Hola, Sneakers. Welcome to the Episode 463 of the show that never blows.
It! I forgot to say “it”. Oof!
Anyway, this week Ian and David are starting with abject apologies; calling for action; baiting squirrels; making sweet sweet potatoes; confusing names; hailing Otto Lowy; knocking opportunities; talking talk radio; telling a touching story with a heartfelt moral; bemoaning kids these days; pitching woes; anxious about anxiety; all for equal opportunities; having agoraphobiaphobia; taking tricky tests; declared Grodinheads; hot for Heat; updating Scorsese; taking down The Snowman; watching The Key Party Murders; researching on Mr. and Mrs. Skin; oozing pus; taking miracle drugs; having dermatological fun; happening upon adult movies…again; having kids encounters; wench guessing; voting for death; asking whatever happened to brother Chuck; remembering the height of meat prices; jealous of Angel’s chili; figurin’ figurines; getting cereal-ized; feeling the Kondo crunch; squealing to death; naming that tune; anti anti-heroes; talking talking tigers; and, finally, singing descriptive theme songs.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the Week: What was your favourite cereal as a child? What is your favourite cereal now?
Sub-question of the Week: What’s the best prize you ever got from cereal, Cracker Jack, Kinder Surprise, Red Rose Tea, etc.?
Ian’s wife Pia talking about her work!
I guess they really were a thing!
Captain Crunch with cinnamon. Also a thing!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I’ll lead this week by attesting that my last name is in fact, not fake. It is original and adopted from several generations back according to my Father’s work in genealogy. It’s been misspelled, mis-pronounced and misunderstood but I can safely state right here in front of the Sneaky Dragon audience that it is the real deal and it’s all mine. This doesn’t excuse the instance that my first girlfriend’s brother’s girlfriend thought my name was Edra Ganski (for real) or that I may or may not be related to the famous researcher Bogdan Draganski but I can unequivocally prove that I am the official bearer of the name Draganski.
My wife’s maiden name was Goodpasture, which I’ve always thought sounded like a Bond Girl’s name but now I’ve claimed her under the Draganski title as well. At least her first name isn’t Pussy.
My address is on its way. More later after I procrastinate writing you guys until Wednesday night.
My favourite cereal was cocoa pops. Do they have those in North America? Cocoa Puffs maybe? Anyway, they turn the milk chocolate so it was always a treat to drink up the milk at the end.
These days I just make my own oatmeal with apple, cinnamon, almonds, coconut and maple syrup (or substitute the apple and cinnamon with peaches and nutmeg when it’s peach season).
As for prizes in cereal, I do remember shrink-a-dinks, specifically smurf ones. They were kind of like big vinyl stickers (though not sticky) but you put them in the oven for a couple of minutes and they shrink down to little puffy plastic pictures you could glue to your school folders. Or they might have had a hole in them so you could put them on a keychain. We burnt many a shrink-a-dink, which brought on a lot of tears because we typically weren’t allowed to buy sugary cereals all that often.
In Australia, we had our own sort-of Kinder Surprise eggs called Yowies (a Yowie is a fabled bush creature like a Jackalope, I guess) that had Australian animals in them that you could put together, but there were also rare Yowies to find and collect that were solid, unlike the puzzle-piece animals. So my friends and I figured out you could weigh the Yowies at the pick-and-mix station where they all weighed between 72 – 79 grams except for the Yowies that weighed just over 80. We bought SO many Yowies with those solid little buggers in them, then sold them to the local card store that bought the rare ones, that we flooded ourselves out of the market. Oops. Got some extra comic money there for a while though!
Best cereal prize: in the 1990s, Chex Mix cereal came with a PC game called Chex Quest, which was basically a reskinned version of Doom, remade to be as kid-friendly as possible. Instead of demons, you fight slime monsters from another dimension, and your weapons don’t actually kill anybody, they simply teleport the monsters back to their home dimension. I remember the game being pretty fun, certainly more fun than anything else I ever got out of a cereal box. Apparently this game has been remade recently, but I haven’t gotten a chance to play the new version.
Despite Chex Quest, my favorite cereal as a kid overall was probably Honey Nut Cheerios.
Some Cracker Jack prizes I liked were these little plastic photos of wild animals that moved back and forth when you tilted them (also known as Lenticular 3-D pictures.) My family would go to Whitecaps soccer games at the old Empire Stadium and we’d get boxes of Cracker Jack from the concession. If there was a lull in the action, you could always amuse yourselves by making an ostrich or an elephant move in the palm of your hand.
My favourite cereal growing up was Honeycomb which we were only got when we were camping. My favourite cereal now is Nature’s Path Pumpkin Seed and Flax Granola which has less sugar and more fiber. But it doesn’t have a great jingle like the old commercial Honeycomb song which I found out later it was from a hit country song. It surprised me as a kid when I learned a jingle’s tune was from preexisting song. Like the “When You Eat Your Smarties” song which was sung to the tune of the truly awful “Does your chewing gum lose its flavor?” Is there a song that was ruined for you (or improved) by its use in a commercial?
I’ve mentioned Freakies as one of my favorite cereals growing up but it was like Captain Crunch and tore my mouth up, there’s only so much of that one can take. In my mind it seems like there wasn’t the variety back then that we have now. I do remember the Jean LaFoote Cinnamon Crunch quite well when it was introduced and I liked anything cinnamon. I recall going through phases, I had my Lucky Charms phase, Quisp phase, Cinnamon Toast Crunch phase and Cookie Crunch phase….I tried them all. Remember KaBoom? They looked like clown faces, I did that one too. The only demand made from my Mom when she bought a new cereal at the store was that I had to eat it all before she bought another one, I was a skinny, lanky kid and I burned off all that sugar without even trying.
Now that I’m a type 2 diabetic, my choices are limited. I’ll agree with Ian that the Quaker Oats Squares are wonderful but even they have too much sugar for me. So now I spend even more time on the cereal aisle squinting at the sugar content on each box hoping it’s somewhere below eight grams or less. Cheerios is good for me, so I’ll eat that, so are a few of the other healthier options like Life, Kix or plain oatmeal. I’m just happy there’s something I can eat at all and I can still have as much coffee as I want.
Freakies comes to mind again when you ask about prizes, I had all of them. Freakies reign supreme when it comes to the collectivity the cereal manufacturers wanted us kids to engage in. I remember a cereal that had a record inside, one of those flimsy plastic ones that only played a few times, that was cool even though I don’t remember what was on the record. Being a Star Wars fan I gravitated towards the brands that promoted each new Star Wars film with lightsaber spoons, trading cards or character pens. I had fun for years with all that stuff. For a few Summers in the 70’s the 7-Eleven we could walk to from my house had Marvel Superhero plastic Slurpee cups that we collected. Later on the cups stopped featuring the superheroes and went back to paper but on the inside bottom of the each cup was a round pog that you could pull out and collect. They featured superheroes, rock bands or a TV show. They usually were lenticular and you didn’t know what you were going to get until after you bought your Slurpee and were walking home.
Hi,
Thanks guys, I’m feeling a little bit less lonely, I was even wondering if will open a bottle of french coca cola, you know, Champagne. Same bubbles, better taste and you didn’t have to add cheap whisky or rum to get drunk. And you mostly know what’s inside, you can even find organic ones ! A total bargain.
Yeah ! At last somebody agrees with me about mister Fincher. Seven… pouah… one of the rare film I really hate, I get out of the theatre really upset, thinking that I had at least the chance not to be an American. I had the feeling that he just spit on the American viewer and by ricochet at any viewer.
Then a friend of mind sold me Fight Club, quite some time after Its theatrical release, saying I will love it because it was taking an aim at the consumerist society, with a kind of revolutionary feel.
WôÔÔöt ?? The movie tells exactly the opposite. Ok it’s start with a nice FX scene seemingly making fun of Ikea and all the boring stuff of modern consumerist life. But it only shows a bored psychotic character, which is going to do psychotic things. A revolutionary ? No ! If the film is talking about revolution or revolutionaries, it tells that the leaders are dangerous schizophrenics and the follower brain dead white boys from the middle class… More a picture of Trump followers than any leftist. His organisation is a « Club » like Golf, for cry out loud, which is purely based on senseless violence between members.
The film is not about mental illness, at the end the character fight is schizophrenia, killing is bad half, to get back to normal, with the help of the government, if I remembered well. Schizophrenia is NOT working that way.
It could have told a story about madness and society. In a sense it was ahead of its time. It portrayed a bored human in a senseless society, acting out, joining a sect and ending blowing things, which is the perfect portrait of the modern terrorist. We got a sad exemple here, in France, last week.
The last nail in the coffin is House Of Card, we watched it with my ex-girlfirend. And we loved it as eveeeerrryyy body. Despite the fact that I knew that it was produced by Fincher . But he’s at tough motherfucker and a good manipulator. But in the middle of the season 3 I really start to wonder why I was hoping for the demise of the people I will support in real life, journalists, caring people and was praying for the success of this infernal couple and particularly, the main character, Underwood. Then I remembered, ah yeah, Fincher!
He installs a sadistic relationship with is viewer, he manipulate them , put them in inferior position to punish them and make them self accept this situation, I would say, even, love it. It’s the portrait of the narcissistic manipulator and its victims.
By the way if you don’t have already watched the original House of Card, the english one, watch it, it is properly intelligent, it’s roughly the same story, it tells about cynicism but it is not. A really great show.
And now the questions of the week.
As the child, the concept of cereal completely eludes me. I was more a sauerkraut kid, eating the left over from the day before. Then I stopped eating breakfast altogether, just an expresso.
Cereals are not a cultural thing here, we had mainly Kellog’s corn flakes and that was it, until the end of the 80 ’s. We’ve got amazing crescent (for the sundays), very good bread, butter (salty) and jams. So why bother with industrial products containing way too much sugar and god knows what else.
The best prizes came with pif gadget a « communist » cartoon magazine. Pif was a dog and is dumb counterpart was a cat named Hercule (which should be the other way around, maybe a take from the communist on the anarchists).
But you’ve got Corto Maltese too. And a « gadget » with a technical or scientific touch, like the spaghetti gun, the cardboard record player. But they were not always functional like the square eggs machine. But that was fun.
David, I got a question for you, sometimes ago you talked about a funny crime novel writer but I can’t find who.
And to stay on the political side,actuel may I suggest you to do a fansplainer about « the second civil war » which seems to me a very prevailing politic film. Maybe too gentle, as in our reality there’s a chance that it’s the president of the US of A that is really preparing is secession. As our greatest king, Louis XIV said, « After me, the Flood » (biblical flood).
Keep up the good work !
Okay, so who else had to look up ‘lenticular’? Just me? Really? 🙂
Your cereal question got me thinking about my childhood (you often do). I usually skipped breakfast as a boy, and didn’t really pick up the habit until well into my twenties. This might have had something to do with my dad being a chain smoker. It was hard to wake up with an appetite when the air in the house was suffused with enough tar to coat a garage roof.
When I did indulge, it was usually conflakes or rice krispies, with the occasional foray into the exotic wonderland of Special K. I guess I had a thing for bland.
These days, like Canaan, I put together my own cereal – sort of a muesli, mixing up porridge oats (that might be oatmeal where you are) with toasted pumpkin seeds, flaked almonds, chopped hazelnuts and desiccated coconut, lots of chopped dates, raisins, sultanas, sunflower seeds and a little oatbran, just to keep things interesting. I serve this with the extra creamy type of oat milk that’s meant to be used in capuccino, and the colder the better. To borrow a phrase from Ian: if you like that kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing you like.
I used to create the art that was provided to print a lenticular effect, which had to stay layered in Photoshop for it to work. Lenticular printing was one of those effects in the industry that started out really expensive and now can be done for pennies, it’s come a long way since I used it as a print gimmick.
By the way, Thanks for mentioning “Midnight Run”, probably my favorite buddy film this side of “The Blues Brothers.” I remember seeing it several times and watching it so much that my brother and I can quote any scene to one another. I used to hope Martin Brest would do a sequel, possibly called “Midnight Run II In The Next Life” where Dennis Farina is released from prison and goes after Grodin and DeNiro, but that ship has sailed I’m sure. Also one of the best “Non-Burton” Danny Elfman scores of the 80’s, kind of a ramblin’ honky tonk, on-the-run score….