Purple Stuff: The Ecto Cooler Adventure.
The holiday weekend was an unending fiasco. Memorial Day marked the official return of Hi-C Ecto Cooler, and even though I’d already scored a few press samples, I needed to experience it the real way. I needed the personal shopping experience. (Also, I just wanted more goddamned Ecto Cooler.)
Unfortunately, we fans perhaps took that “May 30th” street date a little too much to heart. Seemed like everyone assumed that Ecto Cooler would just magically appear in every store at midnight, when the reality was much, much harsher: Even a day later, Ecto Cooler is still tough to find in stores, and even impossible to find depending on your location.
But we didn’t know that right away. In fact, me and Jay from The Sexy Armpit embarked on a ridiculous Ecto Cooler hunt that began last Friday, and continued for practically two days straight. Our story has a happy ending, but for a while there, it was looking pretty rocky.
We decided to record our memories while they were still fresh, so hooray, you’re getting a special bonus episode of The Purple Stuff Podcast. It’s really something we wanted to record for ourselves, but I dunno, maybe you’ll enjoy listening to two guys reminisce about the night they spent hopping from one 24 hour ShopRite to another, in the middle of a giant thunderstorm.
Give us a listen by clicking the giant play button down below!
You can also download this week’s episode by right-clicking here.
I’ll let the cat out of the bag early: Yes, we did find Ecto Cooler. While the Hi-C juice boxes haven’t hit any stores within reasonable driving distance just yet, we found one Cinemark movie theater that had the cans, and decided to drive another 1.5 hours out of our way to find them. Was it worth it? Oh hell yes!
Reminder: The Purple Stuff Podcast can also be found on iTunes, Stitcher and Podbean. Read More…
Five Retro TV Commercials, Part 9!
Just like last time, everything in this edition of Five Retro TV Commercials comes from that tape full of 1991 Ninja Turtles cartoons.
(I’ll be putting that cassette to rest after this article, by the way. There are other commercials on it, but nothing you can’t live without seeing again. Except maybe the one where MC Hammer shilled his official doll. Since the doll was made in the precise same scale as Barbie, the crossover possibilities were pretty Kodak-worthy.)
Sprinkled Chips Ahoy! (1991)
Sure, I’ve already written a whole tribute to Sprinkled Chips Ahoy, but now you can see it with that gravel-voiced TMNT bumper as the lead-in. IMO, that’s the only way to see it!
The commercial confirms that Sprinkled Chips Ahoy debuted in 1991, when style guides were still stuck in that weird limbo between ‘80s neon and ‘90s graffiti.
Adding everyday sprinkles to Chips Ahoy cookies was hardly worth so much fuss, but at the same time, I never would’ve bothered with them without that fuss. Mountains were made out of molehills, and I spent the early ‘90s refusing to eat cookies that didn’t look like they’d been infested by rainbow bugs.
(Well, maybe not refusing, but definitely not preferring.) Read More…
Purple Stuff: TV Theme Songs!
I think I got two hours sleep last night, so apologies in advance if I mindlessly segue into a diatribe about how rabbits are really elephants. It was all to bring you this thing in a timely fashion:
In this week’s Purple Stuff Podcast, me and Jay from The Sexy Armpit discuss a dozen of our favorite TV theme songs, covering everything from Growing Pains to Game of Thrones.
I must emphasize that these aren’t necessarily our twelve favorite TV themes — just a bunch that really rock!
Give us a listen by clicking the giant, ugly play button down below!
You can also download this week’s show by right-clicking here.
Thanks as always for listening — we love seeing the Purple Stuff grow! Feel free to talk about some of your favorite TV themes in the comments, too.
(We’ll probably revisit this topic on a future episode… there are just too many great themes to cover in one show!) Read More…
Five Retro TV Commercials, Part 8!
Welcome to a special edition of Five Retro TV Commercials. Special to me, at least.
A tape donated by my pal MZ was simply labeled “Turtles,” and I correctly guessed that it’d be stuffed with old TMNT episodes. What a freakin’ goldmine!
Everything on the videocassette was recorded in 1991, when the white hot Ninja Turtles had episodes running on weekdays and weekends. The light grew a little dimmer by ‘92, but this was still very much during the period when anything with any tie to any Ninja Turtle meant buckets of money and devotional vows.
Below are five commercials that YOU AND ME PERSONALLY WATCHED during Ninja Turtle cartoons back in ‘91. They’ve all aged gracefully.
Sunkist Fruit Rox! (1991)
Guys, this is it. The most impossibly ‘90s commercial of all ‘90s commercials. It’s hard to accept this as something that actually aired in 1991, and not in 2016 as a parody of ‘91.
The “rocks as fruit snacks” gimmick had been tried before, but never with this twist: This time, the rocks (“Rox”) were from outer space AND the future. Wow. Given that concept, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the commercial is so nuts.
Two skateboarding kids teleport aboard an alien spaceship, because that’s evidently the only place to procure Sunkist Fruit Rox. As if that isn’t weird enough, the lead alien breaks the fourth wall to tell us about we can get a free “Fruit Rox Box” by collecting proofs-of-purchase from specially marked packages. This is literally just a plastic box meant to be worn as a necklace, as said alien demonstrates.
I’ve seen plenty of odd promotions, but “necklace that holds fruit snacks” may take the crazy cake. It’d be curious even if it wasn’t pitched by a space alien who looks like a cross between a Teletubby and a dead tree.
Still, the subtle permission to treat fruit snacks like junk from a museum gift shop was all I needed to temporarily name Fruit Rox both my favorite thing to eat and my favorite thing to play with. Read More…