some girl. Badass vocals.

Well, anyway. I think a bonus is that everyone looks pretty damn cool in the above video. GO 60s

Femme fatale

I think one of my favorite things about this Age of the Internets that we live in--and YouTube in particular--are all the covers of songs by amateurs sitting around in their living room. Even songs I've listened to a million times seem to come out fresh and new. I could watch 'em all day.

Anyway, here's Femme Fatale, sung by a beeyootiful lady:

Pardon Me

I like this cat

Lamar Odom is a really weird guy

American gibberish!

Just yesterday at a party I was mentioning that one thing I've always wanted to hear was someone who didn't know a lick of English putting together a string of English gibberish. And now today I see a video that features exactly that: specifically, it's an Italian doing American gibberish.

Enjoy!

Monkeys! Dogs! Elephants! Holy shit!

Motion to reinforce stereotypes passes unanimously

What do you say if we make applejuice and fax it to each other?

Absurd:

Happy Thanksgiving!

It was weird watching this again, because I'd forgotten that a quote from it had worked its way into my family's lexicon. Basically, my mom and my sister will say, "It'll be fun Kevin!" in this goofy way whenever they're trying to get me to do something. What they're mimicking is Adam Sandler saying to Kevin Nealon, "C'mon Kevin! It'll be fun." I doubt if either my sister or mom remembers what they're quoting from when they say that.

(In a similar vein, you will find a lot of people who say in a particular voice and cadence, "I like it--Ilikeitalot"--having long forgotten the source material for this, which is the 1994 movie Dumb and Dumber.)

It's-a me, Radiohead

I thought this was damn impressive:



It gets more intricate and clever as it goes on, so consider watching at least up through the transition to the "rain down" part.

Mad Men

Oh, Yoko's alright

If Alex Jaffe ran the FCC

This is from a while ago, but worth another look:


FCC Okays Nudity On TV If It’s Alyson Hannigan

You are ten years old. You've just gotten home and thrown your backpack in the corner and turned on the TV

I already linked this video on Twitter, but here it is again:



A few comments:

• Oh God, that Kid Sister/My Buddy song. It stays with you.
• "Airlandia"? A world where "everything is powered by wind"? HELL FUCKING YES. I have no recollection of these toys, and it doesn't even seem as though there was any cartoon that actually accompanied them. It was just this entire concept and basic storyline introduced within a 30 second commercial. You especially have to love the "fighting for air against the tyrants of wind" line, too. I wish I could see recording studio footage of the grown men who sang the chorus, "Air Raiders, the power is--in--the--Air Raiders...." Also, a really nice touch: you hardly notice it, but at the very end of the commercial it shows a kid falling away from the camera (getting blown away from the camera, perhaps?), and then the Air Raiders logo appears. He probably ended up in the same dimension that you get sucked into when you lose at Crossfire.
• I also have no recollection of Freakies cereal. It looks God awful. And it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense: why are these cereal aliens modeled after the Beach Boys? They're all wearing Hawaiian shirts and the song sounds like it's supposed to be the Beach Boys. Did kids even know who the Beach Boys were? Who are they targeting with this? Also, the name "Freakies" is a horrible name. Also: it's kind of cheating to make the mascot of a cereal a big, misshapen cereal-like lump and then turn around and pretend that you made the cereal into the shape of the mascot.
  
• Flintstones: weak.
• Wow, Video Art. I love how high-concept and stylized the commercial is--and man would it be cool to have one of those today. Sixteen colors!
• Screw Alpha-Bits.
• If I was friends with the Turtles, and they slept over, in the morning I'd always be like, "Hey, you want Golden Grams for breakfast???", and they'd be like, "Fuck you", but then like, "Wait, do you have Golden Grams?", and I'd be like, "No, I was only joking", and then they'd look a little let down maybe?
• I really, really like the ice cream cone cereal commercial. Ice Cream Jones has got to be near the bottom of the heap in terms of forgotten cereal mascots. I imagine he parks that ridiculous cart outside a run-down apartment building in a bad part of town, goes into his sparsely furnished apartment, and drinks and cries. Also: I love how they just beat you over the head with their mind-bending concept of an ice cream cone cereal. The kid at the end (who looks vaguely stoned, I might add) says it best: "Mmmm, ice cream cone cereal." They might as well have just showed 30 seconds of silence with nothing but big block letters that said "BUY ICE CREAM CONE CEREAL NOW". Actually, I would like to see a commercial done in that style some day.
  
• I totally remember this Honeycombs commercial. Aurally the most visceral parts are the "Yeah yeah yeah" and "no no no", but visually I have to say the most visceral image is the calipers holding the piece of cereal with the ruler on the robot measuring it to be a full inch. As a kid I never understood what this was supposed to prove or why I was supposed to care if the individual cereal bits were big. Baffling, but there you have it. Also: Hannity & Honeycombs.
• That kaleidoscope thing is WEAK.
• I remember a different version of the Connect Four song, where it goes: "Go for it--connect four!" Maybe that came later.
• Ahh, Duck Tales bumpers.
  

By the way, I have to say that I've always been fascinated with cereal and the way it's marketed. It's like this weird perfect intersection between children and capitalism that produces a marketing Galapagos Island of exotic cartoon characters and high concept junk food. I imagine that someone from Russia visiting here in 1982 would have been utterly astonished by the sheer number and variety of sugary cereals available, and would have immediately realized that Communism didn't stand a chance.

PS: It's been a long-standing dream of mine to create a children's cereal called Basically Just Sugar.

On Newsies

Here's a video I made a while back that was lying around on my computer; I went ahead and uploaded it to YouTube, because, hey, that's what you do.

It's time to blow your mind

You know how shocking it was when we all found out that the Joker from Batman: The Animated Series was voiced by Mark Hamill? Well check this out: you remember the episode where this nobody called Sid the Squid accidentally "offs the Batman"? Well it turns out that Sid the Squid was voiced by Matt Frewer--better known as Max Headroom!

Worst cover ever

Via Sullivan.

Great moments in movie history

A while ago--maybe last year--I saw Lawrence of Arabia at the Castro Theater, during a 70mm print festival. It was the first time I ever saw it, and it was just about as perfect an experience as you can get.

Anyway, for whatever reason the peak of the movie, for me, is the scene that leads into intermission--and it just so happens that someone had put precisely this scene up on YouTube:



Those Brits...

Destroying America in order to save it

It's a cheap exercise to single out videos of people you disagree with making fools of themselves, but I can't resist this time:



Remarkable. Beck, at the end, even explicitly ponders aloud that Bin Laden would certainly refrain from any kind of attack, lest ass-kicking Beck-followers seize power in Washington and..er..start kicking ass--apparently not realizing that Bin Laden not attacking us is, you know, a good thing.

But let's be charitable: what do these guys really think? I think it's something like this: in their view, the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and is on pace to either destroy itself or be destroyed/overwhelmed by outside forces. And so a timely Bin Laden attack would be a nation-saving wake-up call, the harm done to the victims of the attack notwithstanding. That is what they think.

Which is, you know, really crazy and myopic.

Video via Sullivan.