Saturday, June 8, 2013

GO! (or: come back, Mr. Whipple - wherever you are)




(Note. I've dealt with this issue before in a previous post, but every time I see a new Charmin ad I have to update this due to their absolute genius for presenting their product in the most astonishingly offensive manner possible. And yet, the ads just go on and on. And so must I. . .)

When I first saw one of those Charmin ads - you know, the ones with the cutesie cartoon bears running behind trees to take a royal dump - I was pretty offended, but I managed to more-or-less tune it out. 

But then they escalated.





The Mama and Papa bear seemed highly concerned with Junior's wastefulness in the TP department, but the nice Charmin voiceover convinced them that with their brand, you could "use less". At the same time, Junior developed a problem: "Little bits left behind," requiring regular rectal inspection from Mama.

Little bits of what? I had to ask myself. And if it was toilet paper, why were they sticking? It didn't "bear" thinking about.

But then I noticed the annoying Baby Bear announcing at the end of the commercial, "We all go. Why not enjoy the go?"

Jesus Christ!




I wondered if I was the only person who was completely astonished by this bit of business. Characteristically, I went on an internet search and found so much shit I couldn't believe it.

Proctor and Gamble decided, in some bold and possibly idiotic move, to rip the inhibitions away from bathroom functions, to elevate urination and defecation to the lofty and even fun level they deserve. We should all be enjoying our basic bodily functions, not just getting them done so we can get on with our day. 

Interestingly enough, when I look up samples of Charmin ads on YouTube, ALL the comments are negative. NONE of them think the bears, including the shitty-assed Baby Bear, are cute. The newest ad is even more jaw-dropping: Charmin will, apparently, help you keep your underwear clean. (And this in full knowledge of the fact that these bears don't wear any clothes.)





I honestly don't know why this headspinningly offensive campaign is still on the air, but it just goes on and on, year after year, continually upping the ante, so to speak. One wonders what's next: actually watching the bears go grunt, grunt, plop? How much more explicit can these ads be?

(As an aside: why are there three colors of bear: red, blue and brown? Does the brown bear really get down to it, and will we soon be subjected to the fruits of his labours?)

Below I quote the only article I could find that deals with this embarrassing subject to any depth. But even this piece isn't complete. To kick off their cute new campaign, a few years ago Proctor and Gamble set up a sort of Defecation Expo with gigantic toilets and Disney-like washroom cubicles. Their public ambassadors, all fresh-faced and attractive, had to be people who "really, really enjoy going to the bathroom". One of their slogans was, and no, I am not making this up, "sit and squat".








The Wikipedia entry reads: 

Times Square Charmin restrooms 

In 2006, Charmin opened up public restrooms in New York City's Times Square. The location is now a new Disney Store. The convenience of having clean restrooms in Times Square during the Christmas season was a novel idea. There is currently no news of a 2013 Charmin restroom location at this time.

In case you can't quite make out the want ad above, some of the most unbelievable lines are:

"Do you enjoy going to the bathroom enough to earn $10,000.00? Charmin is conducting a national search to find five super-fun, enthusiastic people to work at the Charmin Restrooms in Times Square, NYC this holiday season. Description and Qualifications: Greet and entertain bathroom guests. Then, blog about the experience. All candidates must really, really enjoy going to the bathroom." And I can't go on, sorry.

I don't know, maybe it would be healthier for us if we DID sit around the water cooler comparing anecdotes about the quality and duration of our poo-poo experiences, ideally at lunch time. Maybe we should have little contests (judged by a rotating panel of poo monitors) to see who uses the least and most squares, and even a fragrance tester to determine whose dump smells best and worst. Might have something to do with what you ate last night. The curry, perhaps?




"Enjoy the Go"? Is Procter and Gamble's Campaign for Charmin a Bizarre Joke? (from BrandCulture Talk)


November 26, 2012 


Every once in a great while we encounter a campaign so execrable it defies belief. Charmin's "Enjoy the go" fits the bill and causes us to question whether the marketing geniuses at Procter and Gamble have lost their minds.





The campaign rhetorically asserts, "We all go. Why not enjoy the go?" Can this possibly be the Charmin brand assertion? Indeed it is. The brand embraces a path as grammatically desultory as the campaign is incomprehensible.

Here at BrandCulture Talk (with a hat tip to David Aaker) we spend a good deal of time discussing rationalemotional and self-expressive brand benefits.  Brands that lay claim only to functional benefits are subject to being quickly eclipsed by competitive offerings. Only by laying claim to emotional and self-expressive value can brands create enduring competitive advantage. Except for a product like toilet tissue.

We suffer no illusions as to the job Charmin is designed to perform. By seeking to elevate excretion and dejection to a source of pleasure, however, the campaign is at best puzzlingly risible (albeit in poor taste) and more likely, seriously unhinged. Charmin endeavors to explain, "We all go to the bathroom every day . . . especially after morning coffee. Talk about getting things going! . . . Whew, that curry was hot [steam whistle sound effect]! Bottom line, we all spend a lot of time going." We do?







How a company that is arguably the world's preeminent marketer of consumer packaged goods created, and continues to support this campaign is a mystery.  P&G has extended the campaign into social media (recent Tweet to Charmin's nearly 8,000 Twitter followers: "Anyone have a favorite game they play while 'enjoying the go?' We enjoy a certain mad avian galactic battle one"), a Facebook presence with over 325,000 "likes" (!) (recent post: "Did anyone have Charmin on their Black Friday shopping list????") and a dedicated blog that descends from the simply gross to a creepily voyeuristic "Daily peek inside the cleanest public restroom in Times Square" (although they may have rethought that one as the last "daily peek" took place in 2009). This campaign is so bad for so many reasons that the writers of Saturday Night Live would be hard-pressed to invent this madness as a parody.

And just to make this whole campaign a wee bit classier, let's add . . . Kim Kardashian a couple of "Enjoy the go" bear mascots, a Brooklyn drum corps and a ceremonial glass key to the toilet! See for yourself:








So . . . instead of furthering the devolution of the English language while mawkishly celebrating the unspeakable, wouldn't P&G be better served by dusting off an updated version of the venerable Mr. Whipple, who successfully hawked Charmin for over 20 years? Mr. Whipple cleverly extolled the functional (and actually valuable) benefit of softness through the inability for virtually anyone to resist the siren song of "squeezing the Charmin"? Like the iconic "Maytag Lonely Repairman," Mr. Whipple distinguished Charmin from competitive offerings with aplomb in more than 500 commercials, and was at one point the 3rd most recognizable American -- only behind Richard Nixon and Billy Graham. Not once did he feel compelled to mention enjoying the "go."





The late Dick Wilson, the actor who portrayed Mr. Whipple, hit upon the crux of Charmin's dilemma in a 1985 interview with the Chicago Tribune: 'What are you going to say about toilet paper? I think we handle it the best way we can." If only  P and G took his advice.









(An awful p. s., then I will truly stop. In what used to pass for morbid curiosity but is now seen as chirpy cheerleaderism, I decided to google terms which might be said to support the idea of "enjoy the go". What I came up with were terms for two psychiatric disorders: urophilia and coprophilia. This is the sort of stuff Dan Savage deals with in his ever-fascinating Savage Love column (not that I ever read it).

Sorry, folks, but this is what "enjoy the go" really means. Perhaps Proctor and Gamble had better do their homework more carefully next time.)








Friday, June 7, 2013

The STRANGEST "separated at birth" ever seen!







If you've been following my blog for a while now - and I just fervently hope SOMEONE reads this, at least once in a while - you will have noticed my recurrent series, Separated at Birth. Anthony Perkins and Gregory Peck. Harold Lloyd and Jake Gyllenhaal. That sort of thing.

Well.





I stay up way too late sometimes and just look for things to muck around with to use on my blog. I love diddling around with images that move, but I like images that don't move too. I also wanted to see if I could find a good YouTube video on the Hapsburgs, preferably a comedy: Take it on the Chin Charlie, Louie the Lip and Friends, whatever. An animated series on King Charles II of Spain, also known as El Hexado because he was so fucking ugly, would have filled the bill, but all I could find was a very strange 2-minute "reconstruction" of the face of Marie Antoinette. 






I could find almost no information about this, but it started with the standard portrait of her and slowly morphed into something a lot more realistic. Someone in the comments section said something about a death mask, so it may have been reconstructed from that, though death masks, I find, generally aren't very flattering.

But as it slowly morphed, I cried into the void, "Hey. That's not Ms. Let-Them-Eat-Cake at all. That's Kaley Cuoco!"

Yes.

The adorable female lead on the hit comedy The Big Bang Theory, which is now on so many times a day that my DVR just can't keep up. I think it looks EXACTLY like her, or at least close enough, though Kaley definitely has Marie beat in the cheekbone department.





The comments under the video mentioned Marie's "Hapsburg lip", so like all the rest of those aristocratic swine she must've been hopelessly inbred. I don't see the lip here, but the picture's not in 3D, is it? I don't know if Kaley has any Hapsburg blood in her, and to be honest I've been trying to figure out just what sort of a name that is anyway - sounds kind of Portuguese. So now I'm off on yet another search.





SPECIAL Bonus Creep-o-rama Link! One of the creepiest links I've ever found, next to Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. In fact, this one is worse.


http://www.undyingfaces.com/info/

It has got THE WORST pictures of dead guys' faces all melted down, or with their mouths tied shut. I don't know when they stopped doing this shit, but there's one of Alfred Hitchcock that's just ridiculous, it looks so much like him.
There's also one of Timothy Leary (but I forgot to save it). To be honest, I thought they froze his head. I saw a video once of a bunch of scientists carting his severed head around. It was too sickening.











Special Post-Post Bonus-Bonus: There are all sorts of these creep-o sites, apparently, for sickos who like to look at death masks. Nobody WE know. This one is a sort of Greatest Hits list. But I'm beginning to be suspicious. Some of these masks are of rather murky provenance and might have turned up in some third-rate history prof's cellar in 1980 or something. One site even said, astonishingly, that it was clear Abraham Lincoln "had not been assassinated". Gee, then I wonder what all the fuss was about?








Some weird shit goin' on. . .









Harold gets jolted!




I TOLD you not to step on that wire!

Incredible word soup






Ducks on a pond, ducks on a pond
Very pretty swimming round
The lion and the unicorn journey very far








The answers are the question, sir
The lady soothes the lion's fur
Meek as a lamb he follows her
Wherever angels are

Sing me something









I asked the ice it would not say
But only cracked or moved away
I thought I knew me yesterday
Whoever sings this song





Greetings on you kings in the sky
Who'll buy me a mynah bird
Play me a magic word
Speak of hopes with thoughts absurd



Thoughts floating by
Little ducks, pretty birds
Clouds across the sky




Moving pieces on the plains of Troy
Carving faces on the rocks of joy
Pretty lady washing the tiles
Soapy pictures like crocodiles

Chilly winds blowing
Lovely spring coming soon










I wear my body like a caravan
Gipsy rover in a magic land
Misty mountains where the eagles fly
Lonely valleys where the lost ones cry





I had a little letter full of paper
Inky scratches everywhere
Always looking, looking for a paradise island
Help me find it everywhere




Peacocks talking of the colour grey
Awaking soundly in darkest day
A howling tempest on a silent sea
Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree




Mad as the moon when Merlin falls
Silver castles and silver halls
Taking lessons from the piper's son
Learn to play while the world is young





Boys and girls come out to play
The moon doth shine as bright as day
Leave your sorrows and leave your sleep
And join your playfellows in the street




Come with a whoop or come with a call
Come with a goodwill or not at all
Up the ladder and down the wall
A ha'penny loaf will serve for all




Following my fortune now the Holy Grail is found
And the Holy Bread of Heaven it is given all around
Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world any more




Poor as the birds but to give their song away
Gathering possessions round to make a bright array
Dark was the night, praise God the open door
I ain't got no home in this world anymore.





Brighter every day





OK then, this is a mixup, but not really. All day yesterday (or I think it was the day before), I was thinking of that Incredible String Band song Ducks on a Pond. Makes sense, because all I did  that day was watch ducks/ducklings on a pond.

I wanted to post my homemade duckling gifs, video, etc. and wondered if the Ducks on a Pond song would be a good accompaniment. Well. . . I hadn't heard the Increds (as we called them back in 1968) for many,  many years, but I remembered they were best listened to when you were stoned out of your mind on hashish (with a side of cheap wine). I now see why. The Ducks song just goes on forever, and though it has some arresting images in it, it's just too crazy to include here.





But I found another one, much shorter and more - what, sprightly? Less stoner-rific? Like you can actually listen to it clean and sober. No ducks in it, but it's still a nice song.

So here it is. . . with ducks.

You Get Brighter

You get brighter every day and every time I see you
Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you






And I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you
I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

In the morning when I wake I moor my boat and greet you
Hold your brightness in my eye and I wonder what does sleep do







For you get brighter every day and every time I see you
Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you
I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

Oh, wondrous light
Light, light, lighter
You give all your brightness away
and it only makes you brighter






For you get brighter every day and every time I see you
Scattered brightness in your way and you taught me how to love you

And I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you
I know you belong to everybody but you can't deny that I'm you

Krishna colours on the wall you taught me how to love you
Krishna colours on the wall you taught me how to love you
(repeat and repeat and repeat)







You get brighter 




Every




Day.


Thursday, June 6, 2013

Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy ducklings: DUCKLINGS ON LAND!




Part 2 of our Duckling Adventure! The fluffies preen themselves on shore.



Itty-bitty, fuzzy-wuzzy DUCKLINGS!



Such goings-on at the Duck Park! The Duck Park isn't really the Duck Park at all, but is properly called Coquiitlam Town Centre Park, and we walk around it at least once a week. The jewel of the park is Lafarge Lake, a former gravel-pit,  trout-stocked and serene. One day we discovered a tiny cove full of greedy ducks who were so acclimatized to humans that they literally walked right up out of the water and stood 2 feet away from us expecting to be fed. Soon we were saying "Let's go to the duck park" to each other.  For retirees like us, it was a cheap way to get out and have fun.

Then. . . come spring, the flock thinned out. There were fewer and fewer ducks waiting for us. Bummer! Then I had a thought. What if the ducks had other things to do in the spring?




Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Such strange goings-on!




Is this Harold, or some fiend from hell?




Spastic meets Catatonic. . . a match made in heaven.




Harold's daily calisthenics.




The quickie of all time!


And so say all of us (or some. . . )




I seldom post links, but I think this piece makes some good points.

http://laurenbdavis.com/2013/06/this-will-probably-get-me-into-hot-water/





Harold Lloyd: you can't keep a good man down




Drink was, in fact, the curse of the family. Mildred (or “Mid”, or “Molly”, as Lloyd called her) had been an alcoholic from some time in the forties, when it is said she wanted desperately to divorce Lloyd. In her late years a full-time nurse was employed mainly to see that her perfume bottles did not mysteriously get filled with booze, that her habit of drinking Listerine did not get out of hand. In a pathetic family – “a disaster”, as even Lloyd’s kindly friend Simonton put it – she was perhaps the most pathetic member. One thinks of her – never a very mature, forthcoming or stimulating person – wandering the halls of the great house, her husband either absent or preoccupied by one of his interests, her children all gone, and none of them bearing her any very kind feelings, caring mainly for her two companionable poodles and her booze, and one sees the end results of the flaws that, almost from the first, people had detected in Lloyd’s art – its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth. It is all dreadfully sad.


Harold Lloyd: The Shape of Laughter, 1974

This was one of the more disturbing passages I found in my relentless quest for information about Harold Lloyd. In fact, this whole book sells Lloyd short in just about every facet of his life, but never is it more hurtful than in this personal attack on his family.





One wonders, in fact, if he knew or cared about the surviving members of Lloyd's family, about their feelings for him. He seems to have assumed no one was left who cared two figs about him, or if they did, that they weren't significant enough to merit a modicum of respect.

At the same time, this critic - and I don't name him to cover MY ass, not his! - is one of those unassailable figures in "cinema" (a step up in snobbishmess even from "film") whom no one ever really questions. Even to this day, his work is hugely influential. What puzzles and offends me almost as much as his nasty cracks at his family is his description of Lloyd's art: "its abstractness, its mechanical quality, its lack of real warmth."






This description seriously makes me wonder if he ever saw a Lloyd film, or if he perhaps only saw those "knockabout" one-reel comedies made before 1920. Harold Lloyd features like Girl Shy, Safety Last!, The Freshman and The Kid Brother are so far from "mechanical" that I cannot fathom his comments; Harold's films have moments of pathos and even tenderness that never fail to bring me to tears. The gags are graceful and ingenious, particularly in The Kid Brother where he plays a sort of male Cinderella, washing clothes in a butter-churn and hanging them out to dry on the string of a kite.

I did find out some things about Harold Lloyd and his family, in particular from a more recent bio written by silent film historian Jeffrey Vance in collaboration with Harold Lloyd's granddaughter (whom he raised), Suzanne Lloyd. The book is honest and forthright about the sometimes-serious problems the family had; it was hardly a snow job. But as with most families, the dynamics were complicated, and joy and celebration often ran neck-in-neck with sorrow. To call Lloyd's home life "dreadfully sad" is to miss the point.

Alcoholism is a family pattern, with stubborn roots deeply buried in the soil of generations. Though Harold did not drink, some of those around him did, and it inevitably did them harm. But it's absurdly unlikely that his former leading lady Mildred Davis spent her final years wandering around the halls of their mansion like a ghost. Moreover, "it is said" does not pass as a particularly reliable source of information, and in fact can often mean nothing at all. It's as bad as that godawful phrase "studies show", which too many people seem to swallow without question.







I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly how things were at Greenacres, but I honestly don't think they were anything like this. I do know that the word "mechanical" stuck to Lloyd's films for decades, mainly because people seemed to take this critic's word as gospel. It did irreparable harm for decades and kept his movies buried for far too long.

There's a Lloyd revival going on, thank God, which proves that these descriptions are inadequate and highly inaccurate. In his Everyman's search for love (which is at the core of most of them), Harold Lloyd invented a new genre: the romantic comedy. It could even be argued that he broke ground in screwball comedy with the delightfully wacky Why Worry? I haven't seen every Lloyd film, but I've seen as many as I can get my hands on. The features he made after 1920 are nuanced and three-dimensional. His Glass Character tugs at the heart. But since that cold, abstract label was pinned on him shortly after his death and his work was either unavailable to the public or adulterated practically beyond recognition, it was accepted in the movie world without a lot of question.







This book ends with an acknowledgment section that I find almost harrowing. This is a direct quote:

When Time-Life Films, which will be re-releasing most of Lloyd's films over the next four years, invited me to attempt this critical-biographical sketch of the comedian, it had already commissioned a veteran correspondent of the Time-Life News Service to interview as many friends, relatives and co-workers of Lloyd's as he could find. His remarkably thorough dispatches were placed at my disposal for this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to him. I am sure he would like me to express gratitude to those who provided him information.

This means The Shape of Laughter (a bizarre title that basically means nothing) was not written from primary sources and in fact had "contractual obligation" written all over it. He simply took someone else's material, believed it without question, and wove it into a book. No doubt the correspondent's opinion of Lloyd's work, whatever it was, must have been mixed in to this rehash. It makes one wonder if Time-Life wanted the glossy seal and cache of this particular critic to boost book sales, even if he didn't really write the book. Or did he simply owe them one? Such things are known to happen, but if you ever raise it as a possibility, all hell breaks loose, along with a storm of vitriolic denial.






An even more intriguing clue to the near-disappearance of Lloyd's films after his death is provided by Kevin Brownlow, arguably the world's foremost expert on silent film.

Two years after Lloyd died in 1971, Time-Life signed signed a distribution deal for his films and handled them with a tragic lack of understanding. The shorts were packaged with a commentary in the style of Pete Smith ("Poor Harold! It's doom for the groom unless he gets to his room!"), which effectively sank them without a trace. The features were spared the commentary, but insensitive, honky-tonk scores and the elimination of entire sequences often crippled their effect.

May I add to that the constant, annoying, ridiculously exaggerated sound effects?






In spite of all the factors that came together to compromise the integrity of Lloyd's work, it remained intact in the vault, sleeping, awaiting a second life. No one could have predicted the huge advances in film restoration that would strip the grey veils off his masterpieces and reveal them clean as new. No one could have predicted that Turner Classic Movies would get behind this renaissance, drawing more and more people back to pictures that are so vibrant and well-made that tired old comparisons to Chaplin and Keaton no longer apply.

Lloyd only "comes third" in some people's minds because they weren't there, and because they have had their viewpoint skewed by outdated, poorly-researched critical commentary. The best remedy for this is to buy the superb DVD movie set The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection and watch the hell out of them. I guarantee you, once you start, you won't ever be able to stop.