The Secret Life Of The Centre Square

 It's kind of depressing how fandom can come and go. I mean, there logically will be a last person alive who still misses Automan, what if it's me? That's why I find it reassuring whenever I see evidence of an old fandom. So if I come across Greatest American Hero fan fiction, I rejoice (but don't read it) because I'm glad to see passion for an older media franchise. And genuine passion too, not just someone name-dropping it to sound eclectic like I just did.

So recently, when I saw a personalized license plate that read "Zsa Zsa G," I found it reassuring. I was never a fan of the actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, but I'm glad that there's still someone around who misses her. So much so that I'm not going to do the math on the likelihood that it really is a Zsa Zsa Gabor fan, vs just someone named Zsa Zsa G. I don't think there's a big Hungarian community in town, so I'll just go with my initial assumption.

By the way, it's as good a time as any to revisit those 70s-80s pseudo-celebrities. It might seem weird to current generations, but there was a certain type of D-list celebrity that hung around on game shows or did guest spots on sitcoms, or appeared on a talk show in need of a human punchline. Today, we often talk about someone who's "famous for being famous," but that just means they are famous for reality TV or social media. But back then, these people just kept showing up on our TV and we weren't always sure why. 

Of course, those were real people, and in the modern day, we've learned more about them. It’s sort of like  when Dolly Parton was only known for her bustline, and Betty White was just another frequent TV star. It'd be quite a tragedy if society had never seen beyond that. Well, I’ve since learned that Charo was actually quite a good guitarist. Fannie Flagg wrote Fried Green Tomatoes. JM J Bullock lived with HIV for much of his career and co-hosted a talk show with Tammy Faye Bakker. Which reminds me:

Things Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #46:

An actress will win the Best Actor Oscar playing Tammy Faye Bakker.

Anyway, it’s unfortunate timing for that generation of borderline celebrities. Today’s media landscape is just built for such people: Then, they had to make do with guest appearances, but today they’d have reality shows, Hallmark movies, and so many social media followers.

It’s Time (Travel) For Tims

Tim Hortons is advertising retro donuts. That is, they're bringing back some of the old donut styles, for a limited time only.

On the one hand, that's nice. I miss dutchies too. On the other hand, this relates to a big part of why public opinion has turned against them in recent years: the selection is nowhere near what it used to be - it seems like every time you go in, there's one less thing on the menu. On the other hand, there will be some bizarre item that wasn’t there last time and won’t be there next time. These retro donuts are just the latest in the dizzying sequence of temporary specials.

I assume their strategy of recent years is to reduce the selection of available products to the bare minimum for efficiency's sake. They then compensate for the lack of variety by having the endless stream of temporary features. Hopefully you won't notice the jelly Timbits are gone if you're distracted by the new Chili Lasagne Bowls. But now the irony is that they're distracting us from the poor selection with the old selection.

I can understand why a company would want to restore some of what customers used to like about them. But being a temporary feature, it feels like a bit of a tease. “Hey remember how great it was when we had a wide variety of products? And you used to like us, not just tolerate us? That was pretty nice. Anyway, time's up! Next month’s feature is Chipotle Omelette Balls. Enjoy!”

I'm trying to imagine which other Canadian companies could restore what people used to like about them. Hudson Bay has already been having occasional pop-up Zellers stores, which is a similarly odd strategy of acknowledging what people used to like about the company, but without actually committing to it. I also remember Muchmusic had a daily retro video show a few years back, but even that’s gone now. Also, there’s quite a few companies like Sears where I’d say, it would be great if they’d go back to existing.

So enjoy the retro donuts while you can, and eat as many as your arteries will allow. If they sell well, maybe they’ll make a return, soon, and bring some of the extinct Timbit varieties with them. Until then, enjoy the Tuscan Sausage Dumplings.

How The Meaty Have Fallen

Years ago, I wrote a post about how many ads use “It’s Your Thing” by the Isley Brothers. The point was that it’s really over-used, and worse, lazily used — by advertisers looking for a cheap expression of … I don’t know, individuality, or something? I was pointing out that it just keeps getting warmed-over by the ad industry, despite it already being associated with the last second-rate brand that used it, and also, in complete obliviousness to how cliched it is. 

(After the recent passing of Rudolph Isley, I should point out that I have nothing against the song itself, but it’s become generic ad music, about as fresh as 70s Muzak.)

So I was absolutely shocked when I saw McDonald’s latest ad campaign built around that most over-used song. It might not be a surprise for younger people: Today, McDonald’s is just another established brand casting about for something that will appeal to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. (Seriously, that’s what they’re calling it.) 

But when I was younger, Mickey-D’s were legendary for their marketing prowess. Among anyone with the self-awareness to realize that marketing was happening, they were the epitome of corporate Svengalis making the public dance to their choice of tune. Children loved them. Teens loved them even though children loved them. Parents hated them but let their children drag them there anyway.

To be honest, I always thought the legend of their gastronomic propaganda was a little exaggerated. After all, if they could control the general public’s tastes, wouldn’t they choose something easier to make than burgers? I mean, they are a fairly complex food; they do have all the food groups one way or another. Wouldn’t it be more profitable to command everyone to desire raw soy beans or something?

But even if they were never a burger collective controlling the American palate, they were the pinnacle of twentieth-century marketing. Yes, they had missteps like the Arch Deluxe or their foray into Pizza. But on the other hand, they built an empire with a clown and a big purple lump, convinced kids to have their birthdays there, got us to drink some kind of orange syrup at public events, made the McRib into a major event, and made a legend out of a burger that’s half-bread and has an unclassifiable-sauce.

So it was a shock to see them build an ad campaign around this cliched song that a regional chain of muffler shops would be embarrassed to use. On the one hand, it’s kind of refreshing; instead of marketing going after the youths, here they’re going after, I don’t know, the Boomers, I guess? But it’s also a bit sad. It’s like a TV show that came back for one season too many, an aging rock star dabbling in smooth jazz, or an athlete that doesn’t know when to quit. Wow, I saw communism fall, and somehow the fall of McDonald’s marketing is more shocking.

Merry Mac’s

Where I grew up, the nearest store was a Mac's convenience store. Back then, they went by the name, "Mac's Milk," I suppose because in those days milk was the big draw for convenience stores. My dad would always call it, "Mac's the Milk," in reference to the song, Mack the Knife, famously recorded by Bobby Darrin in the 50's, but — and I didn't know this — written in 1928. Not the greatest pun, but, well, it's a dad joke. I wonder if I inherited that need to make misunderstood pop-cultural puns. (looks at blog post titles) Sigh.

Anyway, I — being a youngster — didn't understand the reference, and thus also referred to the store as "Mac's the Milk," thinking that was the actual name. My friends thought there was something wrong with me, since they also didn't get the joke, and of course, when you hear a young person saying something so nonsensical, you assume he's a little slow, not that he's the victim of a corny joke about music from a couple of decades back. And I should clarify that, in my childhood's memory, my dad 'always' said that. He probably did the joke like, twice, but in my early perception of time, it seemed like a lot.

My reason for going through this awkward, possibly deformed memory, is that the Mac's convenience store chain is mostly gone now, having been bought, and then rebranded out of existence. As the picture illustrates, they’ve all become Circle K. A brand that, fittingly, sounds like an old west cattle brand.

Of course, bygone brands are hardly news: I've already written about disappearing brands. But what's interesting is that brands disappear for different reasons. They might simply go out of business, or they might be bought out by a rival. But it gets a little more complicated when you find that the same company might operate in different places under different names. Perhaps they bought a local company and decided to operate with the name that locals already knew. For instance, the European food delivery firm Just Eat has bought some local services and used their names in those markets. So it goes by "Just Eat" in Europe, but it's known as "Skip The Dishes" in Canada, and "Menulog" in Australia & New Zealand. Yes, local branding is so important to them that they seriously made Katy Perry sing that jingle three times for the European, Canadian, and Australian & New Zealander markets.

(How much do I care about this blog? Enough to watch that commercial three times. Well, two-and-a-half.)

But in our globalized world, it often doesn't make sense to have different brands in different places anymore. After all, it's expensive to make specialized advertising, and people see advertising from different countries through the Internet, or international sports events, or movie product placements. And here in Canada, we're used to seeing our brands replaced by American ones, like Circle K. What's frustrating is that in this case, it's a Canadian company doing it. Quebec's Couche-Tard (or, "night owl") is a convenience store behemoth, owning lots of brands around the world, including Mac's. But Circle K is the most numerous, so when they decided to use one brand for all their English-language stores, they went with Circle K. I can understand the logic behind it, but it still feels like in Canada, even when we win, we lose.

Hold This Thread As I Walk Away

Scotiabank has been promoting a new book they're sponsoring, called The Hockey Jersey. The commercials make the point that it's to promote inclusion and tolerance. That's something everyone in hockey agrees is important,  but isn't too good at actually doing. And although Scotiabank are selling physical copies of the book, you can also download a digital copy for free from their website, which is the nicest thing a bank has done since, well, ever. 

It's about a bunch of young girls who come together as a team after they get their own hockey jerseys, which somehow look better than at least half of NHL uniforms. Of course, that title is similar to The Hockey Sweater, the classic story by Roch Carrier, about a boy in Quebec who is mistakenly given a sweater of the hated rival Toronto Maple Leafs, not the Montreal Canadiens sweater he wanted. There is also an animated version from the National Film Board available for streaming.

(As an aside, I love that in the middle of the Wikipedia synopsis of the story, they point out the plot hole: the fateful sweater was ordered from Eaton’s, and Eaton’s pioneered the money-back guarantee, so the mother could easily have returned or exchanged the sweater. Don’t ever change, Wikipedia.)

This being hockey, a lot of people will surely resent something new piggybacking on something old. But I think it gives us an opportunity. Can we finally give The Hockey Sweater a rest? When I was a kid it was really over-used in school. The story was drilled into us so much, one time in junior high, when the teacher announced that we’d be reading a wonderful new story called The Hockey Sweater, the whole class groaned. She was honestly surprised we had not only heard of it but were already sick of it. Now, I find out it was only written in 1979, and thus was a little less than a decade old at the time, so I can understand her not realizing how fast it had saturated the school system.

But it's easy to get why teachers were eager to use it: it's a perfect storm of sports, Canadiana, and situations relatable to kids. Also, looking back, I can appreciate how much of mid-twentieth-century Quebec life he squeezed in: People forced to do business in English, the towering authority of the church, the place of Maurice Richard as a hero. In the eternal quest to find things that will engage students, it sounds like quite a find. 

But there's a problem with The Hockey Sweater that really bugged me - I mean besides it being overused. I've been carrying this around with me ever since, so get comfortable.

It's not really a kids' story. Yes, I know, it's about children, but that doesn't mean they're the target audience. A story can be about children or through the eyes of children without being intended for them. To Kill a Mockingbird, Angela’s Ashes, Lord of the Flies, etc.

Like those books, The Hockey Sweater is pretty dark, when you look at it. The main character doesn't do anything wrong, but ends up a social pariah. His mother doesn't care about his situation. His religion blames him for his problems. And then there's the subtext that his people are trapped in a system rigged against them. Add a murder and it would be hailed as a classic of existentialism. 

An adult can appreciate a story of frustration and futility, but at the time, I found it really depressing. At a young age, children are still expecting stories to have a moral, or at least, to not be a nihilistic commentary of on the futility of life. 

That recounting of unfair situations is also the kind of thing that is best appreciated with a buffer of a few decades to protect you from the raw reality. Sure, now I can read a story about a kid ostracized for wearing the wrong clothes. That’s a common trope of stories about young people. But back then, it was your average weekday. Seeing that happen in a story, with no comeuppance for the bullies or actions by the adults in charge was, well, again: your average weekday. When his only hope for justice is divine-intervention moths, and that’s presented as the punchline, it just seemed hopeless.

So let's retire the Hockey Sweater. Print it on a Syl Apps jersey and lift it into the Bell Centre rafters beside Richard's number 9. That girl in the Scotiabank book can annoy future generations.

Mmmall Mmmemoirs

Today I was looking through news headlines and I was surprised to see a Toronto Star headline, "The Rise and Fall of the 90's Muffin." That intrigued me, because it combines two favourites of mine (the 90's and muffins, that is; not so keen on rise-and-falls.)

It turns out to be the story of the MMMuffins chain. If your personal journey through time and space hasn't taken you near that name, I'll tell you that they were a chain of muffin shops, predominantly in malls, in Canada, through the 80's and 90's. If you haven't heard of them, I'm sure you can think of a similar example of a chain that used to be ubiquitous but is now gone.

The chain is, surprisingly, not completely out of business: according to their website, they have precisely two locations left, one in Toronto, one in Montreal. Also strange about that: they have a website. It looks kind of weird to see an older name with "www." & ".com" around it. Just watch:

www.k-tel.com

www.fotomat.com

www.pan-am.com

www.americanmotors.com/gremlin

www.ptl.org

www.coleco.com/cabbagepatch

And that leads to my realization: stores can come and go without you even noticing. They're sort of like TV commercials. Sometimes I'll be watching something recorded a few months ago and I'll catch one of the commercials and be like, wow, where did you go? You were everywhere and then, boom, nothing. And I didn't even notice.

It's hard to believe, but entire store chains can disappear from consciousness, like MMMuffins. I'm pretty sure that at least once in the last twenty years, I asked myself, "hey, what ever happened to that MMMuffins place?" But on the other hand, I didn't even notice The It Store was gone until a few years back when I saw it on a Facebook meme of stores that have disappeared. They used to be a regular mall feature, now they're so forgotten they don't even have a Wikipedia entry.

So let's spare a thought for some of the chains that have disappeared unceremoniously from our malls:

Randy River

Northern Elements/Getaway

Big Steel Man

Bata

Thrifty's

Cotton Ginny

Coconut Joe

Lewiscraft

Leasure World

Direct Film

Smart Set

The Future Is Bunk

Ford has a new ad featuring Bryan Cranston in a variety of guises talking about innovation. The premise being that some unknown "other guys" are talking about doing futuristic things while Ford is and always has been actually building it.

The most dramatic part is the android Cranston, which is quite well done. It's like the ad grabs you and holds you out over the Uncanny Valley, and teases, "gonna drop you, gonna drop you!" Of course the fake TED talk is good too. But the president in the plane just looks so old-fashioned now. I mean, a president swamped with work? Weird. But I appreciated the concept the best, since I've always hated it when companies make vague claims about future technology. "Use Smith Brand soap. One day soon we'll bring you cyber soap."

The ultimate in future promises was a series of ads AT&T did in the early nineties. They made a lot of promises about future products like video phones and smart homes. That really ticked me off, because they were trying to sell us on things that they clearly were nowhere near delivering. Why not just promise us warp drive while you're at it?

At the risk of getting even further off track, someone uploaded the entire series to YouTube, and it's fascinating to see the view of today from a quarter-century ago. I'm pleasantly surprised at how much they got right. Well, they "got it right" in the sense that it would happen. In most of the cases, it wasn't AT&T that brought it to us. I wonder if there's grounds for a class-action suit here?

But back to Ford. Much as I like the idea of the ad, it all comes off pretty flat. For one thing, is "Paint it Black" really the best song to accompany the monologue? Let's talk about building the future with a song about depression. Okay, now that I think about it, I guess it was a reference to the Model T coming in black only, which was for the sake of standardization and efficiency, which was one of the innovations they're talking about. Just think, they've been sitting on that one since the song came out in the sixties.

The biggest problem, however, is that it's so out-of-step with reality. Ford is a company that just decided to dedicate itself primarily to Trucks and SUV's. Sure, those are popular, but in the public's imagination, they represent the Walmart parking lot more than the future. And they don't have a Prius or a Bolt in their line-up to point to as something they're pushing the limits with right now. So the climax of the ad is Cranston dissing other companies for not being futuristic enough while driving a bulky pickup that looks like it could have come from any time in the last couple of decades.

What's especially perplexing is that the ad and the campaign it's a part of is apparently supposed to be putting down tech companies. I had assumed that the vague "other guys" mentioned in the commercial were other car companies. But no, they're thinking of the tech companies that have been encroaching on the car biz. What? I know, I've been critical of such companies, but let's face it, it's quite an indictment of the American car business that Tesla has gotten as far as it has. Meanwhile, when I just went Googling for the latest on Ford electric vehicles, I just got promises that they have electric trucks coming soon. So this is the biggest self-own in advertising since Diet Coke's "Just For the Taste of it."

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Keep Listening

Like a lot of Canadians my age, I have fond memories of Muchmusic. Not just silly, embarrassed memories, but some genuine appreciation. Although it could be juvenile and amateur, they offered a wider variety of music than any radio station, and so cultivated a more mature appreciation of music that we would otherwise have had. Also, their many genre-based shows allowed young music fans a deeper dive into their favourite music than you could get anywhere else at the time.

As a young proto-hipster, I especially enjoyed their alternative music show, The Wedge, and its predecessor, City Limits. They introduced me to musical possibilities a kid in small-town Ontario would never have had a chance to be exposed to, some of which would become life-long favorites.

But like I say, it wasn't perfect, and I think it's time for a reckoning of some of Muchmusic's crimes. For instance, they sometimes gave musicians a poor introduction. I'm still kind of ticked that I didn't get into The Smiths until years later because Much convinced me they had nothing more to offer than "Girlfriend in a Coma." Is not a bad song, but not the catchiest in their catalogue, and surely not the one you would use to introduce people to the band.

But that sort of thing tended to happen: they'd arbitrarily overplay one song in a bands ouvre, denying viewers the chance to get a better idea of their music. To be fair, they were limited by the fact that is a video channel, and have a mandate to choose good videos. But I suspected that we were also at the mercy of taste-makers behind the scenes, and if someone at the station had a thing for a particular song, then we were just kind of stuck with it.

Which brings me to fellow Mancurians, The Fall. The only song of theirs that I ever recall appearing on Muchmusic was "Eat Y'self Fitter," which I thought was one of the worst songs I'd ever heard. So for years, I had a very negative view of them.

Occasionally, I'd see The Fall mentioned alongside legends of the Manchester Scene, which would confuse me, having written them off as talentless weirdos. Eventually, though, between Internet radio and YouTube, I got to hear some of their other songs, and was surprised to find that they were much better.

After the recent death of The Fall's singer-songwriter Mark E. Smith, there were more accolades for the band, so I checked out some more of their songs on YouTube, and again, they fit into a fun, creative flavor of post-punk that I appreciated. After a few songs, I noticed that "Eat Y'self Fitter" appeared in the list of suggested videos, so I tapped on it to see if it was really as bad as I remembered.

Indeed it was. I'd describe it as the musical equivalent of one of those terrible Saturday Night Live sketches where they repeat the same joke over and over, and it's not just unfunny, you're not even sure why it was supposed to be funny. So I Googled the song to see if I was the only one that had the same reaction, and I was shocked to find that it is one of the all time favorites of British uber-DJ John Peel.

So I guess the lesson here is that not everyone's tastes line up. And never judge a musician by one song.

Ghost Of The Machine

Apple is running a TV commercial showing a child doing all sorts of things with her iPad, ending with a neighbour asking what she's doing with her computer.  The child responds by asking "What's a computer?" I suppose the message is that the iPad is so unlike a conventional computer as to be unrecognizable. But I'm thinking that it's still pretty inconceivable that a kid would not have encountered a computer at that age, so the message I'm getting from it is that if you give your kid an iPad, your kid will be an idiot. I can't be the only one thinking that the child-actor's line delivery is particularly wooden, presumably because it's so unbelievable. She's probably wondering to herself why these adults find it so important that they see a distinction between computers with keyboards and computers without.

I don't really get it either. But it seems that adults have a big fascination with kids not knowing what obsolete technology is. Although the trend has subsided a bit, I can't count how many links I've seen passed around Facebook of videos of children perplexed by VCR's, Walkmans, phone dials, etc. First of all, I don't really know what the attraction is. I try to avoid seeing evidence of my age, but apparently some people can't get enough, like being unable to avoid picking at a scab or something.

But I also wonder about some of these kids. Just because you've never used something personally, you still get introduced to things a number of other ways. Usually that would be your parents and the media. I never had to place a call through an operator at a switchboard, but I saw them in movies. I never bought any records, but my parents had them. At some point it did occur to me to ask my parents why they had all these flat boxes with pictures of Elvis on them, as well as who this "Elvis" person was.

The fact is that we're all subjected to old-fashioned technology throughout society. Many people have noted the oddness that the 3.5" floppy is the universal symbol of saving a file, even though they haven't been used for years. And as I was thinking about this post, I came across this comic on that very idea. Old fashioned ideas often become symbols. I'm typing this entry on a web page that uses a picture of a bell to represent "notifications" even though bells have just been Christmas ornaments during my lifetime.

And also, you might be surprised how many things that are still in used in society that kids don't understand. I remember as a young child thinking that it was turning the steering wheel back and forth that made a car move. That wasn't because cars were obsolete, it was because this is a complicated world, and it takes a while to learn all about it. I was too distracted by learning grammatical structures and object permanence to learn the details of current technology. 

We all end up learning about a lot of the culture that came before us. You'll probably find that even kids have learned a lot about what came before them, eventually. Some kids are faster at picking it up, and some are slower. I've always assumed that they single out the latter for those "today's kids don't know what a flip-phone is" videos. Those kids are easy to find; they're the ones with iPads.

Can't Get Enough Of That Overthinking Commercials

Today at the grocery store, I happened to see a box of Sugar Crisp cereal, with its cartoon bear mascot, Sugar Bear. That bear has been around forever; I remember him trying to sell my generation cereal, now he's back for our kids.

I found him a little confusing as a child. I remember he started off as a normal anthropomorphic bear. Then they introduced the idea that eating Sugar Crisp made him into some sort of super bear. Okay, fine, we have the transforming hero trope. Even we youngsters had been introduced to that through Popeye. In Popeye's case, it was based on eating nutritious food, while Sugar Bear just had some sort of epic sugar high.

But at some point they seemed to forgo the transformation concept, and just had Sugar Bear be super powerful all the time. That seemed like a cheat. Even back then, I could see that the trade-off of this trope is that the hero has powers to defeat his foes, but also had normal human (or ursine) weakness. You can't just discard that and have him be some sort of all-powerful ultrabear who, for some reason, only battles enemies that threaten our cereal supply.

I wasn't sure if I remembered all this correctly - it's not like I actually ate Sugar Crisp. I prefered Cheerios, which only had that bee in the ads. He didn't introduce challenges to story-construction theories; his only problem was being short a couple of limbs. But it hit me: this over-formalized analysis of pop culture that used to just exist in my head, but now I often see it in another place too: Wikipedia. So I looked it up there, and sure enough, it very earnestly explained that in the mid-to-late 1980's, the super bear concept was dropped for a bear that simply had a "vitamin-packed punch."

Also, it turns out that it's only here in Canada that it's still called Sugar Crisp. It's become "Golden Crisp" in the U.S. to avoid association with sugar. But apparantly we don't worry about that. I'm not sure what that says about our respective countries.

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.

This Post Is Keyboard Approved

There's a car dealership in the area, Barry Cullen Chevrolet in Guelph, that used to advertise heavily on local TV. All their ads were built around the idea that he was "The Regional Dealer." That might take the form of a simple slogan ("Come down to Barry Cullen Chevrolet, The Regional Dealer!") or claims of superior service ("When you're The Regional Dealer, you can offer the biggest rebates.") I found all this curious because he never actually explained what the hell a regional dealer was or what was so great about it.

I was thinking about this because Nissan has been running ads bragging about things being "factory approved." Their rebates, technology, option packages: they gleefully exclaim that it's all factory approved.

I have no idea why this is such a selling point. You sometimes hear the term "factory approved" when referring to replacement parts, just to assure you that they aren't some warranty-voiding knockoff. When you think about it, it's an anachronistic term; really, you need approval from the designers and engineers, and presumably their lawyers. The factory in a struggling right-to-work state where robots weld together parts freshly trucked-in from Mexico probably doesn't have the clout to approve anything in the company.

But is there really a problem with non-factory-approved sales prices? Have you ever received a thousand-off a car price, only to later find out that the factory didn't approve it? Even if the factory didn't approve, would you really have a problem with it? If anything, I think I'd be a little more inclined to buy a car if they could assure me that my deal is just between the dealer and me, because the factory would be real pissed-off if they found out.

But I'm being naive, what surely happened is that a focus group stumbled across the fact that "factory approved" really resonated with the demographics that buy cars, and they overreacted, and tried to call everything "factory approved.” Really, we should just be glad they weren’t claiming everything is “chocolate covered.”

Train In Vain

Do you remember Consumers Distributing? If you're too young, or too non-Canadian, I'll explain that it was a catalog-based retailer. Their "stores" were little more than small warehouses with a few desks out front where you could order items. Then a sales person would go back into the warehouse and find they were out of your item and they'd have to order it.

Anyway, Consumers went under some time in the early 90's, and their stores became so many bingo halls. But I always thought that was such unfortunate timing. After all, who would be better positioned to take advantage of e-commerce, than a company who already had an ordering system and network of warehouses? If they could have just survived that early-nineties recession, they could have beat everyone to the market and ensured years of prosperity, instead of ending up as a retail footnote.

I'm reminded of how cruel business timing can be when I look at this:

This is a plaza near where I live. As you can see, it's seen better days. A number of businesses have come and gone, and it's mostly closed now. Its parking lot is small and hard to get into, it's off to the side of other shopping areas, and it's not the most prosperous neighbourhood to begin with.

The sad part is what you can see in the front of it:

It's a half-finished light rail station. Yes, this sad-sack plaza has suddenly become prime real estate, because it's right outside one of the stops on KW's new transit system. We've recently seen several other development projects started or announced near other stations, as they transform eyesores and vacant lots into hot properties.

So just think, if any of those businesses could have just hung on for a few more years, they'd be looking great right now, with a big source of foot traffic dropped right in front of them  Instead, it will fall to new businesses to take advantage. Someday soon, the closed stores will be filled by over-priced coffee shops, whose patrons will be unaware of the ghosts of short-lived nail salons around them.

Movie Star Killed The Video Star

It’s too bad the Age Of Blogging didn’t overlap the Age Of Music Video. The world could have wasted so much time writing about them. I'm reminded of this after watching the glorified podcast that is the remains of Muchmusic. They have a show called Retro Lunch, which defines "retro" as 70's, 80's and 90's, and "lunch" as 1-3 pm.

I had plenty of opinions on videos: black & white is over used, concert videos are a cop-out, ironically cheap videos never work, opening credits just look pretentious. But there is one truth above all: movie soundtrack videos always suck.

Okay, there are a few examples that work, but that's usually because they break out of the usual format of scenes of the band playing interspersed with random clips from the movie.

At the time, I recognized that this didn’t work, since it's just forgettable images of the band without even the energy of the concert videos, combined with movie scenes so brief that they don't really tell any story. The weakness of music videos was that they often devolved into random images, and movie videos were the worst example of this.

And it got worse if the song ended up being much more popular than the movie. A band does a song for a Julia Roberts vehicle, they use scenes from the movie in the video, then the movie tanks. Everyone forgets the movie, so they won't recognize where the clips come from. So now future generations will wonder how the band got Julia Roberts to be in one of their videos, and why they just had her appear in a few disjointed scenes.

This problem was bad enough when it was just a few years after the movie. But now it’s just surreal to see a song you remember, by a musician who’s a legend, with scenes of a movie you don’t remember. You can’t even figure out what the movie is about from the short clips, and you’re trying to remember the name of that guy in the movie who was in that other thing with whatsisname.

Fully, Completely

I've gotten to the age where I've seen things through from start to finish. Athletes, TV shows, politicians, etc. And somehow, that hasn't seemed like a big deal. Free agency has made sports careers so disjointed - you don't think of a twenty-year career so much as a series of episodes with different teams. And I saw Stephen Harper go from nobody to Prime Minister to retirement, and it didn't really seem that long. I've seen musicians go from unheard-of to the Rock hall of fame, yet that hasn't been really emotionally impactful. It hardly even makes me feel old.

However, it's been different with The Tragically Hip, playing their last concert. Obviously, that's partly because of the unfortunate circumstances of singer Gord Downie's health. But it's also because they were making it big around the time I was becoming musically aware in the late 80's/early 90's. Essentially, I've been around for their whole career, from that moment of wondering "What is this song about New Orleans that Muchmusic keeps playing." Which I guess is why it seems more personal. And I deserve bonus points because my family visited Bobcaygeon years before the song. Of course, as a Gen-Xer, I'm not really used to this feeling of something I grew up with becoming a cultural touchstone. I'm not sure how that happened.

That's just one way in which the band has seemed to defy pop-cultural gravity. They're also famous for being the only band that has become big in Canada without becoming big in the U.S. It should be impossible to get enough exposure in Canada to get so well-known unless you use the power of American media. But somehow The Hip have spread without it. On a similar note, I haven't really listened to them much in the last decade or so. And yet even if I'm not actively following their career, they've always been in the background. When people have described them as being the soundtrack to the nation, it may sound like hype, but it's actually an apt description.

I read this article by Damian Abraham of the punk band Fucked Up. He describes coming to appreciate The Tragically Hip's music and Gord Downie as a person. First of all, praise for The Hip written as an introspective and self-deprecating article by a foul-mouthed punk may be the most Canadian thing I've ever seen. But more to the point, I think he has a good handle on their place in the country, including his attempt to describe them to foreigners as our Bruce Springsteen. After all, they have the same odd blend of intellect and blue-collar appeal.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised, coming from the country that gave the world Rush. Again, we may be seeing the emergence of a distinct culture here in Canada, just be patient.

Blog Features Giants

There's a new movie out called The BFG, based on the book by Roald Dahl. So apparently Dahl is going to be the kid's version of Philip K. Dick, with Hollywood grinding-out every one of his books eventually.

Of course, there's a problem here. The book came out in 1982, so for someone my age, it would have appealed to slightly younger people. So when I hear "BFG," I think of the weapon of that name from the Doom video game. It came out when I was in my second year of University, close to its target demographic, so I'm sure I'm not the only one. Just the association with a violent video game is an unfortunate thing, even before you consider what the word between, "Big" and "Gun" is.

The hilarious part is, you know someone at the studio did research on this, studying just what percentage of the population associated the three letters with each media property. I guess it makes sense: it's a fight between Generation X and the Millennials, and the latter wins on both numbers and likelihood to go to movies.

But here's something I never thought of before: I can understand wanting to put "friendly" in the title, since that's not how giants are usually portrayed. But "big" though? "Big giant" is redundant, since giants are, by definition, big. So it should just be "The FG," or, "The Friendly Giant." Well, Mr. British author and American director, that's a concept we in Canada pioneered, and we didn't even need any CGI to do it.

Wearing The Pants In The Family

Well, I've just got to put the finishing touches on this post about the decline of Canadian print media and... wait, what's that? The Kamloops Blazers are wearing Cooperalls? Stop the presses!

If you're not familiar with the concept: in the early eighties, the Cooper sports equipment company experimented with long pants for hockey players, rather than the shorts-and-socks of tradition. They were briefly used by a few NHL teams, as well as in many minor leagues, but they fell out of favour and disappeared. (And to be clear, I now find that "Cooperall" was just one brand, and it was Kleenexed into being the name for all of the pants. It turns out the pants used in the NHL were not actually Cooperalls™.)

Cooperalls had become something of a punchline in recent years, so it was quite a shock when I was chanel-surfing and came across the Sportsnet Junior Hockey game of the week, with one of the teams in pants. I assumed that they just had weird socks that look like part of the shorts, but no, they were pants. Needing to convince myself I wasn't going crazy, I searched Twitter for "Kamloops Blazers" and found that nearly all the current tweets were commenting on the pants, with no mention of the game itself.

It turns out that this was a promotion, an eighties throwback night. You have to have respect for that kind of throwback. No cheap third jerseys or asking the audience to turn up in pastels, they went for truely retro uniforms. But what was really surprising is that people seemed supportive of it. Most of the aforementioned tweets were positive, appreciating the quirkiness and irony of it.

I found that surprising because hockey tends to be a sport that really takes itself seriously, and I would argue too serious. A sport that has some - let's face it - strange aspects could really benefit from learning to laugh at itself. It was refreshing to see people applaud instead of shouting-down a deviation from the traditional orthodoxy.

Maybe it was because this was Junior hockey. Maybe it was because it's the first time, and there'll be a different reaction if lots of teams break out the pants every season. Or it could be that Cooperalls have just receeded far enough into the rear-view mirror that they can be regarded as part of hockey tradition. Either way, I'm not expecting fans to welcome back the Fox Trax puck any time soon.

Speaking Words Of Wisdom

So I recently stumbled across the fact that both Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles covered both "Let It Be" and "Eleanor Rigby." If you'd like to hear them, um, consult this handy chart:

	Let It Be	Eleanor Rigby
Ray Charles	here	here
Aretha Franklin	here	here

I don't know, I just feel like someone should have mentioned this.  Yes, I know, you Baby Boomers were busy telling us we were lazy and should stop doing drugs and playing video games.  But if you were sitting on some intriguing musical nugget like that, you could have slipped it in there.  Say, tell us that we should get a job and be a productive member of society, like when Franklin collaborated with Duane Allman to cover The Band's "The Weight."

I guess the entire cultural heritage produced by a generation is a lot to pass on the younger folks.  Despite all of our society's celebration of the Beatles, there were still many people who didn't put two and two together and realize that Paul McCartney used to play bass for the Beatles before his solo career.  It's like, whoops, did we forget to mention that?

So now I'm wondering what we in Generation X may have forgotten to mention.  It's not just weird covers necessarily, though if that's what you're looking for:

• Tori Amos covering Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
• Alanis Morissette covering Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"
• R.E.M. covering U2's "One"
• AlexisOnFire covering Midnight Oil's "The Dead Heart"

Hmm, what else.  Well, the guy from Foo Fighters was the drummer from Nirvana.  Don't fall for the conspiracy theories passed around social media - they're just trying to make fun of you.  And if you haven't heard, you should really know about Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke's fathers, just so you get the full ironic appreciation of their careers that we've been treated to.  Oh, and we're really sorry that we almost erased "Under Pressure" and "Superfreak" from the musical cannon by making half-assed samples into hits.  Check out the originals if you haven't already.

All Those Moments Will Be Lost In Time...

During the hype for the new Star Wars, there was a tweet passed around that dared you to quote any line of dialog, or name more than one character, from Avatar. Of course, that should be easy, since Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all time, at least for the next few days. Lots of people couldn't do it, which underlines the weird way pop-culture works.

When I was a kid, I remember going to the movies in 1982, and they had three movies playing. (Three screens! How adorable!) This stuck on my mind because I, unlike most of the world's movie-goers was excited about seeing Tron, while one of the other screens was showing E.T., which was turning out to be far more popular. In my mind's eye, I think the other screen was showing Blade Runner. I could just be imagining that, but according to the release dates, that seems likely.

In retrospect, it's interesting to see how those three movies have taken such different trajectories. E.T. was a huge hit, breaking Star Wars' box office record. It was also a cultural phenomena, getting referenced, spoofed and imitated all over. Yet it faded quickly from the public's memory over the years. The 20th anniversary reissue bombed. And now, at a time when other 80's blockbusters have had amazingly long lives, it gets ignored.

Tron was hugely anticipated, but died at the box office. For a while it was remembered only as the cinematic equivalent of the Edsel. But it maintained a following among us weird kids, and then when we took over the world, we elevated it to cult classic status, and it eventually got an unexpected big budget sequel.

Blade Runner was a disappointment at domestic theatres, but did better in Europe. Then it got rescued by, of all things, the director's cut reissue on video. It's reputation grew, and now it's regularly mentioned as the greatest Science Fiction movie of all time.

And we can see the same sort of things happening with newer movies. Avatar may not be as well remembered, despite its success. On the other hand, the previous James Cameron movie that held the box office record, Titanic, does seem to have maintained space in the hearts and minds of the public, at least if the there-was-room-on-the-lifeboat-for-Jack discussions are anything to go by.

The same thing happens in other media too. When I first noticed it, I called it the "Grand Funk Railroad phenomenon," after the band that broke Beatles' records in the 70's only to be forgotten by the 80's. Or on TV, there was The Cosby Show, which was very popular when it was on the air, but even before its star was revealed as a sexual predator, had faded from the public consciousness.

So what causes this? I've been trying to come up with some commonality to explain the fates of these pop-cultural artifacts, but I can't find it. For any rule about what makes something last, I can come up with a counterexample. Any ideas?