Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to Episode 497 of the internet’s most favourite podcast that no one had ever heard of!
This week: frustration speaking; the circle of poo; guest birds; Corvid-3; the new gods; a noble garbage bird; cartoon animal problems; joke-alikes; all gain, no pain; inevitable alien destruction; tech vulnerable; long fall; evil deads; Spielberg – the mild-mannered maverick; comfortable action; you have to see this movie; what’s next for Indy; Time-Life books; the producer has an idea; ironic Wolverine; whither Toad; the god Pan showed up; recommended: The Wind in the Willows movie; children book’s not for children; discovering Michael Bublé; Canada is the new Japan; thanks for mentioning us; premium content; professional dad jokes; it’s time we worked out our differences; Dork Shadows – All About Eve; the Dark Shadows DVD box set sales pitch; vintage shows with vintage ads; Questions of the Week- Sneakers respond; ratings rated; where similarities end; intelligence means you’re not a dum-dum; “gifted” versus “on the spectrum”; let’s finally say “Boo, cocaine!”; and, finally, the perfect gift.
Question of the week: What is something you realy enjoyed as a kid, but no one seems to remember now?
Sub-question: What is a something promoted as being for children that is clearly not for children?
That West Side Story parody everyone is talking about:
If you don’t know the Andy Kaufman “incident” from the TV show Fridays, here it is:
And here is the fallout from that “incident”, the apology that appeared on next week’s show:
And the capper: “a year later” (actually about half a year), Kaufman was a special guest on Fridays and took the opportunity to introduce his fiancée, Kathie Sullivan (who really was a gospel singer who sang on The Lawrence Welk Show. This is not just a clip, but the whole show. You can see Kaufman’s bit at the 4:12 mark:
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What is a something promoted as being for children that is clearly not for children?
Jessica Rabbit. Not for children.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is considered a children’s book but clearly, it’s only adults that are really into it these days, and then only a certain type of adult who wants to analyze it, adapt it, reinterpret it, get stoned with it, or look clever by alluding to it. All the nonsense and surrealism of the book was innovative back in Victorian times and you can see its influence on pop culture over the years. But as a logical young person, it was never my cup of tea. All that growing big and small and encountering talking animals and crazy adult characters was too trippy for me.
That’s interesting – I’m probably ‘one of those adults’, but as a youngster I really enjoyed disappearing into the strange world conjured up in ‘Alice’, particularly in audio book and play form. Looking back, I think the appeal lay in its combination of free roaming childlike fantasy with characters and situations reflecting a child’s view of the puzzling (and sometimes menacing) adult world: despite the unreal setting, the feeling of disorientation rang true.
As I got older and re-read the book, layers began to reveal themselves, until I finally got around to reading ‘The Annotated Alice’, in which the Scientific American’s legendary Martin Gardner unpicks the various mathematical, linguistic, and philosophical puzzles held within the text. One delightful visual pun that I’d missed til then is hidden in the illustration of the caterpillar; what appear to be a nose and chin in profile are also his front legs.
It probably goes without saying, but the Tim Burton adaptation completely misses any of the depth that makes the stories rich, replacing carefully crafted nonsense with slapdash silliness, and dream logic with random trippiness.
Peter Ayres continues:
I remember hating the original ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ books with a passion as a kid. Something about the images of flat grey faces stretched across hyperrealistic trains in perfect sun drenched countryside creeped me out then, and later struck me as positively Kafkaesque: “Thomas Samsa woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous steam engine, unable to turn his head or move sideways”
‘Still…’ I thought, picking up a book to read to my train-mad toddler – ‘…they’re still very popular, so there must be something in the stories – let’s give it a go’. UGH. Has there ever been stodgier, more indigestible prose? Do any other kids books have more crushingly vindictive ‘stay-in-your-lane’ morals?
Take as an example the Reverend W Awdry’s third, truly chilling story, in which Henry refuses to leave a tunnel because it’s started raining. His crew, the passengers, another engine and the (then) Fat Controller try to get him to move, but to no avail. Quoting directly from the book:
“So they gave it up. They told Henry ‘We shall leave you there for always and always and always’ They took up the old rails, built a wall in front of him, and cut a new tunnel.
Now Henry can’t get out, and he watches the trains rushing through the new tunnel. He is very sad, because no one will ever see his lovely green paint with red stripes again. But I think he deserved it, don’t you?”
Hi,
[Do it short, remember?]
Sub answer with some continuity with my last post : Ghostbuster ! I rewashed the movie recently. And err…
When I was young all that matters was the logo, a bunch of dude with pretty cool uniforms and plasma weapons, a killer car and a ton of FX monsters. But mostly the plasma weapons and THE car.
Speaking of cars,
[oh boy, shhhoort]
The blues mobile then the Ecto-1. Is there a trend with Dan Ackroyd and cars, I think so. Or Was it the Eighties, remember the Back to the future DeLorean ? Oh, no! It’s just America, the petrol burning empire. But, hell yeah, they’ve got pretty cool cars.
[Keeep foocuus]
Back to the awkwardness of this movie, sex is everywhere. Bill Murray isn’t he kind of a sex predator? I mean he’s quite insistent with Sigourney. Which Sigourney is bewitched to f… the key master, then you’ve got the ghost blow job (Is that why there’s always doors slamming when ghosts are around?), the Ron Jeremy cameo, the “creamy” ending… Urg…
[cool now say goodbye]
Some precisions about Youtube references.
[Here we go…]
Doug DeMuro is one of the major car youtuber, he reviews “quirks and features” of cars, and I kind of think that it has an “air de famille” with Jay.
And for Vsauce 1, the Micheal one, it’s a very intelligent science vulgarization channel, very, very, very, very well written.
For real random stuff from internet channel. Ozzy Man reviews, make me laugh really hard, his commenting on memesque videos: cats, fails (his destination f…ed series)… It’s very witty, IMHO.
[Are we done????]
About mothers
[Damn, Noooo :-(]
My mother thought I was gifted when I was a child (she was a psychologist) but my father don’t (he was a psychiatrist). And at this time, the gifted concept was perceive as something between a make believe and a Barnum circus act. And only well known for the little geniuses, the one that succeed.
David mother learned it but didn’t tell.
And I found out recently that it’s the kind of the opposite for Rick Beato, guitarist/music genius, his got perfect pitch, his son has it too. And when young as he had problems in school, his mother told him “forget it, your too intelligent for your teachers”. I think, he check a lot of the gifted check boxes.
[mamamia…]
That’s all folks !
[Thanks god ! Fewww]
I didn’t enjoy this as a kid but my Elementary School was really into Chisenbop as an alternative Math, so much so that other subjects suffered because of it. To this day I really suck at Geography because it was pushed aside in favor of Chisenbop. I remember watching the films on Chisenbop and the teachers struggling to teach us how to count but nobody else seems to remember our school adopting it into the curriculum. It’s almost like a joke whenever I mention it today, as if I made it all up to be funny.
I have to give you both a huge amount of credit for bringing so many experiences, subjects and stories to the forefront of our collective memories, stuff I haven’t thought of in years. I’ll assume it’s because we’re all the same age and we remember the same things from our early years but I can’t think of any place else that has covered so much ground in my collective memory. “Dark Shadows” is just one example, I remember that show but I hadn’t thought about it since I was a kid. Now David discusses it every week! Sneaky Dragon is the greatest time machine for the mind that I know of…or rather several (moderately) old guys making sure we discuss random shit so we don’t forget it all entirely. Sincerely though, you guys cover some fantastical stuff that really tickles the old medulla oblongata now and then.
Speaking of time travel, if you’ve been following any of the news concerning the new Indiana Jones film you’ll see it may involve Die Glocke, or the “Nazi Bell.” Rumored to be a scientific weapon that was designed to travel through time, Die Glocke may be the latest macguffin in the franchise. You were discussing the Indiana Jones films and what the upcoming plot might be, this is what the going speculation is. Someone grabbed a photo of a concept board and there’s a device on it that resembles Die Glocke…swastikas and all. If that doesn’t work out, Indy can just sit on his porch, enjoying this retirement screaming at the nazi kids to get off his lawn.
I clearly remember parents blindly taking their young kids to see “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” I got into a heated debate with my Mom’s friend about it. See assumed that because it featured cartoon characters that it was plainly marketed towards children. My defense was did she pay attention to the rating of the film, I stated that it’s there for reason and if you ignore it you’re seeing the film at your own risk. My Mom then got mad at me for arguing with her friend and gave me the usual, “What makes you such a know it all? You don’t know everything.” One of my jobs at both my current and former place of employment is to design kid’s meal toys. You wouldn’t believe some of the movies that have wanted to tie-in to kid’s meals in some way just to be promoted. One of the best satarized videos in years was the commercial selling kid’s action figures for the film “Philadelphia.” It has kids playing with action figures and dinosaur toys (Dino Buddy) not even remotely based on the film but purely marketed towards kids play. They all have ships, playsets, lasers, flame throwers and transform into jets…there’s even a Sega Genesis “Philadelphia” game!
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/philadelphia-action-figures/2868164
Hello to Ian, Dave, and everyone kindly lending their ears. Having listened to Regis’ viewer comments concerning intelligence in last week’s episode, I have come to the realization that Sneaky Dragon is a podcast produced by and marketed towards the highly-capable, retro and not-quite retro pop culture-centric geniuses of the world. Yes, I would place the whole listening audience into the category of genius (or at least highly intelligent). Even though some of you are probably shaking your heads with a mixture of both humility and imposter syndrome-filled disagreement and anxiety, I concur with Regis that there is a pattern in the similarities shared by hosts and audience. Call it birds of a feather flock together or what have you, people do gravitate to what is familiar to them. Now if we could just harness our collective intelligence and individual talents and combine it with the financial help of a government grant, we could, dare I say it, rule the world. 😉
Question of the week: Food is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of things I enjoyed as a kid that no one seems to remember now. Nabisco had a little box of assorted cookies that had sugar wafers, creme filled cameo cookies, a cookie that was shaped like an ankh. When you opened up the box, it had red tissue paper you also had to unfold. My parents would purchase a box every couple of weeks. I also enjoyed cookies called Giggles that was shaped like smiling faces. Does anyone remember the drink called Burple? It was bottle that was collapsible like an accordion and contained a powdered drink. You stretched out the bottle, filled it with water, put the cap on, and gave it a few shakes for a fruit drink. The fun part was that you could collapse the bottle and it would make a burp sound. I also enjoyed drinking New York Seltzer flavored waters. I heard that they started making those again, but they didn’t get distributed in this part of the South. I wish Kraft would re-boot their whipped butter. It came in yellow tubs. I can remember how great it tasted when spread across a slice of buttermilk bread. Country Crock and other modern oleo/margarine aren’t quite as good.
Sub-question: I will let you in on a terrible secret. In the library world there is quite a lot of bad librarianship. Librarians who have never read a particular book make a judgement call and assign it to certain areas of the library, be it Fiction, Juvenile Fiction, or Young Adult Fiction. Many, many times when a library is looking to de-select (we call it weeding) the collection to make room for incoming books, librarians will come across a classic novel that hasn’t circulated in a few years. The librarian has guilt about discarding a classic novel, simply because it is considered a classic, they will move the book to the Juvenile Fiction collection all the while thinking this is a classic so it must be suitable for children. Obviously, the librarian hasn’t read the book they are re-classifying. Walk into any library, go to their juvenile fiction section, and you may well find James Fenimore Cooper, Jules Verne, Jane Austen, or any other number of classic works being promoted as children suitable simply because they are old. A child in 4th grade is not going to have the same interest or understanding of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens as would an adult. And yet there they are. Funny thing is the majority of the children who borrow books from the juvenile section of the library want gateway titles like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Man, Captain Underpants which are hybrids between novel and graphic novel. The reverse is also true, there are a lot of books in the Young Adult section of libraries that need to be moved to the Adult Fiction collection. An author may start out writing for Young Adults, but later write materials geared towards adults. Librarians who haven’t read the books (and no we can’t read everything that comes into our collections) often think that so-and-so is a young adult author, so I’ll put her new book there even though it shouldn’t go there. This is a particular pet peeve of mine.
And yes, speaking of books… Sparks! and Double Dog Dare are in cataloging right now waiting to be processed for the collection. Maybe I’ll catalog them as 636.7 (non fiction Dewey Decimal for dogs) since the cats parade around as a dog… just kidding, they’ll go into the juvenile collection. Better write some more though. Kids check out the newest in a series and want the next one soon.
Happy week and take care!
I forget,
[Oh, no! Not again. See ! you unleash the long commentaries of helll!!!]
Firstly, no, I did not! Secondary….
[Hey what you doooo…. arrrrrghhh]
Frankly, who need a conscience.
So just to say that I nearly was going to add a remark, last time, about Mannequin In The Moon making me think of The Far Side… which could only be a compliment.
Saying that it has some common spirit or way of thinking… or simply third degree humour is not saying that it’s copying.
Or as we know all have been allready done. Your the Beatles ? You make melodies with notes. But my friends Bach did just that centuries ago !
And Crystal, yeah seems always a bit on the edge just to think that, thanks for confirming that we are, indeed, a bunch of weirdos (but in a good way) 😉
ByyyyYYYyyyeeee