What The Hell Are You Staring At (On TV)?

Recently we saw a bizarre news story in which fans of the animated series Rick and Morty went crazy over McDonald's Sichuan Sauce (Sichuan? Szechuan? Supposedly "Sichuan" is the new accepted spelling.) The whole thing reached ridiculous proportions when a woman in Michigan traded a packet of the sauce for a 2004 Volkswagen GTI. I mean, I could understand a Golf, but a GTI?

If you haven't seen the whole story, here's what I've pieced together:

• Back in the 90's, McDonald's briefly offered a Sichuan sauce for McNuggets (rumoured to be teriyaki mixed with ketchup) as a tie-in with the movie Mulan.
• Recently, there was an episode of Rick and Morty that focused on an obsession with Sichuan sauce
• McDonalds tried to get on board by offering limited-edition Sichuan sauce for one day
• Perhaps they were trying to set up a Tickle-Me-Elmo style craze, but more likely they just greatly underestimated the popularity of Rick and Morty, and they didn't have nearly enough for the throngs that showed up, some after driving for hours.
• Angry fans vented online. 

I don't want to turn this into a kids-these-days rant, or more precisely, a young-adults-these-days rant. After all, Rick and Morty fits into a longish tradition of cartoons that drop into the sweet spot between children's programming that displays imagination and flexible reality, and the fertile subject matter of the adult world. And I’ve been through that too.

In the past I’ve mentioned Ren & Stimpy being popular in my early years of university. In my later years at school, Teletoon was starting up, and we wasted many hours watching Duckman. Unfortunately, it’s been largely forgotten, but if you've ever wished that Family Guy and South Park had ripped off The Simpsons’ cleverness along with its irreverence, then it was the show for you.

After leaving University and getting my Adulting Licence, I watched a few cartoons in the same vein, such as Undergrads and The Boondocks. But mostly I’ve drifted away from the genre. Recently, I've seen slightly childish adult geeks like myself making references to Archer and Adventure Time, getting that same enjoyment out of it. I do feel a little jealous.

So I actually watched a few episodes of Rick and Morty once it started getting big, and it was indeed a fun show. But it will take a while before I get to the obsessed level. I have no desire for collectable McNugget sauce, though I wouldn't mind a Mr. Meeseeks.

And that's where we get to the kids-these-days part: I can't imagine my generation going this crazy to try to get limited-edition Gritty Kitty brand kitty litter.

So I can't really explain the current obsession. It could be that adult-oriented animation has become a big enough pop-cultural force that it's now attracting a wider swath of society. Where it was once followed by a few bored students, it has now reached a critical mass where it even appeals to a number of extreme fans who will band together to do things others find strange, like swarming a fast-food outlet.

Or it could be that this is just another aspect of society's already crazy priorities. People have long paid ridiculous amounts of money for items of nostalgia. If you don't have money to spend on your obsessions - but you do have time on your hands - then spending a few hours waiting in line at McDonald's for your cultural touchstone makes more sense than spending thousands on a rare lunchbox. Fittingly, some of the more expensive items of pop-cultural nostalgia are old animation cels.

Hollow Movies

This year there's going to be a live-action movie based on the 1980's cartoon, Jem and the Holograms. A trailer has been released, and fans are up in arms.

I didn't really understand the controversy, since the show was after my time. It was my experience growing up that kids watch cartons, but then around the time they get to the teens, they figure they've outgrown them. But by their late teens, they often come back: they've realized that the rest of television isn't that great, and they can use irony as an excuse for why they're watching cartoons even as they enter adulthood. Or maybe they just get high.

So I looked up the show on Wikipedia to try to understand it, and sure enough, it was on during my early teens. As the title suggests, it's about a rock group. But this being an 80's carton, it can't simply be about a rock group: the singer leads a double life using a holographic appearance generated by an advanced computer and projected through her magic earrings. Of course.

But judging by the trailer, the movie chucks all this, and has a straightforward story of teen girls hitting it big in the music biz after a YouTube clip goes viral. It's got themes of being true to yourself and your friends, and looks like an episode of Behind the Music as produced by the Disney Channel. So I can understand why fans of the original show are angry.

The Wikipedia article notes that the trailer for the movie has alienated the movie's target audience. Not so fast, anonymous Wikipedia editor: it's pretty clear the movie is being aimed at teenage girls, not the thirty-somethings who watched the original show. Of course that's more frustrating, since it means the studio might just get away with this cynical rebooting.

But it does bring up a question I've wondered about with this and many other movie remakes: why bother?  I know, most of them make sense. If the last Batman movie made money, a risk-averse studio will want to make a sequel or reboot. More distant tie-ins like Battleship are less obvious, but they are trying to cope with our fragmented and international media in which it's difficult to promote a movie, so you base it on a game that everyone alive has played.

But Jem and the Holograms was only on for a few years, and unlike contemporaries like Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it didn't really have a lasting media legacy that younger people might recognize. So why would you buy the movie rights to a show young people won't recognize, so you can make a movie for young people? It would make sense if you were buying it for a good premise that you think would appeal to new generations as it did with previous ones. But that's not the case here: they ignored the premise, and used only the name. If your audience doesn't know the brand, why not base it on an all-new concept that you don't have to pay someone to use.

Worse, the people who will recognize the source might be the parents of the target audience. Good luck getting teens to see a movie that gives their patents fond memories.

Occupying The Passing Lane

It's kind of forgotten now, but when Bill Clinton was first elected, he was promising a health care system. Of course, that effort went nowhere, and other aspects of Clinton's presidency are better remembered. So now we rarely remember "Clintoncare" except when some smartass reminds everyone that Republicans of the day made a counter-proposal that looked a whole lot like Obamacare.

So it's hard to believe now, but there was actually a computer game simulation of the health care effort. It was from the makers of SimCity (and lesser known contemporaries like SimEarth and SimAnt.)  Obviously, it was called SimHealth

I remember this, because of the first time I saw the SimHealth box in a store. I picked up the box to read it, partly out of interest in the game, partly out of amazement that such a thing exists. As I'm reading the box, a little kid wanders by, sees which game I'm looking at, and says, "I heard that game's too hard." And I thought, my god, I'm in a political cartoon.

That incident comes to mind because I found myself in another political cartoon today on the highway. Two semis were driving in the two right lanes. A Prius was about to pass them, but it got cut-off by a Cadillac driving wildly and way over the speed limit.  You've got business on the right, the rich ignoring laws, wiping out the middle class and hurting the environment.  All we needed was to work a Hummer into the scenario too.

Foiled Canadian Jilted Has-Been

In my first year of university, back in 1992, the coolest TV show for us first-year students on an all-male floor was Ren & Stimpy.  It was made by Nickelodeon in the U.S., but shown on MuchMusic in Canada.  Most of our residence floor would huddle in the TV room to watch.  That is, until it was taken off the air after a few months.

Interestingly, we found out later that it wasn't pulled from the schedule because of ratings, but because of regulations.  MuchMusic had a license to show music-related programming, and other than the odd episode, Ren & Stimpy wasn't about music.  (Fortunately, a few years later Much was able to import Beavis & Butthead, which did qualify as music-related.  But I had matured beyond it by then.)

The weird thing is that although we were angry at the time about being deprived of our favourite animated chihuahua and cat-ish blob, we shouldn't have been.  As you've surely noticed, the regulators are much more lenient on programming focus now, and MuchMusic has morphed into the teen drama channel.  In retrospect, Ren & Stimpy was the first step in that deterioration.  Had we known that at the time, I think we would have understood, and preferred to keep Much as a music station, especially if we had known that in just a few years, the Internet would allow university students to pirate all the TV from anywhere in the world that they could want.

Why am I bringing up this reminiscence of cartoons and government regulations?  Because today, TSN showed an episode of The Amazing Race.  And so, another channel begins its slow fade away.

Today's Special at the Acme Restaurant

Here's one for the category of "Cartoon cliches you rarely see in real life":

That's the first time I've ever been served a sandwich with an olive on a toothpick on it.  Thanks to the Charles Dickens Pub in Woodstock Ontario for giving me that honour.  It was very good, though I only got to eat half of it.  Before I could get to the other half, a mouse ran out from a perfectly semi-circular hole in the base board and ran off with it.  I would have chased the mouse as it ran out the door, but they were raising a piano into one of the upper floors outside, so I didn't think it was wise to get involved.