Daniel85

Imagine my surprise when, flipping through the latest Clint’s Crazy Bargains Warehouse catalogue, I was greeted by the sight of the Bandana Kid, back in all his manchildish glory!

Ooey-ooey-ooh… wah wah wah. Ooey-ooey-ooh… wah WAH wah. Ooey-ooey-ooh.. wah wah wah wah.

(That’s the stereotypical Western ‘duel at high noon’ whistle thing, if you couldn’t tell by my awesome onomatopoeia.)

That bandana has become this child model’s trademark. I can imagine a packed audition room with hundreds of kids and their vicarious stage-mums going for a K-Mart catalogue or something. Then the Bandana Kid rocks up and they all start whispering and pointing, cos they know that their presence has become futile– he’ll get the job.

He has such versatility… he can go from childish joy while jumping around in a green bag (don’t ask me what that’s about…), to pure evil:

That’s the role he was born to play!

This kid NEEDS a part in Pirates Of The Caribbean 3. 

It’d be the greatest film ever. It’d sink Titanic!

Some more mock-worthy stuff from bargain basement catalogues.

This is probably one of the weirdest and most compelling things I’ve seen in years. That kid is built like a 37 year old truck driver who’s been sinking a slab of VB a day for the past 18 years. Even his facial features look old. It’s just weird.

I dunno if the bandana is just what he came to the photo shoot in, but it doesn’t really jive with the medieval/barbarian weaponry, does it? It would make for a cool rock-opera, though, involving medieval warriors who get around on Harleys instead of horses. Music by Jim Steinman and Meatloaf.

I hate that kid in the black hooded suit. That sardonic look on his/her face, as if he/she is so above doing a Go-Lo catalogue. I guess I’d be looking kinda nonplussed if some photographer asked me to hold my hands up in a ’scary’ pose like that, but still… 

Check out that little dude in the Dracula get-up below, though. He’s loving it. He’s getting right into it. Good on him.

That pirate guy in the middle has forgotten that he’s in some shitty two dollar shop catalogue flogging a dodgy pirate costume, and thinks he’s in a Myer catalogue or something. He’s doing his Blue Steel look.

They’re still selling this kinda shit. Good old discount stores.

The shot gun even comes with little shells, which heightens the chances of some nervous cop thinking little Billy has grabbed dad’s shotty from the shed, and so popping a couple of pistol shots into him for public safety.

So… Halloween’s tonight. It’ll be interesting to see how many trick or treaters we get, considering the big push from retailers and supermarkets this year.

And then tomorrow we can start celebrating Christmas! Fruit mince pies all ’round!

Another goodtime happyfunsummer commercial:

There are certain things that stick with you from childhood, and for the TV generation(s) they’re mostly ads. This is one of them for me.

I remember being over at a friend’s house after school one day, and we became absolutely enamoured of this ad. We probably saw it during Disney Afternoon or Totally Wild or something. Afterwards we went outside on the trampoline and took turns sliding across it, singing “You run/You slide/You hit the ramp/And take a dive!”. I think we replaced ‘ramp’ with ‘bump’, cos that’s how I remember it.

We must have done it for hours, or what seemed like hours, because we were at it right through the twilight, until the street lights came on and his mum called us in for dinner.

That kid should get a fuckin’ Oscar for Best Sheer Terror. He’s either the greatest child actor of our times (even better than the kid from Liar, Liar) or the director of this ad actually brought a real crocodile on set and sicced it on the kid. Method directing.

Of course, I never had a Crocodile Mile, or even a Slip ‘N’ Slide. Just a couple of black garbage bags held down by volcanic rocks, with the hose running at one end. Thanks, dad.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but somewhere amidst all the tinsel and demonic animatronic Santas stores are endeavouring to make a couple o’ bucks off this Halloween thing.

Target, perhaps wisely (imagine the Pilates crowd calling up Today Tonight complaining about Target being an antipodean outpost for American cultural imperialism…) is not pushing the Halloween thing too obviously; instead they’ve just packed the toy section of their catalogue with more costumes than a Star Wars premiere. There’s nary a Jack O’ Lantern or bat in sight.

Except Batman, of course:

I can understand the Batman/Robin set… that’s a couple of brothers taken care of. But Superman/Clark Kent? What kind of messed up kid wants to dress up as Clark Kent? And it doesn’t even look like Clark Kent.

“What are you supposed to be, a Franz Ferdinand fan? Their sound is derivative at best.” *punch*

That Batman suit is pretty cool, though. Better than the shitty one I got as a kid:

You don’t wanna mess with that.

Now there’s  a Superman costume. Superman with endocrine problems, anyway.

This Turtles costume is almost as bad as my Batman one. Twenty bucks for a pair of green pants and a t-shirt? And why didn’t they just put the mask on the kid for the first photo? They probably forgot to, and then had to add that inset later, just so people would realise what it’s actually supposed to be. 

Fuck department stores, though. The real Halloween action is at discount chains. Check out this awesomeness from the Clint’s Crazy Bargains catalogue (I refuse to call it ‘The Warehouse’, because ‘Clint’s Crazy Bargains’ is too awesome a name to give up.) 

That’s all you need for Halloween costumes. Cheap, plastic weapons and masks and shit. I’ll bet places like this (and The Reject Shop, and The $2 Shop) do way more trade on costumes and stuff at Halloween than the department stores, because they don’t waste time with expensive, sub-par licensed character costumes. They know people just want cheap, disposable stuff, and so they supply it.

The funny thing is that there’s usually such a random assortment of this junk in the shops that you’ll see kids with mismatched costumes, like a Count Dracula with a scythe, or a ghost carrying an axe. That’s the spirit of it, though. Just throw anything remotely horrorish on and go out an get your fun-size Snickers and Barley Sugars.

Here’s the slightly more up-market offerings at Clint’s/The Warehouse. I don’t know what any of them are supposed to be. The big one looks like Eric Stoltz’s character from Mask, and the middle one is like a human-sized Madball. The top one would be a good generic mask for a Skeletor or General Kael costume (Amirite, Reaper? Amirite?!)

Lest I forget my raison de blog, here’s a food review to nourish your minds.

I haven’t really followed the protean manifestations of the Twistie over the past few years, but there have been many. When I was a kid, we just had Chicken and Cheese. Cheese was my favourite, but I wasn’t averse to some Chicken Twisties when one of my parents returned to the car with a couple of bags of them after paying for petrol . Why do people always buy Twisties at service stations?! Service stations must account for at least 80% of all Twisties sales!

Anyway, in recent times there’s been all manner of variations in size, shape, and flavour. The only one I can remember is the ill-informed experiment to gauge the public’s receptiveness to sweet Twisties with the Blue Toffee flavour, and now these Zig Zag Twisties.

I don’t claim that these are particularly new; in fact they’ve been sitting on the shelves in my Safeway’s chip aisle for months now. Resigned to the fact that word-of-mouth wasn’t suddenly gonna cause this product to start flying off the shelves like some montage from a Christmas movie, they were marked down to $1.99, from whatever exorbitant price they originally were. I’m a tightarse, so I grabbed a pack.

This kind of mad-lib/cloze thing on the back is straight outta the 90s. I didn’t think that stuff was still practised in food marketing. Well, McDonald’s putting ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ in various world languages all over their packaging is just a rip-off of Coke doing the same thing with the word ‘Always’ back in the 90s (Toujours Coca-Cola!), so I guess everything old is new again.

I don’t know if you can see it on that terrible photo, but at the bottom it says ‘Eat ‘em, connect ‘em, use them as fangs or hey, do whatever you want with them because LIFE’S PRETTY STRAIGHT WITHOUT TWISTIES’. Have we learned nothing from ‘3D Doritos’? If that fiasco taught us anything, it’s that attempting to make chip products into playthings is a fool’s errand.

Flavour so big you can see it, all right. The funny thing is that that bowl is actually dark blue, but the flash on my camera turned it electric eel blue. Fantastic.

The flavour on these babies is great, which makes me wish I’d discovered them before the dying days of the product. I turned them over in my mouth like some stuck-up wine connoisseur for ages trying to find the mots justes for the flavour, and it’s this: McDonald’s BBQ sauce. It tastes exactly like McDonald’s BBQ sauce, which is probably the greatest condiment ever produced by McDonald’s, apart from perhaps their Hotcake Syrup. Seriously, someone get me a crate of McDonald’s BBQ sauce and Hotcake Syrup packets, and I’ll live on that shit for months.

It tastes so much like the McD’s sauce that I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not what the R&D Department at Smith’s were going for on the sly. Chip companies having ‘crossovers’ with fast food chains is nothing new; remember the ‘Pizza Hut flavoured’ Thins a few years ago? That’s false advertising, man, cos I bought those chips under the impression that I’d be chowing down on a delicious bit of brown brick and mansard roof tiling. (Wow, I think I was channelling Mitch Hedberg for a second there.)

Anyway, I’d highly recommend these if you can grab a pack before they go the way of all novelty food and drink.

Anyone remember that old 90s Aussie kids’ show Ship To Shore? Of course you do!

Despite how awesome everyone thought that redheaded kid with a plane fuselage for a bedroom was, the true star of Ship To Shore was security chief Hermes Endakis. Oh, the crazy schemes those island kids pulled on ol’ Hermes!

The weather’s been pretty nice lately, so yesterday I was thinking about summer and the good times that roll during that season. I remembered a Super Soaker ad that ran at some point in the mid-90s, which featured a character that I was convinced was played by the same actor behind Hermes Endakis (Greg Carroll is his name, by the way).

Through the power of YouTube, I managed to track down said commercial. (Of course, like so many commercials and TV show intros on YouTube, it was stolen from my beloved Retro Junk.)

And for reference, here are some pics of Greg Carroll/Hermes Endakis:

So, what do you think? Is that Hermes in the Super Soaker ad? He certainly looks, talks, and acts like him. It wouldn’t be the first example of an over-the-top Aussie character being appropriated for US TV commercials, either. Remember Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson in those ‘Energizer… Oi!’ ads?

And am I the only one who thinks it would be awesome to spend a fortnight at ‘Camp Super Soaker’?!

EDIT:  Robin has furnished us with a MIDI composition of the Ship To Shore theme. Watch out, Leopold Stokowski! (Ya know, cos, I heard there are graverobbers about… )

EDIT #2: And you can find it here. I’m really off the ball today.

Came across these while kicking it around my local Safeway recently:

I don’t think there’s been any advertising for them (but then, a product like this would probably be advertised during the morning cartoons, and I’m never up before 10 AM), so I dunno how long they’ve been around. Could be old news for all I know.

Let me tell you a little something about Tiny Teddies. They first entered the hearts, minds, and stomachs of Australian children in 1990, in ‘chocolate’ and ‘honey’ form. They’re loosely ripped-off (I mean based on) what the Yanks call ‘Teddy Grahams’. 

Now, in 1990 both the Care and Gummi Bears were still going strong (and who could forget the Ewoks?) so kids would eat up any product related to those small, fuzzy natural born killers.

Wait a minute! Eat up? Small bears? Small… tiny. Bears… teddies. Tiny Teddies.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that’s how one of the brainstorming sessions at Arnott’s would have gone in early 1989.

Anyway, I remember when they had just come out, there was a display at the Safeway on the corner of Shannon Ave and Aberdeen St (G-Town represent!) which consisted of a massive edifice built of boxes of Tiny Teddies. I was five years old at the time, and so right smack in the middle of the group Arnott’s was aiming for. I don’t recall if there had been much advertising for Tiny Teddies, or if seeing them in-store was my first exposure, but I do know that I wanted them bad.

My memory is a little hazy as to the exact sequence of events, but I think I was walking down the frozen food aisle with my mum when I saw the awesome spectacle of a ziggurat of Tiny Teddy boxes. I must have stopped and she kept going, cos I remember running up to her later, ready to make any kind of deal necessary to have those things in my belly within the hour. Strangely enough, she agreed to let me get them without my having to make the brocolli pledge, and I ran back to grab a box.

I dunno if I was just so excited that common sense physics went out the window, or if I was simply a stupid kid to begin with, but I just reached right into the middle of the masterpiece of whatever high school kid had pulled display stacking duty and grabbed a box of honey Tiny Teddies.

Sure enough, the whole damn thing came tumbling down.

I don’t remember what happened after that, but I don’t think I cared too much. I had my Tiny Teddies and a kick-ass ‘remember when’ story to boot.     

Back to the matter at hand, though.

There’s been a whole bunch of crazy Tiny Teddy shit going in the last few years, and I’ve tried to keep up as best I can. First there were new flavours, then whole new products (the Dunkaroo-esque ‘Tiny Teddy Dippers’, plus the Godzilla of the Tiny Teddy universe, the over-sized ‘Tiny Teddy Creams’, and the ill-fated savoury-flavoured Tiny Teddies).

I’ve always felt that there should have been a Tiny Teddy cartoon. I know that it’s not the early 80s anymore, and you can’t get away with shit like that in children’s programming, but come on- they could make it a positive, edifying multicultural thing. You’ve got the black/chocolate Tiny Teddies, the white/honey Tiny Teddies, and the half-caste choc-chip Tiny Teddies. And you know what the strawberry ones could represent.

No good? Ah well, it was worth a try. 

With this Tiny Teddy On Safari thing we get a hint of the Tiny Teddies actually engaging in some kind of activity beyond just existing to be eaten. (I’ve always felt the ‘Meet them, then eat them’ tagline in the advertising was a bit creepy. Kind of like those Cadbury ads where the chocolate people take bites out of their environment, pets, and each other.)

You’ll probably have to enlarge that to read the text. It’s worth it, believe me. Rex the Rhino, Ellie the Elephant, and Leonard the Lion. Leonard is such an uninspiring name for the King of the Jungle. I’da called him ‘Lucius’.

The standard fun-’n'-games on the back of the box. At least finger puppets are a bit more useful than one of those freakin’ mazes you usually get. 

So here’s what’s on the inside. I was going to try and do a David Attenborough sort of thing here, y’know, like “observe the creatures of the plastic savannah in their-’ oh, fuck it. Richard Attenborough was always my favourite Attenborough anyway.

There’s your lineup. I hate those fucking giggling ones. I think they’re there to laugh at the fat one, to show kids that it’s not okay to be obese. Hey, that could be a public service announcement. “Remember, kids: it’s not O-kay to be O-bese!”

Upon seeing the lion, I decided perhaps Leonard is the right name. He’s just so wimpy. The elephant, on the other hand, is goddamn scary. Those eyes…

I was pretty happy that these biscuits came in the honey flavour, because as far as I know you can’t get boxes of honey Tiny Teddies now; it’s  only available in those cumbersome multipacks with the little baggies that contain like six and a half Tiny Teddies. Those are okay for my two year old cousin, but I don’t need that many layers of plastic slowing me down. I want to just open a big box of Tiny Teddies and stuff my face with handfuls of them. I guess they had to go with honey on this one, though, because ‘chocolate’ and ’safari’ would just be inviting racism claims.

Yesssss. There’s my man Grumpy, clearly the best of the Tiny Teddy gang. If you compare the actual Grumpy to his animated avatar on the box, he is about 100 times more pissed off in biscuit form.

Here’s a line of Grumpy Tiny Teddies, just cos.

I think one of the things kids are supposed to do with Tiny Teddies is create their own little stories with them before eating them. The danger there is that you form attachments and don’t want to eat them, so you end up with ten year old grotty food on your mantlepiece. But anyway, if I was doing a story with the contents of this box it’d be all about Grumpy and his lion posse terrorising everyone else.

How do we get down to one Grumpy, you ask? Well, there’d be a Battle Royale amongst all the Grumpies to decide that. Every non-successful Grumpy would die by being uppercutted into my mouth.

If Nesquik got its own cereal, why not Tiny Teddies? It’s pretty practical, actually, cutting out the tedious dipping process and just getting some good old biscuit + milk action right into ya. Kelloggs + Arnott’s, you know what to do.

As part of my continuing mission to chronicle all the “limited edition” craziness that the junk food hustlers keep pushing at us, I bring you McDonald’s(’s? How the FUCK do you make something that’s already possessive possessive?) latest offering:

The Legendary El Maco

I actually hadn’t heard about the El Maco until my brother came back from a trip to town (and let’s face it- what else is there to do in Geelong but cruise down Ryrie Street?) and said ‘I ate like four of those El Macos’. I did a doubletake at that, a devilish grin spreading across my face as I put dos and dos together, realising that this must be some crazy Mexican- or Spanish-themed McDonald’s product. My bro pronounced it ‘El Mah-ko’, which had me thinking “McDonald’s and tacos- together at last!”. Unfortunately, that relationship remains unconsummated, cos it’s just a burger. But so much more than just a burger.

I must say that the television ad for the El Maco is brilliant. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a parody of those god-awful McDonald’s ads that have been running over the last few months. You know, those ones where the adults suddenly stop in the middle of important stuff like standing in line at a cafe or parking their Benzes, and their ‘inner child’ jumps out of a trap door in their torso and goes to McDonald’s. “Feed your inner child” is the tagline, I believe. Anyway, the El Maco ad has a Hispanic looking fellow (complete with elaborate moustache, Mariachi uniform, sombrero, and guitar) jump out of the belly of a whitebread guy to go and grab an El Maco. “Feed your inner Mexican,” says that annoying voice-over guy who seems to be in every Australian ad lately. You know the one.

It’s a pretty funny ad, and it just goes to show that even though they’ve changed their image drastically over the last few years, McDonald’s isn’t above a bit of racial stereotyping.

Now, in the in-store promotional material, and also in the advertising, this is touted as “the return of the Legendary El Maco”. I’ve honestly never heard of it before, and that hurts me more than you can know. I really would like to think that if a burger had become ‘legendary’, I’d know about it.

The only other Mexican-themed McDonald’s burger I can remember is the Mexican Chicken Burger that had a couple of runs in the mid-90s (accompanied by the sheer brilliance of Spicy Shaker Fries). Now that was a burger of legend.

I love the idea of a burger in a box. If we can’t get back the old styrofoam burger containers (thanks a lot, hippies!), then I want to eat burgers out of cardboard boxes as much as I can.

Down the side of the box is a line-up of the El Maco’s ingredients. It’s basically a Big Mac (it does have two all-beef patties) with taco sauce, tomato, and sour cream, so I guess if the El Maco is to you as the Ribwich to Homer Simpson, then you can just make your own at home long after the legend of the El Maco has faded.

Mmm… appetising. The mess actually makes it look like a Whopper, don’tcha think?

Vivisection of an El Maco. It makes me feel good inside that once the El Maco has ridden off into the sunset, I’ll have been the only person with the foresight, nay, the vision to have taken a picture of the inside of one.

As for the taste of the burger, well, it’s like I said- you could make this yourself with a Big Mac and a couple of leftover sachets from an Old El Paso meal kit.

I’m so happy that they actually entered it into their receipt database as “El Maco”, rather than something generic and lame like “Promo. Burger” or “Ltd. Ed. Burger”. There’s something strangely amusing about seeing “El Maco” printed on a McDonald’s docket. It’s like some stoners working the night shift decided to fuck around with the cash registers and print off made-up stuff.

You might as well all go out and try the El Maco before it’s gone. If only to give your inner Mexican a break.