I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

BEST & WORST CHRISTMAS COMMERCIALS, 2004!

(Also, thoughts on the newer Peanuts special)

Okay, just one more post. Just to give you a little something to chew on for a couple of days.

I have so much else to think about right now, it's hard for me to remember that Christmas is less than two weeks away. However, I've seen enough Christmas commercials by this point that I can confidently declare my most and least favourite Christmas campaigns.

BEST

Office Max: "Santa's Helper" ("Rubberband Man")



This commercial has a stop-motion animation version of the very seventies Blaxpoitation-type "Rubber Band Man" character from Office Max's continuing campaign (the live-action version is played by actor Eddie Steeples) going around old Christmas special settings like a wintry town and the North Pole, giving kids, elves, and Santa Claus alike untraditional gifts of the sort you'd buy at an office supply store like Office Max.

I'll admit, I didn't know what to make of the "Rubber Band Man" song since I couldn't really make out what the kids were singing in the song the first dozen times I heard it, but it's hard not to love the stop-motion animation, directed by Chel White of Bent Image Lab in the style of the 1960s Rankin-Bass specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and you can see in the (visual only, though with the song) "making of" video on the official OfficeMax.com "Rubberband Man" Holiday site that it all really is stop-motion animation done without cheating using CG like that Rudoplh the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys sequel special from a few years back where they sort of captured the look of the original but the CG animation was just too smooth and lacked the jerky-animation charm of the original (and the textures were too obviously CG). As far as I can tell, only small touches were added in post-production using computers: erasing the electrical wires for the lights using compositing software like Combustion and adding snowflake effects (since there is no practical way to do falling snow in stop-motion animation as you can't make the "flakes" stop in mid-air; even in the old Rankin-Bass productions, they had to draw in the snowflakes separately).

You can read more about the commercial here, and Bent Image Lab has a better-quality version of the commercial than the one seen on the Office Max site.

Here are the lyrics, which are an edited version of The Spinners' "Rubber Band Man". I put the lyrics for the Rubberband Man in BLUE, the kids in RED, and the Abominable Snowman in GREEN.



Hand me down my walkin' cane,
Hand me down my hat!

Hey y'all, prepare yourself for the rubberband man.
You're bound to lose control,
When the rubberband starts to jam.

A-ha! This dude is outta sight!
Everything he does,
Seems to come out right.

Hey y'all, prepare yourself for the rubber band man.
You're bound to lose control,
When the rubber band starts to jam.

How much of this stuff does he think we can stand?
(Rubber Band.)
So much rhythm, grace, and debonair from one man.
(Just one man.)
Rubber Band Man
Rubber Band!
(Gotta Get Down! Gotta Get Down!)



WORST:

(Sung vaguely to the tune of "O Tannenbaum"/"Oh Christmas Tree"... or the old Labour Party anthem.)

Those Old Navy commercials with the carolers,
Have really gotten on my nerves.
They ignore the rhyme and the rhythm of the stanzas,
Which is the joke, but that's no excuse.

I can't believe that I'd prefer,
The Old Navy "Holiday Hotline" commercials,

The ones from last year with "The Nanny", Fran Drescher,
saying "My shizzle's gone fazizzle" or something.

(Now sung vaguely to the tune of "Good King Wencelas", since I ran out of space.)

Even Fran Drescher speaking like Snoop,
Wasn't as annoying as this.
Lasr year's commercials had kind of
A "so awful, they're good" quality about them.

I'd say that I'd boycott Old Navy,
But I prefer buying clothes at department stores anyway.
I don't like pushy boutique salespeople,
And they don't have many stores in Canada.

...

Also, I saw, for the first time, last year's Peanuts Christmas special, "I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown". I was prepared to hate it, especially since it was on the wrong network, ABC, so I was deprived of the spectacular "A CBS Special Presentation" sequence with the spinning "SPECIAL" logo and the music, even though I don't think that CBS has actually used that logo sequence, originally from 1973, since the 1980s. The CBS Special logo music is one of the earliest sounds I associated with Christmas, and, to a lesser extent, Hallowe'en. (Fear not, you can get your CBS Special logo sequence fix here, and the "Brothers Chaps" recycled the music for the HomestarRunner.com "specials" "A Holiday Greeting" and "The Best Decemberween Special" and is Strong Bad's Marshmallow Roast invitation music in "Luau".)

Plus, the quality of the Peanuts specials basically has been in decline since the early 1980s. I won't discuss the horrors of the hilariously dated 1984 special, "It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown", spoofing Flashdance, though Matt Caracappa should consider reviewing it in X-Entertainment sometimg.

And the biggest strike against this character was that it featured the character Rerun Van Pelt, Lucy and Linus's little brother, who seems to be a year or two older than he was during the Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show days of the mid-80s but who is still in Kindergarten. Rerun is basically the Peanuts version of the "ancillary character who is basically a younger, often smarter, version of an existing popular character on the show" and joins the ranks of The Muppets' Robin the Frog, Scooby-Doo's Scrappy Doo, and Sailor Moon's Chibi-Usa/Sailor Chibi Moon/Rini/Sailor Mini Moon (though, don't worry, Stephanie Beard a.k.a. "Sugar"/"Suga Baby" from YTV's The Zone and the dub voice of "Rini", I like Chibi-Usa and think she gets a bad rap). And how retarded is it to have a younger version of Linus? Linus is already a fairly young boy, not being any older than about 7 years old.

But... sorry, I liked the special overall. Why? Because it actually showed Snoopy's brothers, and not just Spike, the mustachioed version of Snoopy who lives in the desert in Needles, California, but also Andy, the one with frizzier fur, and, Olaf, the chubby one. Even though the Peanuts strip was declining in quality in the final few years leading up to Charles M. Schulz's death in 2000, with the farewell retirement message strip published on the day he died in many newspapers that run the Sunday strips on Saturday, a rather freakish and tragic coincidence, Olaf was still a great addition to the strip and... it's just impossible for me to hate anything with Olaf in it. So, it was nice to see him animated, even if it was just a cameo. Made the entire special worthwhile. And you got to love Spike too, who was featured in this episode, moreso than any other Peanuts special or Saturday morning episode I remember.

And, while the Christian subtext of the original special is mostly gone, they did have a token Christmas story pageant scene so you can't complain that it's completely secular, which would be fine for Garfield, but Charles M. Schulz was a man with a very sincere religious faith, so it wouldn't be appropriate for them not to mention Jesus at all in a Christmas special, regardless of whether or not you think of Jesus as being "all that".

Overall, I thought it was the best Peanuts special *that I have seen* since, at least, "What Have we Learned, Charlie Brown" from, I think, 1983, but that's not saying too much. It doesn't approach "A Charlie Brown Christmas" but it still can be appreciated for what it is, even if you don't care for Rerun in general, it's still a cute enough story of how Snoopy and his brothers try and compensate for his parents' total dislike of dogs.

...

By the way, I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep, but I will try and get at least some of the remaining chapters of "30 Days, 30 Years, 30 Boring Stories" finished during the holidays. I wanted to finish it in September, but those things were a lot more energy-draining to write than you'd ever believe, and, by the middle of the month of September, I was increasingly getting too distracted when the plan to sell the house and move to Ottawa went from being a vague idea to something much more concrete.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 3:25 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

IS THIS MY FINAL POST? FROM QUEBEC, I MEAN.

This may possibly be my last post from Quebec, at least as a Quebec resident (for the time being).

John returned to Vancouver on Sunday morning, taking his X-Box and Gamecube with him. :( Not too long after my parents got back home from Dorval... umm... Trudeau Airport, we got a knock in the door, and it was... well, who it was isn't important, but he, or she, had found the key to the Ford F-150 somewhere in the street so we didn't have to pay to replace the key after all (though we did have to pay for the two extra days). It was a shame we lost the key, but my mother seems to think that, with all the things going wrong with our move, if I had gone to Ottawa, the truck would have gone into a fatal skid or something like that.

The past three days, I've mainly been packing boxes, mostly books and CDs. A lot of the boxes seem to be recycled from past moves, and they're from many points around the globe. I have crates from Les déménageurs bretons from the province of Brittany in France, DMS (Deutsche Möbelspedition) from Germany, and, Horizon Movers from Belgium, and this is the strange one, Class International Movers, which is a normal-enough sounding company name, except they're from Lima, Peru, yet the box is completely in English. Even the branded packing tape is in English. I knew there was a substantial minority of Japanese-Peruvians, but are there many Anglo-Peruvians? I thought that Guyana was the only country with a substantial English-speaking population in South America. Or is English just fashionable?

Since I have so much to empty out of my room, including three whole 6-foot bookshelves that were packed, often with two rows of books on each shelf, I've been sleeping the past couple of nights on my sister's old bed in her old bedroom in the basement. One thing we didn't need to keep was the bunk bed I shared with my brother, Nick, who started living mainly outside of home in 1997. The top bunk had a normal mattress but the bottom bunk, which I slept on, was a futon, which is what I've been sleeping on pretty much every night for the past seven years, exluding those nights I slept at the apartment, back when I had one, and when I was on vacation. A futon wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but, yeah, compared to a mattress, I got little support and did wake up some days with a sore back. Now that I'm back on a proper mattress, I don't think I could ever sleep on a futon on a regular basis again. Even if I lived in Japan for a period of time, I think I would try and see if I could procure myself a proper mattress. We gave the bunkbed to the family across the street, but the father and his handyman friend had to come around this evening to my bedroom to disassemble it first, which was not that much of an easy task considering all of the crates and bookshelves in my room though they got the pieces in the van in only about half an hour, a feat I found quite impressive.

I know I said I was planning on doing a whole bunch of "Fuck You" and "I Hope You All Get Fired" type messages, but I'm just not in that spiteful a mood today. Except for the striking SAQ workers (SAQ = Société des alcools du Québec, the government-run liquor stores). Since I have to get up really early on Friday, since they can't move the bed if I'm sleeping on it, and I am, by nature, an insomniac, I'll need the big guns to get me to sleep early on Thursday night, and, by "big guns", I mean "vodka screwdrivers". I was going to go downtown and do some things, including watching Sideways, tomorrow, but I still have a lot of things to do at home, so I'll have to see if I can get me some Absolut Mandrin at Fairview Pointe-Claire when my mother goes there after dropping the dogs off at Possumplace kennels, assuming the SAQ is open. If there are picketers there, I might mutter "Fuck you. I hope you all get fired!" under my breath, though I'll turn up the volume a bit if one of them actually tries to engage me.

Though it's necessary for me to move to Ottawa, just for the better employment opporunities, it certainly is not easy for me to leave the house I've lived in for 23½ of my 30 years. I wish I had something more profound to say, but... eh... I'm drawing a blank.

I thought we wouldn't have the Internet in Ottawa until at least next week, but my father seems to think they already have the Internet connection ready there, so, I might be back on the air in this blog as early as Saturday if I'm lucky. So, if I don't write anything else before then, I will just say that, for the most part, Quebec is a lovely province to live in despite the best efforts of the politicians and language zealots to make Anglophones' lives as difficult as the law will allow.

Take care, everyone!

posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:23 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

BRETT HULL MAKES A FUNNY AND MY FINAL PINCOURT BLOCKBUSTER ANECDOTE.

I haven't said anything about the Canadian Supreme Court's re-definition of marriage to include gay couples due to my own total lack of being able to care passionately about the issue one way or the other, but, on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment, one of the female anchormen, I think Amy Poehler, had a special guest on the segment tonight, the Phoenix Coyote's Brett Hull, mainly to have him do a couple of mild, not offensive to NHL management, jokes about the NHL strike, but then she brought up Brett Hull's Canadian citizenship and asked him about what he thinks of the Supreme Court's decision, and he had the best line of the night: "That's what you get in Canada when there's no hockey."

I had just gotten back from Pincourt Blockbuster, where I made my last rent ever from that particular Blockbuster location, a week-long rental of The Punisher which I will have to take back on Thursday since I don't think Blockbuster Video will let me return a copy rented in Pincourt to an Ottawa location. One thing I was very pleased to see was that they actually had a couple of copies of former Clinton adviser-turned-FOX News and New York Post commentator Dick Morris's counter-documentary, FahrenHYPE 9/11, exposing Michael Moore's half-truths, stretches of the truth, and total fibs, on display right below Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. I were impressed that they were even able to get copies of that in Canada; they must have gone out of their way to get those copies. Too bad I won't be able to rent it from that location, but I wasn't in a documentary mood. I'm sure that they'll have copies of it for rent at Blockbuster in Ottawa.

So, ro commemorate this momentous occasion, my final rental from Blockbuster Video worldwide location #07156 a.k.a. Pincourt Blockbuster, I wrote a special farewell ode to my local Blockbuster inspired by seventies Canadian singer Terry Jacks, who single-handedly gloomied up the Oh, What a Feeling CD box set, a compilation of famous Canadian rock hits, with his "Seasons in the Sun".

Goodbye, Pincourt Blockbuster,
I've been renting from you since Adrian worked there.
Though you lacked obscure movies,
I rented lots of DVDs,
Paid my fair share of late fees.

Goodbye, Pincourt, it's hard to move.
But my work situation has to improve.
My finances are fucked,
Can't get a job 'cause my French sucks.
In Ottawa, I'll have more luck.

We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun,
But the mall in Pincourt needs an English-tongue bookstore.

In loving memory of renting mainstream crap from Pincourt Blockbuster,
1995-2004.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:16 AM 0 Comments Links to this post