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Monday, September 30, 2013

When She Was Still Spordelia

In the third season of Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar has this one scene in which she recalls her life before her character’s vampire-staking days: “Before I was the Slayer I was… well, I don’t want to say shallow but… Let’s say a certain person who shall remain nameless — we'll just call her Spordelia — looked like a classical philosopher next to me.” That’s a description to keep in mind when you watch the 1989 pilot for Girl Talk, which basically plays like a slumber party filmed before a studio audience, sponsored by Tiger Beat, fueled by Fun Dip and held in D.J. Tanner’s bedroom. Girl Talk co-stars Soleil Moon Fry and a girl named inexplicably named Russell.


It’s bizarre to watch baby-voiced SMG prattle on and on about cute boys, especially given the pop culture pedestal we now place Buffy on, and I can’t help but be reminded of a similarly bizarre clip of a 1991-era Jenny Lewis talk about hanging out with her friends in Westwood and then participate in a montage where she tries on a series of increasingly funny hats. (Yes, you should hit that link and watch it.)

Here, maybe you should watch Girl Talk now:


A short viewing guide:

0:03 — The theme song only lasts ninety-some seconds, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it plays nine hours. It also runs through your head with the violence of a ricocheting bullet. Sample lyrics: “School! That’s cool! / It’s the place to be! / All your friends are there / And the talk is free!”

1:31 — The announcer makes the mistake of introducing SMG as Sarah Gellar. I assume he was never heard from again.

1:43 — Please note that poor Russell (left) is dressed like a preteen version of Dorothy Zbornak.


4:30 — In case you didn’t realize that Soleil Moon Frye was THE. SHIT. at the time this episode was filmed, no worries: Russell and Sarah get to introduce her as the extra special, much more famous host of the show.

4:42 — The wisdom of Punky Brewster: “I think my favorite part of school is talking to my friends… especially the boys.” Hooray for education!

6:24 — Again, school is great because that’s where you get to talk to your friends about clothes, music and boys.

this is why you're bad at math

7:23 — So one of the things written into the show is that the girls all have crushes on a guy named Neil Tardio, who in real life is a director and the first husband of Tea Leoni. I hope his mention in this episode is how Neal and Tea fell in love. I would also like to think that her legal name was Tea Tardio for a period. Also also? The mention of that oh-so-sexy name Tardio prompts Russell to make this face:


7:34 — Then this happens:


But then you find out that the heartthrob they have visit the show for the first episode isn’t Kirk Cameron or Corey Haim or Chad Allen or any of the others you’d have reason to feel weird about today. No, it’s one you probably don’t have feelings about: Brian Robbins from Head of the Class. He causes much girl-screaming, I’ll give him that. Also, upon his entrance to the stage, SMG stage-faints and remains unconscious for the remainder of the interview.

10:12 — Robbins on shooting two episodes of Head of the Class in Russia: “The people were really interesting, kind of a little depressing. I think they should forget about things like glasnost and perestroika and all that and just paint the place. I mean, a nice shade of blue or something like that.”

13:50 — I have no idea who Safire is, but I’d like to think it’s the woman who wrote Precious, during her peppier teen years.


15:35 — The show also features comedy skits, like this one where Russell and Sarah play lab partners. Sarah is studious and quiet, while Russell blathers on stupidly. In the end, Russell is praised for being wonderful, while Sarah is condemned for attempting science. Hooray for education! The weirdest bit of dialogue: the bizarre brag of “Remember the guy who played the father on The Brady Bunch? Well, his real-life daughter used to go here!” Though for the record, Robert Reed did actually have a daughter. How stoked she must have been to have been included in Girl Talk.

17:20 — After having promised a performance by New Kids on the Block the whole episode, you find out that it’s only Jordan and Jonathan, appearing via a pre-taped interview. Here is how the Girl Talk hosts do “looking interested” when the gay one talks:


21:07 — Jonathan Knight’s advice to kids today about peer pressure: “I would say just be yourself. When people offer you drugs, if you don’t want them, just say no. And the final outcome will be that they’ll just pay more respect to you because you’re being yourself. They’ll respect you for that.”

21:40 — And finally this:


All in all, it’s still better than watching proto-Kathryn Merteuil on Swans Crossing.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Super Mario Bros. 2, Part Two: The Sequel: Return to Subcon

I’m basing my choice more on nostalgia than anything else, I realize, but Super Mario Bros. 2 remains my favorite video game — not just of the eight-bit era but of all the eras of hopping and bopping.


I’ve probably written about it here more than any other video game, and its look — peculiarly Arabian, and an odd fit even among the always-surreal Super Mario games — grabbed ahold of me in a way no other game aesthetics ever did. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t agree, and it rarely gets the love from fans or industry types that the first, third and fourth Super Mario games get. That’s slowly changed in recent years, what with a quietly Super Mario Bros. 2-themed track in the newest Mario Kart game and Donkey Kong Country Returns concept art that shows the develops had planned a major shout-out, at least in the early stages.


But Super Mario Bros. 2 may yet get a second moment in the spotlight — in the form of Super Mario 3D World, an upcoming Wii U title that features Mario, Luigi, Peach and Toad as equally playable characters for the first time since Mario 2 was released in 1988. (Yep, Peach hasn’t gotten a chance to star in a regular, platforming, non-sports, non-RPG, non-kart-racing Mario game in twenty-five years. In a 2009 interview, Shigeru Miyamoto blamed the prohibitively complicated nature of animating her dress as she moves about.) I did always like playing as Peach, especially in a “real” Mario game, as opposed to just a spin-off, and there’s something awesome about the idea of her getting to do everything Mario can.


In heels, no less, Ginger Rogers-style.


So far, however, Nintendo hasn’t specifically stated that Super Mario 3D World was intended as a big Mario 2 callback, but I’m starting to think it is, for one specific reason: this image.


Not the orange, Yoshi-looking dragon, but the pink character flitting above Toad.


Unless I’m way off, I think Nintendo has brought back one of the most obscure characters in the history of the Mario games: the Subcons, the little fairy things you rescue at the end of Super Mario Bros. 2, whose identity is complicated by the fact that the share their name with the setting of the game. They’re Subcon. They live in Subcon. It’s weird, though I suppose no weirder than the Vulcans being from Vulcan.

Here’s how they looked in the original version of Super Mario Bros. 2:


And here’s how they looked in the ending to the Super NES remake, as they disposed of the big bad’s battered corpse in a cutesy, Nintendo-y fashion:


The resemblance isn’t dead-on, but that pink character easily could be the result of some Nintendo designer wondering how those fairies might look twenty-five years and five console generations later. (She is a bit closer to the thumbnail-sized official artwork you see here.) And I suppose I’ll find out if I’m right soon enough, but for now I’m just happy thinking someone at Nintendo might feel as strongly about Super Mario Bros. 2 as I do. And that’s gratifying enough: just the possibility that I’m being catered to, that someone else still remembers these obscure characters that meant a lot to me back when I was a kid and maybe still do.

Wart Mam=u 夢工場 ドキドキパニック

Video games obscurities, previously:

Thursday, September 26, 2013

An Open Letter to E.G. Daily

Dear Elizabeth,

Can I call you Elizabeth? “E.G.” sounds so formal in this context, like maybe you wrote The Outsiders or something. Anyway, I’m a fan — of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and The Powerpuff Girls, like a good nerd should be — and I was a surprised as anyone to hear that you’re now a contestant on The Voice.

Here, I found a clip in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, which would be weird.


As would the other aspiring singers on the show, I’m sure you could greatly benefit from The Voice’s multicultural panel of mentors (one blond Latina, one black supervillain, one guy to appeal to liberal white women, one guy to appeal to conservative white women). But I must object to your being on the show, not because you’re too famous to be in the running but because in 1987 you released a perfect song that no current singer — you or anyone else — can hope to top. Of course, I speak of “Mind Over Matter,” the “montage” song from the film Summer School.

Here, again, I found the video in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, though that would also be weird.


It’s essentially everyone’s favorite song, and every song released from 1987 on has been a failure in its own right and in comparison to “Mind Over Matter.” (Fact.) Allow me to enumerate the reasons why this song will never be beaten:
  1. Inspiring yet danceable.
  2. The best use of a singer’s natural rasp that I can think of.
  3. It’s literally the best montage song ever. You could play this over a smattering of scenes of characters doing anything — working out, building above-ground pool, trying on a series of increasingly extravagant hats, anything — and it would work There should be more montages in movies because of this song.
  4. Slant rhymes such as “Sometimes it feels like we’re losing altitude / But I have a winner’s attitude” bravely belted off as if they were actual rhymes.
  5. If you close your eyes, it actually sounds like Buttercup from Powerpuff Girls is singing the song.
  6. The hat you wear in the video.
  7. The fact that the video features the power cast of Mark Harmon, Kirstie Alley, Courtney Thorne Smith and Alotta Fagina from Austin Powers.
  8. Layered pro-education, anti-education message.
  9. The dog that eats the peanut butter around the 3:35 mark.
I think I’ve proven my point. As you said in your song, “we’ll never let dreams die young,” but then again the Summer School kids probably didn’t pass that test because you made them dance around the room instead of filling out the bubbles.

I thank you for your time. Also, how on earth did you pick Blake Shelton over Cee Lo?

Best wishes,
Drew Mackie

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Running Down a Dream

It makes sense, I think, that when I think about whole new worlds, I think about them in pixels. Here’s to new horizons — clunky, blocky, new horizons.

modified via
Pixel art, previously:

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Dialing 9 Like Some Kind of Idiot

This is how the conversation happened, more or less. I'm sure of it.

— "Should we have everyone in the building dial 9 to get an outside line, like you do in every other building ever?"
— No! Let's have them dial 8 here, just so they feel stupid whenever they dial 9 out of habit!"
— [evil laughter]

This has to be how things work, generally speaking.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Your Ugliest Colors

Though I must admit I picked a beautiful-sounding, beautiful-meaning
word to end on
, six months have passed since I last wrote a word-of-the-week post. Here, then, is a new one for you: a rather cute-sounding word whose only associations are incongruously vile.
bilirubin (bill-i-ROO-bin) — noun: a reddish-yellow water insoluble pigment occurring especially in bile and blood and causing jaundice if accumulated in excess.
Despite the fact that it sounds like a Robin Goodfellow-type who skips through the forest whistling a jaunty tune, bilirubin refers to something far less pleasant. What the above Merriam-Webster definition doesn’t make clear is helped along by Wikipedia, whose first paragraph plainly states that it’s what makes aging bruises turn sallow, what lends the “straw-yellow color” to urine, what turns feces brown and what paints jaundice victims yellow. See? The full range of foul — piss, shit, bile and pain. How there was never a punk singer named Billy Rubin, I’ll never know.


The word literally means “red bile,” with bili- being a German word part referring to bile and -rubin coming from the Latin ruber, “red.” And yes, there’s also a bile pigment biliverdin, and yes, it’s the one responsible for when your bruise turns greenish.

The human body is revoltingly beautiful.

Previous words of the week after the jump.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Kathy Santoni: The Africa Adventure

(The long and short of it? This is one of the weirdest pop cultural connections I’ve made in my life.)

Those of you who also cling to memories of childhood television may remember Kathy Santoni as D.J. Tanner’s friend but sometimes rival on Full House. Kathy started out as a mentioned-but-unseen character in the style of Maris Crane from Frasier, but she eventually appeared on the show. This fact actually lost me a bet once in college, because these were the things we discussed in college and because I also completely forgot about the episode where D.J. starts going to junior high and realized that she is a stupid baby because she doesn’t wear make-up and doesn’t have yabbos like Kathy Santoni, who blossomed into womanhood over the summer break and now dresses like dancer from The Grind.

Here’s a photo if you, like me, need your memory jogged:

this is what reads as hot on abc family tv in 1989. feel weird about it.
Kathy appeared four more times after that first 1989 episode, and I don’t remember any of those either, but IMDb says that Anne Marie McEvoy played her in each appearance. Not that I need a reason to bring up Kathy Santoni, but she’s relevant as a result of something I blogged about a few days ago: the 1992 video game Ghost Lion, which features the amazingly, horrifyingly early-90s, Lisa Frankensteiny box art you see here:

Nintendo NES Ghost Lion box art
i will never get tired of posting this, btw
Ghost Lion, it turns out, has one more thing going for it aside from the tragic time capsule that is the box art. Someone on Tumblr pointed out that the game was based on a movie — a Japanese movie, in fact, that used Western actors but that was filmed in Egypt. I checked IMDb. Nothing. I did some rudimentary Googling. Nothing. Finally, at long last, I turned up a VHS cover.


The movie exists. Based on this page, either the title was Pyramid in the Distance: Legend of the White Lion or that is just a literal translation of the Japanese title. (In Japan, the video game Ghost Lion was titled Legend of the White Lion.) It doesn’t appear the movie was ever released in the U.S., even though it was filmed in English and featured American audience-friendly Anne Marie McEvoy in the lead role of Maria, the girl who ventures through Egypt on some search for her parents that may or may not involve a white lion. The movie doesn’t show up on her IMDb page, but nonetheless, yeah — the girl with lime green stretch pants and stripper hair on the box art of the video game is, kinda sorta, Anne Marie McEvoy, or at least a version of her, which means she has the unique honor of doing something that only major action film stars and professional athletes ever get a chance to do: play as herself in a video game. And that’s pretty good for an actress whose second-best role after Kathy Santoni on four episodes of Full House is a supporting turn in Children of the Corn.

kathy santoni again, in a sense — via
It just strikes me as peculiar that the film doesn’t show up on IMDb at all. The director, Mataichiro Yamamoto, doesn’t even have a directing credit on IMDb, although he is credited with producing some better-known stuff such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Azumi.

I don’t know why there’s so little information about the film online — or at least on the English internet. But even without anything further, I’m pretty stoked on this as being a means of making Kathy Santoni relevant, if just for a moment. Middling reviews of the video game Ghost Lion notwithstanding, I’d be curious to see how the game plays. I’d also be curious to know how Andrea Barber feels about Anne Marie McEvoy getting to be playable in a video game so long before Kimmie Gibbler made her eight-bit debut. Surely, some me-minded game programmer can make that happen, no?


Video games footnotes, previously:

Sunday, September 8, 2013

The Phanto of Paradise

So long as I’m making some effort to convince the world that I can arrange shapes on a flat plane in a way that pleases the eye, and that’s apparently my game plan this weekend, there’s this sickly colored little tribute I made to Super Mario Bros. 2 and its stripey hills and sinister masks. It doesn’t mean anything.


I made this a few months ago, by the way. I liked it, and though I posted on my Tumblr it never made it onto this blog. I feel like it should. So now it has. Now everything is different.

Credit to sprites from here, here and here.

Pixel art, previously:

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Falling to Pieces Two Hundred Feet Above Burbank

To hear myself say it makes my eyes roll back so hard that they recede into my brain and then I don’t have eyes anymore, because holy high school diary, but where other people might have thought of this one window as broken, I found it beautiful. The cobweb pattern of cracks made it better than the others, at least if you ignore the danger it posed to anyone walking on the sidewalk below.







Not too many other people will see this window, I’m wagering, because it will soon be gone. What I saw was fleeting. That, I suppose, makes it even more beautiful. I would say that this could be a testament to the power of embracing your imperfections, but I can’t get past the fact that this beautiful but broken window will just be replaced with one that’s less interesting to look at.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Nothing But the Appreciation of Obscure Album Art That Is Both Wonderful and Terrible

(see title.)


(and if you must know, the android sisters sound exactly as you would guess, though perhaps more creepily sexual.)

(no, i don't know why either.)

(happy friday.)

Thursday, September 5, 2013

On Bukkake

I know, I know — that post title, right? How dare I title something I wrote with that when Joyce Carol Oates' On Bukkake remains the definitive text on the subject?

Know that I'm only writing this to inform you of one simple but nonetheless notable fact: the word bukkake may not always mean what you think. Now if bukkake doesn't mean anything to you, please do not Google it, especially if you're at your work computer. Please also do not inquire about the subject at your local library. Also, please don't go to the Wikipedia page for bukkake, because it's somehow even worse to see the whole explosive process explained in matter-of-fact language and diagrams. It's just one of those things you don't know about until you do, at which point you can never forget what it means and you occasionally wonder, "Wait, how did I learn what bukkake was?"

The word calls to mind some rather vivid imagery, too, and that's what makes the other meaning so strange: It's food — udon, in fact. And I know because a coworker recently wrote about ordering bukkake udon from a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo.

Here's the photo:

courtesy kcet food
Surprisingly tame, right? Compared to how you might have imagined bukkake udon, this looks rather savory, I think. (And that's savory in the sense of polite behavior, though I imagine it also tasted savory.) So why must this dish share its name with a sex act? Per my understanding, it's unlike the majority of udon dishes — which arrive soup-style, with the noodles floating in broth — in that the diner is served the noodles and topping and then required to pour the broth-like sauce over it immediately before eating. (Do I have that right? Please straighten out my understanding of the various bukkakes if not.) In case that doesn't make the connection clear enough, know that the word bukkake means "the act of splashing" in Japanese and comes from the verb bukkakeru, "to splash with (a liquid rudely)." Fair warning: that link may well be NSFW, depending on whether you work for squares.

So there you go. Now you know. May all your future bukkakes be the kind you ordered. Just be specific with your server.

Food written about in an unappetizing fashion, previously: