Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to Episode 445 – the somewhat less cool episode than Episode 444.
This week: figured out; rolling balls; fowl balls; not a Ken fan; viscerally live; know your Branagh; community TV crimes; Henry V fan edit; everybody’s hat talking; hairy situation; shitty nature; disturbing bears; hooray for MAD magazine (R.I.P.); text nerds; The Harvey Girls; three million calories; horrifying Little Dot; slow jokes; so long Denny O’Neil (R.I.P.); Magnus Robot Fighter; novelty ads; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; and, finally, Thoroughly Thorl.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the Week: Did you ever order anything off TV or from a comic or magazine?
Sub-question: Who is your favourite advertising mascot?
Don’t miss out on your chance to WIN WIN WIN!!!
That’s right! Our 450th episode is fast approaching and we will be hosting our traditional Listeners’ Questions Episode! Every question gives you a chance in our GRAND PRIZE DRAW. The more questions you ask, the better your chances to win! So get to asking!
Send your list of questions by email to sneakyd@sneakydragon.com. If you’d like, record your questions, send us an audio file, and we’ll play it during the show. Fun, right???
Here are some sweet pics of some of the items we discussed today!
Not sure what Magnus is doing? Throwing something? Tai chi?
Disturbing!
Don’t worry, everyone! They don’t actually work!
Not to scale. Or working, for that matter.
Noting like a “bowl full of happiness”.
You know what? I still want one.
What exactly was Oscar Goldman’s briefcase?
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Hi Guys,
First off, the title you were looking for is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. On reading simpler books in college, I just read Alice Adventures in Wonderland which is a perfect example of this. I also found my friends and I rereading books we had already read as teens instead of starting new ones, it’s definitely a familiarity thing. On a similar note, I always found it odd when college kids boasted about not reading the books in my English classes. I was just grateful for a storyline instead of a textbook, and was always excited to read something new. The essays were another story though…
To answer your sub-question, my favourite advertising mascot is the Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy. His hot crescent rolls are a guilty pleasure of mine. But I have a sub-sub question: why is the Buzz the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee a male? Drones don’t make honey. All a drone does is mate with a queen bee during which time his organ explodes off him then he expires. General Mills, as far as I’m concerned, Buzz can f*** off and die.
I have a footnote to add to your discussion of Falstaff. He also appears in Shakespeare’s seldom-performed comedy, “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth said she wanted to see Falstaff in love and the play was dashed off in two weeks. Which is probably why it’s seldom-performed. As for Kenneth Branagh, I find his acting style rather scenery-chewy. But I do like him when he dials it down for movies like Dunkirk, or the gritty Swedish detective series, Wallander.
Ian, I’m glad you had a nice crow encounter, shit notwithstanding. We weren’t so lucky. A pair of crows built a nest in a tree outside our house but abandoned it shortly after the eggs hatched and little open beaks started to appear above the twigs. We read that if crows sense danger, they’ll flee their nest in self-preservation so they can live to breed again. Maybe I shouldn’t have given them the ominous nicknames of “Crow-na” and “Corvid-19.” Then a few days later, I saw three crows standing in our neighbour’s driveway. One crow had a flicker (a type of woodpecker) pinned under one claw and was eviscerating the smaller bird with its beak. The other crows stood by, waiting for their chance to get at the carcass. Now I better understand why they call it “a murder of crows.”
Sometime around 8th grade I remember ordering older comics for my collection from ads in current comics. There was only one comic store in town with a limited supply of back issues, so I ordered from Mile-High Comics, which advertised in new comics as one of the largest comic retailers in the U.S., located in Denver. The thing was that you had to hope and pray that they still had the comics you wanted in stock by the time they received your order, in my case, it was Fantastic Four #48, #49 and #50, The Galactus Trilogy. I put down alternates instead they didn’t have those three in a row, which was required, but soon I received all three in the mail! Two of the comics were about $8.00 apiece and the third was $12.00, so I had my Mom write me a check. She thought I was out of my mind spending $28.00 on three comics! But this was the first Silver Surfer story and first appearance of Galactus! I made her eat her words years later when the three skyrocketed to a much higher price but I refused to sell them since these three comics are now signed by both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Something my childhood best friend and I always wanted to buy through the ads in “Boy’s Life” magazine were plans on how to build a one-man hot air balloon. We had these grand plans of getting the plans, building the balloons, tethering them together with rope and just in case, take walkie-talkies if we were separated. It’s funny how much we talked about it and drew up plans for execution but in the end it didn’t happen. We were both probably lucky we didn’t die by plunging to our deaths from a few shitty man-made balloons over our neighborhood or get electrocuted in the power lines.
(Forgive me for the separate posts, I’m all over the place this week.)
I had a few of the Six Million Dollar Man toys when I was a kid, Maskatron (who stood in for my Oscar), The Bionic Transport and Repair Station, The Venus Space Probe and yes, you guessed it, the Critical Assignment Arms! Now I’m about to tell you something quite reprehensible I’m not proud of, so here goes. The Critical Assignment Arms had this rubber flesh on them that rolled up to the shoulder so you could expose the clear arms and see the lasers, circuits and wires underneath. But if you held the arm hidden in your hand, it looked like the end of a penis with the foreskin exposed. My first girlfriend was over one night and I went back to my room to get the Critical Assignment Arm with the rolled up rubber. I ran out with this arm hidden in my hand down at crotch level and scared the shit out of my girlfriend right in front of my parents! She was a good sport and laughed it off but my parents were really mad at me. I can’t believe you brought this toy up on last week’s episode…I couldn’t resist telling the story. There’s photos all over the web of these things, see what I mean?
https://flic.kr/p/22nLiSh
Olivier’s Henry V was indeed made as a WWII morale-booster, but for the D-Day final phase of the war (1944) rather than during the early Phoney War phase (1939-1940). Anyway, I heartily second the recommendation for the film. Olivier’s Hamlet also features Doctor Who #2 Patrick Troughton in a minor role (yes, I did watch it mostly for that reason, but it’s well worth watching in its own right.)
The Hamlet episode of MST3K was one of the last episodes (before the Netflix revival) and has a reputation among fans as being one of the show’s worst episodes, but personally I think it has some good jokes. If nothing else, Mike’s sarcastic “nice play, Shakespeare” at the end makes it worthwhile.
Oh yes, and: the Doctor Who story Dave mentioned is the aptly-named 1977 classic The Robots of Death. I can see the resemblance between the robots in that story and the ones from Magnus Robot Fighter: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/The_Robots_of_Death_(TV_story)
I’m inclined to pick the 7UP Spot as my favorite advertising mascot since he was under my design care for a few years, but that’s too obvious. Spot is, or was, part of a pantheon alongside many other ad characters created by Leo Burnett in Chicago. When I went home to visit, I’d make time for trip to Leo Burnett, the walls were endless with framed illustrations of all the great characters they had created over the years. Tony the Tiger, The Jolly Green Giant, The Maytag Repairman, Charlie Tuna, The Keebler Elves and Morris the Cat to name a few.
I’m diving deeper and more obscure than that…I’m going back to around 1974 when I was a hopeless fanatic of the sugary cereal known as “Freakies”. I collected everything Freakies made, I even sent away for the complete sets of figures, cars, patches and magnets. The Freakies were hideous little creatures! I still can’t put my finger on my attraction to them, maybe because they were interesting as individual characters and colorful. If you don’t remember these guys, here’s a few commercials:
https://youtu.be/Be77gKd55q4
PS: I’d give anything to take part in designing a Freakies Comeback!!
Here’s the skip-ahead to the Freakies intro commercial at 6:11:
https://youtu.be/Be77gKd55q4?t=371
Hi Chaps!
To answer the first question first, I always wanted to order something from the comic books, but they were American and wanted something called ‘dollars’ which I didn’t have – I had ‘pounds’ which I was pretty sure they wouldn’t take. Closest I got was ordering one of those 3 CD sets of Sixties ‘hits’ that were advertised on late night TV – I think it was called ‘Our Generation) (which it wasn’t, for me at least, but I always had an older taste in music than my contemporaries.
As for the second question , my favourite advertising mascot was/were “The Humphreys” – rampaging red and white straws which sought milk. It was a campaign by the Unigate dairy here in the U.K., and is little remembered, though there is a Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphreys_(Unigate)
One of the TV ads even featured Muhammad Ali… (it’s on YouTube!)
All the best,
Paul Bines