Daniel85

Wow, for once a current commercial I enjoy is actually on YouTube! (I know the blog is supposed to be on hiatus, but posting a random vid doesn’t really count, does it?)

Check out the funky top-loading VCR!

In addition to just being a plain cool commercial, it’s also of interest to me as it’s relevant to some research I was doing last semester about television in the 1950s, and the way Walt Disney (or his studio, I should say) presented a view of history and progress as inseparable from and propelled by consumer technology. Here’s one example.

In other news, I’m off to Seattle on Friday.

I’m thinking of finally buying an mp3 player, cos I’ve already listened to all the (good) albums Qantas has loaded on their entertainment console thing numerous times on previous trips. Gonna pack it with lots of They Might Be Giants and 80s film scores (Giorgio Moroder FTW!).

I just did a quick search of what movies they have playing this month. There’s not much on offer. They have a few movies that I was vaguely interested in seeing, but not beyond the actually-doing-it threshold, such as Cloverfield, 10,000 BC, or even The Mist (probably would never have considered seeing it, but Matt from X-Entertainment gave it a pretty good review, and his taste is always impeccable). I could always fall back on Casablanca, too. Or I could just hope that they’ve updated the same 3 episodes of The Office they always have, or even added some Flight of the Conchords… If only they offered Who’s The Boss, Family Ties, or ALF!

3:02!

Gotta love bad Neighbours acting. This scene was referenced practically every 30 seconds by my brother and me around the time it aired (probably 4 or 5 years ago now). I was chuffed to find the clip on YouTube.

Great winter drink, or greatest winter drink?

You decide.

Holy shit, people.

I’ve been searching for this ad for years, and never managed to track it down. Someone’s finally uploaded it to YouTube.

The Wobbies World commercial is a pillar of Victorian childhood. A flagstone! A bulkhead!

No-one I know ever actually went to Wobbies World, but we all saw that commercial about 5 times a day every day of our lives. Did any of you guys ever actually get to go to Wobbies World? Please fill me in if you did.

In hindsight, Wobbies World looks incredibly lame. But how awesome did it seem as a kid?! I would’ve given my Game Boy to go on that frickin’ bubble helicopter.

I don’t understand how Wobbies World assumed the exalted position of desire it did amongst early 90s Aussie kids. Surely we were smart enough to see that the place was a complete shithole? Nevertheless, I can remember harboring an intense need to go to Wobbies World. Maybe it was cos Disneyland seemed impossible, Warner Bros Movie World perhaps a little less so, but still mostly unattainable… but Wobbies World was a definite maybe. Nunawading’s in the Melways, dad could drive there!

Or maybe it was just that incredibly hypnotic music. I love how it finishes at the end of the commercial. Tik-tik-whoo.

Some more points, because I’m not done dissecting this relic of 90s Victorian kidhood: 

What’s the deal with that stupid mannequin dressed as a fireman? They couldn’t even afford real animatronics, so they just pinched a dummy from the bins behind K-Mart. Oh, and that early shot where it zooms in on the dummy’s face is frickin’ terrifying.

“Bring your friends, and mum too!” (But dad can fuckin’ stay home.)

And I’m sorry, but a slide isn’t a ride. It’s playground equipment. Just had to call bullshit on that one.

P.S. I tried to find the clip from The Late Show where they parodied this commercial (with a funpark named Piss Weak World), but it’s not on YouTube. Instead, please accept this equally hilarious Late Show spoof of Channel 9’s old “We’re Still #1″ campaign:

This is undoubtedly old news to everyone by now, but…

Yep, the best fucking show in the history of television is being revived. I don’t like how the new logo looks like some kind of energy drink logo, or a sequel to Halo or something, but it’s hard to care too much when we have the sheer awesomeness of Gladiators returning to our screens.

The original series intro will prove incontrovertibly my claim to the show’s unassailable awesomeness:

Everything about that is awesome. (I know I’m overusing the word ‘awesome’, but I wholeheartedly believe that the word was actually coined by a Druid seer many thousands of years ago to describe Gladiators, which he had seen in a vision of the future.)

The intro looks like it’s straight out of Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules or Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie (two other examples of sheer 90s awesomeness)… and the theme song is incredibly reminiscent of Joe Esposito’s “You’re The Best” (from The Karate Kid).

The shot of Taipan shredding on his guitar on the peaks of Olympus is further testmament to the unrivalled coolness of Gladiators.

I first got wind of this when I was in the States and saw that they were reviving American Gladiators. I hoped and prayed that Australia would follow suit, and then a couple of weeks ago I started seeing promotional posters all around Melbourne. Happy boy, happy boy.

I always loved in the original series how there would be these roided-up gym freaks who’d come on, convinced they could mix it with the Gladiators, and then they got totally thrashed on the Roman Rings or the pyramid. That’s what we call hubris, motherfuckers. And then there’d always be some little 5′6″ baldheaded tough-nut high school maths teacher who’d absolutely carve it up. (GHS alumni: Do you think Mr. Truscott would’ve been the greatest Gladiators contestant ever?)

The best thing about the original series was when they did the International Gladiators comp. There was one British Gladiator (Wolf?) who was a totally batshit crazy geezer, and he had a rivalry going with Vulcan. It was epic. I thought those two were gonna kill each other.

Best show ever.

(Edit: My brother just told me that this is old, old, old news and everyone’s known about it for months. Oh well. I’m still excited.)

This has always been one of my favourite 80s songs. I never realised the band was from Melbourne, though.

For some reason the song makes me think of the Target in Bay City Plaza. (Fuck you, Westfield… it’s called ‘Bay City Plaza’.)

The video is pretty awesome… great New Wave aesthetic.

Hey.

I’m back in Australia now. Sorry for hardly ever updating the blog. I don’t know if I have the desire to continue it, but I guess I’ll keep it up just in case.

My flight was long and boring, and I got stuck in between two old ladies, which is always fun. One of them was really bitchy and constantly snapping at other passengers and the flight staff. The other one wouldn’t shut up about all the places she’s been. I felt like starting to sing ‘I’ve been everywhere, man’ right in her face.

One thing I noticed on the flight from LA to Melbourne is how ugly Australians are. I hadn’t been around a lot of Australians, obviously, so suddenly being on a plane full of them for 15 hours was an eye-opening experience. Why do all young Australian men (late teens to mid 20s) look like rapists? They all have that smashed-in-the-face-with-a-brick, forty yard stare look to them. Geez… spend a few months overseas and all of a sudden I’ve gone all Germaine Greer/Peter Carey.

Love this song. Love ‘the Crawl’.

It’s one of those half-forgotten ballads you always hear on Gold 104, sandwiched between Crowded House and Human League.

The lyrics (and the video, which I’d never seen before I sought it out recently) deal somewhat with a topic I’ve been halfheartedly interested in lately, the new Orientalism (new compared to Romantic Orientalism, I mean) that permeated Australian culture after WWII and Vietnam. It’s a subject close to my heart, considering that my grandad fought in Vietnam and he (and my grandma) lived in Malaysia for several years of his Air Force career. My mum was born there; the housekeeper’s Chinese was her first language.

Anyway, the song is brilliant. Australian music was really something back then. Doesn’t it just make you wanna rock up to your Year 10 formal in Dunlop Volleys, catch a green/silver V-Line train to go see a Hawks/Cats game, then head down to Lorne on the weekend?

I suppose that in a post that has centred around Orientalism and Australian music and Australian military involvement in the Pacific I should be talking about ‘Khe Sanh’, but I’ve always dismissed that song. Cold Chisel to me is just so much posturing, over-compensated masculine bathos. And not in a good way, like say in Australian Crawl’s later hit, ‘Errol’. Parenthetically (not really, considering I didn’t put it in parentheses), my grandad’s name is Errol, named after Errol Flynn, whom the Australian Crawl song is of course about. Everything is connected.

Oh yeah, whenever Australian Crawl comes up I like to mention that I’m (extremely distantly) related to James Reyne. My mum shares a great-great-great grandmother with him, on her Dutch side. And no, there’s not a straw in the world I won’t grasp at.

So, to summarise… love ‘the Crawl’. Don’t love ‘the Chisel’. Fat middle aged dudes in Hawaiian shirts getting drunk and dancing with Asian girls is hilarious and depressing.

Remember Extreme Darren? That character was the only good thing about that crappy “Big Bite” show. Chris Lilley is a genius. He’s Australia’s Sacha Baron Cohen.

There are a bunch of Extreme Darren bits on YouTube, but most of them are taped off the TV with a camcorder. I hate it when people do that. This is the only one I could find that you can actually see and hear: 

And speaking of Razor Scooters, here’s mine rusting away in the backyard.

Hard to believe that I originally paid $270 for it, back in those heady days of Y2K. Well, I didn’t buy it; my dad did. That’s one good thing about having a guilty ’school holiday dad’.

… is coming (Combing?) to Melbourne!

He sent a bulletin out on MySpace to say that he’s gonna be in town from May 13-29, and possibly doing some uni or pub shows. I’ll definitely be going along for a laff if he does end up doing something. Maybe I’ll finally be able to find out what the hell a ‘knucklebone face’ is… oh, what’s that you say? It’s ‘knucklebone phase’? Well, that makes sense, I guess.

Seriously though, did anyone else used to think those lyrics were “I’m like a yo-yo face, I’m like a marble face, I’m like a hopscotch face… etc”?