Happy December! It’s the month that moves too fast and costs too much, but I love it, and if you’re able to stomach me, I’m guessing that you love it, too.

As is tradition, I dug through my piles of home-recorded VHS tapes searching for more ancient Christmas commercials. Here’s the latest installment of Classic Christmas Commercials, featuring bees, burgers and Blockbuster.

Honey Nut Cheerios & Scrooge! (1980s)

This marvelously melodramatic Honey Nut Cheerios commercial was always one of my favorites, preposterous on its face yet so purely uplifting.

Here we had the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee trying to lure Ebenezer Scrooge away from work with the promise of breakfast. Bee’s motivations weren’t clear — he may have truly pitied Scrooge for working on Christmas, but it’s also possible that Scrooge was just then signing everyone’s houses over to some evil bank, and this was Bee’s cagey way to halt the process.

Scrooge is disinterested until hearing about the honey and nuts. His delivery of the line “…did you say honey, and nuts?” is still studied by budding thespians, who’d gladly settle for being even 1/10th that good.

Between Scrooge’s acquiescence and the goddamned Tallis Scholars singing about Honey Nut Cheerios, this is easily among the most feel-good of all Christmas commercials. Read More…

Posted by Matt on 12/01/18
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My reviews of old toy catalogs are usually one-and-dones, but boy, I could write about this book forever:

Behold, the 1987 JCPenney Christmas catalog. I was in my prime “toy years” when this baby hit mailboxes, and there is sooo much shit in these pages that I had, wanted or outright prayed to God for, sweaty brow and all.

Narrowing the book’s highlights down for one measly article was ridiculously hard, so let’s consider this “Part 1” and agree that I can revisit this catalog at a later date without anyone complaining about me being out of ideas.

Below: Five of my favorite things from the 1987 JCPenney Christmas catalog, in no particular order.

Triple ‘T’ & Cobra-La 3-Pack!
($9.99 each)

Oof, these are some of my all-time favorite G.I. Joe toys right here.

I got the Triple ‘T’ vehicle about a week before Christmas in ’87. It was that year’s “super early present,” which shouldn’t be confused with that year’s “early present,” nor that year’s “two-mornings-before-Christmas present.” My parents weren’t pushovers, but your boy knew how to chisel.

I still associate that vehicle with the holidays, thanks to the fond memories of pushing Sgt. Slaughter across our living room carpet while Rudolph saved Christmas on the nearby TV. (Slaughter was included with the Triple ‘T’, which was what made the vehicle such a must-have.)

Then there’s that Cobra-La three-pack, featuring the bizarre villains from G.I. Joe: The Movie. Most notable among them was Golobulus, the wormy dude on the left. At that point, he was far and away the weirdest figure in the entire G.I. Joe collection, and also the only one that could be worn like a cuff bracelet.

PS: That movie is still my favorite slice of G.I. Joe media. Just you try to deny the artistic value of turning Cobra Commander into a literal snake, and then pairing that snake with Roadblock, and oh yeah, Roadblock’s temporarily blind, and you know what, let’s throw them both into a violent blizzard, too. Keep in mind, all of that still only qualifies as the film’s third most important subplot.

Remember the Key & Peele sketch about Gremlins 2? We got into the same territory with G.I. Joe: The Movie. Read More…

Posted by Matt on 11/28/18
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‘Tis the season for eating garbage and blaming the time of year, so let’s do that. Below are five of 2018’s hottest holiday junk foods. Some are new, others are just new to me.

Grinch’s Green Pancakes!

As soon as I heard about IHOP’s green pancakes, they were all I could think about. I spent weeks in a state of utter distraction, fumbling through simple tasks. Finally ordering them felt less like satisfying curiosity and more like corrective surgery.

The Grinch’s Green Pancakes — an edible promo for his new movie — will only be around for a short time. For all I know, they’ll be gone by the time you read this. The dyed pancakes are topped with a sweet cream cheese icing, which itself is topped with green whipped cream.

The pancakes were beautiful in the promo shots, but it was a different story on our table. It was as if the Grinch splooged and shat upon a moldy pancake. As someone who believes that the Whos of Whoville are True Neutral at best, I don’t why the Grinch hates me.

In fairness, I’ve seen many photos of these pancakes floating around social media, and most of them looked just like the promo shots. This was just an unlucky break, likely due to a hurried preparation at a too-busy IHOP.

GRADE: A+. Ugly as it looked, it still tasted like a birthday cupcake. Read More…

Posted by Matt on 11/27/18
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