Daniel85

McDonalds’ latest attempt to pretend that they’re concerned about kids’ health and well-being is the ‘Music Happy Meal’, which comes with a little iPod-looking thing called a ‘music stick’ containing 30-second song clips.

When I heard about this, I just expected a bunch of crappy  pop songs by the likes of Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson, but I was surprised and awe-struck to find that one of the songs available is the 1994 smash hit ‘I Like To Move It’ by Reel 2 Real.

It’s good to see that they’re introducing kids to the classics. They’re only missing ‘Boom Boom Boom’ by The Outhere Bros, and ‘Whoomp! There It Is!’ by Tag Team. I can actually see why they used ‘I Like To Move It’, cos it was featured in that movie Madagascar last year, but one of the other music sticks inexplicably contains Lou Bega’s ‘Mambo No. 5′ (a song I’d hoped never to have to hear again). 

The music sticks themselves are pretty cool for Happy Meal toys. They’re fairly loud, and come with a clip so self-loathers can proudly display them on their belts and walk around getting beaten up.

I do like the idea of being able to blast ‘I Like To Move It’ from my hip at any time, though. If anyone gives me any guff throughout the day, I can just push the button and give them a dose of Reel 2 Real.

Each music stick comes with a set of dance steps for performing to the songbyte:

McDonald’s and dancing, historically, have not gone well together. Anyone who’s seen the 1988 E.T. rip-off Mac and Me will know what I’m talking about. The movie features a bizarre 10 minute breakdance contest scene in a McDonald’s store, all while a group of ‘men in black’ chase down the little alien who needs to drink Coke (not just any soda, only Coke) to live. I will review Mac and Me for Retro Junk someday, and it will be the best thing ever written.

Since I can’t dance, here’s Spider-Man to show you how it’s done…

(That’s his ride in the background. One does have to represent, after all. Spidey rolls with Barbie dolls.)

My rule of thumb for Christmas products is: the tackier, the better. I love going into The Reject Shop and other dodgy discount establishments around this time of year and marvelling at all the crappy stuff they’re trying to hock.

Stuff like this, for example:

I think I just about fell in love when I found this in Go-Lo yesterday. A big ol’ plastic Santa head full of lollipops. It’s just right on some cosmic level.

The thing looks like a cross between Olmec from Legends of the Hidden Temple:

Thud Butt from Hook:

With maybe a bit of MODOK from Marvel Comics thrown in:

Bizarre.

The lollipops are just standard clumps of sugar on a stick, in Christmas colours, but let’s face it– anyone who buys this is not buying it for the lollies, but for the awesome kitsch value of having a giant fucking Olmec Santa head to put on their mantlepiece.

Perhaps the only thing more disturbing than Santa’s nightmarish visage itself are the mysterious curly black hairs I found at the bottom of the bowl:

Tasty.

Also at Go-Lo, I came across the famed ‘Projector Pop’.

These were out last Christmas, but I wasn’t blogging then so I had no need to waste my hard-earned cash on dumb novelty items.

I was always pretty obsessed with light-up toys as a kid, probably because of the ‘Macaulay-Calkin-In-Michael-Jackson’s-Black-Or-White‘ rebellious aspect of being able to continue playing well into the night, even after your parents have ordered you to turn your light off. I guess it also comes from the fact that I was terrified of the nighttime, and having stuff that cast beams of light across my room felt like some kind of talisman against things that go bump.

 That’s the shape that they reckon this little contraption will cast. There was also a Santa Claus and a flying sleigh, but I chose the snowman as the character I’d most like to make dance across my living room wall at night.

I was a bit skeptical of the projector pop’s claim to be able to ’shine 10 feet’. Yeah, right, just like the Super Soaker can shoot 50 feet. Cut five hours to that night, though, cos you know the night time (night and day!) is the right time for conjuring luminous snowmen up on your walls.  (I’d apologise to the memory of Ray Charles, but I don’t think Mr. Diet Pepsi Uh-Huh Uh-Huh You Got The Right One Baby would mind.)

I was pleasantly surprised…

That’s from about six feet away, and the snowman was about one or two feet high. Even from about ten, twelve feet he’s pretty visible. The photo can’t really do it justice, it really does look great. (I should note here that my camera doesn’t like autofocusing in the murky blackness of night, so I had to manually focus it while keeping the snowman up on the wall. I had to put the projector pop in my mouth and depress the button with my teeth, all the while fiddling with my camera for good focus. The things I do for this blog! I’ll be jumping out of a fucking plane on a skateboard next.)

All told, the projector pop is pretty good value for $2.50. The lollipop part is watermelon flavour, which is kind of icky but strangely addictive. Once you lick it, you can’t kick it.

The awesomeness of being able to turn your house into some kind of Victorian-era magic lantern show cannot be overstated. I think I’m gonna go buy the other two projectors so I can re-enact ‘Frosty The Snowman’ on my bedroom ceiling. But in my version, Frosty will never melt *sniff, sniff*.

Oh, and as a bonus, here’s the Jackson 5’s rendition of ‘Frosty The Snowman’, from their Christmas album. Don’t say I never give youse kids nothin’:

Download Jackson 5 - Frosty The Snowman.mp3

One thing you can always rely on at Christmas (other than Uncle Steve having a little too much ‘holiday cheer’ and proceeding to tell every family member exactly what he thinks of them) is the big consumer products corporations cashing in on the season by plastering their wares with Christmas colours and imagery. The Mars Corporation is just about the most soulless of them all when it comes to stuff like this, right up there with Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

Mars has always been pretty hip to the Christmas thang, bringing out M&M character ornaments and those big ol’ buckets of M&Ms, but it wasn’t until last year that they actually made a Christmas-themed M&M proper. I remember seeing them in the supermarket and praising the Lo’d Jesus. I actually took a couple of bags of them to my family Christmas dinner, in lieu of any constructive contribution. Other people bring potato salad or legs of ham; ol’ Danny Boy brings M&Ms.

Last year’s Christmas M&Ms were just regular red and green M&Ms repackaged in a grudgingly holidayish bag. It’d be funny if someone with too much time on their hands found a marked decline in the number of red and green M&Ms in regular bags during the year. Funny and hatred-for-mankind-inducing.

The bag is actually pretty pimped out this year, with an actual character appearance. I do have to disagree with the tagline, “Christmas is better in colour”, though. I think you’ll find the original Miracle on 34th Street is a superior film to the 90’s remake. John Attenborough is awesome, sure, but his effect is negated by the presence of that annoying little bitch from Matilda.

The whole affair is complicated by the fact that earlier this year, the sexy green M&M character was introduced to promote the limited edition mint flavour M&Ms. Obviously then, putting red and green M&Ms together, alone, is not so innocent any more. Mars has addressed this; just check out Red’s Christmas list:

Red’s lookin’ pretty happy with himself, but that sultry temptress is having none of it. She’s all ‘talk to the hand’. Incidentally, is it wrong to be attracted to Miss Green? Those boots do things to me. I haven’t seen a circular character this sexy since Ms. Pac-Man.

Also this time around, the good folks at Mars have actually gone to a little more effort, and emblazoned the red and green pellets with various Christmas images. As you can see from the photo below, there’s candy canes, stars, holly, snowmen, pine trees, and presents.

I guess that provides about twenty-five seconds of added enjoyment before you scarf them by the handful. If you’re really bored on Christmas Eve, you could always try arranging them into larger mosaics of more Christmas symbols…

That’s a tree. A TREE! Not an arrow! The red ones are ornaments! I hate you.

I can’t really think of anything else to write about this product, so I’ll defer to a panel of experts:

A ringing endorsement. Thanks, Velociraptor from Jurassic Park!

What do you think, Christmas Troll?

Yes sirree, there’s magic in the air this Christmas.

And now, a very special message from Spider-Man.

Wise words. Wiiiise words.

All in all, the Christmas M&Ms are pretty good. The packaging is fun, and the decorations on the candies themselves are cute. It’s pretty disappointing that they didn’t bring in some new colours, though. White would be good, to complete the trinity of Christmas colours. They already have white M&Ms in the mint flavour packages, so it’s not exactly as if they’d have to hire a team of food scientists to come up with a whole new formulation.

But they could get those guys to make up some shiny silver and gold M&Ms for next year. Do it, Mars. Make 2007 the year of the silver and gold M&M!

I generally resist getting into the Christmas spirit for as long as possible. You’d think that’d get harder and harder as retailers push the horizon for Christmas back earlier and earlier every year, but it doesn’t. If anything, it’s hard not to hate Christmas when you start seeing tinsel and chocolate-filled stockings in Safeway in September.

My Christmas season really begins whenever David Jones starts playing its Christmas ads. I don’t think I’ve ever even been into a David Jones store, but those Christmas commercials always signalled the beginning of that wondrous time to me.  It could be the fact that David Jones is a big, glitzy, city department store that conjures up Christmas movie imagery, or even that David Jones is right next door to Myer in Melbourne. The Myer Christmas windows are probably my favourite thing about Christmas, and I always make time to see them.

I guess it’s really just that I knew when those David Jones ads started playing it wouldn’t be long before Santa would move into Bay City Plaza, the Myer windows would be up, and Agro’s Cartoon Connection and Cheez TV would start running Christmas specials.

Anyway, I saw a David Jones Christmas ad on TV last night, so I guess it’s Christmas time. I’ve spruced up the blog header into a suitably Christmassy theme, even though it’s usually 30 degrees celsius on Christmas day in Australia and we’re in drought right now.

Another essential part of the lead-up to Christmas is the good ol’ advent calendar. I still get one every year in some pathetic attempt to rekindle what I felt at Christmas time as a kid, but there’s really no way to engineer that kind of feeling. I used to have my advent calendar hanging up next to my bed, and each night I’d peel back the cardboard window and eat the crappy, cooking-grade chocolate before slipping off into greedy dreams of Nintendo or action figures. As I recall, it was pretty hard to keep the final chocolate down on Christmas Eve when your stomach was doing loop-the-loops in frenzied anticipation of Christmas Morning.

I like my advent calendars like I like my Christmas cards: cheap and tacky. It’s become kind of a tradition to look for the most terribly chintzy advent calendar I can find, and this year I’ve got a DOOZY:

Click to super-size it, so you can revel in the sickness.

It has all the classic Christmas imagery: the tree, the old-timey, gender-constructing toys (tin soldier for the boys, dollies for the girls), kids in their jammies (plus token minority child!), a snowy landscape out the window, and Santa with his bell and twice-checked list.

Probably the best thing about this picture is that the Christmas tree is fucking alive! I have never seen anything quite like it before, but I love it. It’s disturbing and awesome. Distawesome.

Santa looks pretty normal, but the kids are damn creepy. Especially that dude in the middle, with the whafro and painted cheeks. The bear is kinda weird, too. Is that meant to be a toy, or have they just invited a wild bear in for the holidays? It’s a Christmas miracle that he’s not ripping their throats out right now.

I never really cared too much about the games and activities on the back of the advent calendar, but they’re always there. Sometimes it’s a cut-out mask, sometimes a couple of crosswords and mazes, and sometimes whatever this is supposed to be:

Poor Santa. He’s so sad and confused. Why is my sack speaking? Why is it speaking in images? Why is my sack maintaining its shape even though it’s empty? Is this some kind of new memory-fibre? Did I invent it? Maybe I could patent it and then finally quit this dead-end delivery job, move to the Bahamas or something.

The McDonald’s on the Queenscliff Highway at Newcomb has been my ‘local’ McDonald’s ever since by family moved out to Leopold.

Seeing as I’m just a pathetic little crybaby, I was unreasonably angered when I found out a few months ago that they were renovating it to install a ‘McCafe’, which is probably the stupidest idea to entice grown ups through the Golden Arches since Mac Tonight.

Anyway, remembering how I wished I had photos of some other places from my childhood that have since been demolished (Magic Mountain in Adelaide; the Safeway in Market Square Mall) I took some photos of the joint to preserve the old layout forever. FOREEEVER!! HAHAHAHAHA I CONTROL TIME.

Gotta love those curvy, uncomfortable plastic benches. So good for sliding on.

And Ronald McDonald! What kid didn’t love sitting next to the ol’ pervert whenever they went in for a Happy Meal? No McDonald’s is a true McDonald’s without one of these in it.

I had to go in early in the morning so that there weren’t a bunch of rubberneckin’ assholes looking at me like I was some kind of weirdo (cos I’m not…) . It was still dark outside, so those gnarled, creepy looking trees were all shadowy and everything… it was cool. Dig the El Maco poster, too. (My final El Maco count was 4, by the way.)

That’s all been ripped out now. I wish I knew what they did with the chairs, cos I wouldn’t mind one of those benches.

I like how those McDonald’s Brand Bins™ say ‘Thank You’ for disposing of your rubbish in them. I like to whisper ‘you’re welcome’ under my breath as I slip the tray in, cos I don’t wanna offend them or anything.

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.

Some argue that war is a necessary, natural process for the advancement of society. Some are idiots. But anyway, just like World War II gave us the microwave oven and synthetic rubber, so too has the Cola War given us all kinds of crazy shit. Pepsi Blue, anyone?

While Pepsi pretty much gave up on flavour innovation (flavovation?) after the failure of their blue brew (and the less disastrous but equally disgusting Pepsi Lemon Twist) Coke continued the madness with rollouts like Vanilla Coke, Lemon Coke, and Lime Coke (and bringing Cherry Coke to Australia for the first time).

All of those are mere seasoning, though, compared to Coke Zero: the first truly new cola (not reliant on its friends lime or vanilla to fight its battles) from the Big Two since Pepsi Max.      

Isn’t that sexy?

I love glass Coke bottles. Thinking back to my childhood, I remember them only being available in really obscure places like lawn bowls clubhouses or Mobil service stations in dusty country towns on the road to Adelaide. I think maybe my infatuation with glass Coke bottle comes from the sheer pleasure and OH MY GOD I’M GOING TO LIVE-ness of slaking one’s thirst at a roadhouse after several hours on the highway in the blistering heat of the Australian Christmas.

It’d be kinda nice if the bottle were bigger. 250mL is pretty much a gulp to those of us raised on 600mL bottles. 

No real reason for this picture, I just like the silver bottle cap. There is something cool and oh-so-50s about having to open a soft drink bottle with a bottle opener, though. Makes me think of the Cold War. And Happy Days!

Empty, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away! I think I’m gonna put it on my bedside table and talk to it before I go to sleep. Would that be weird?

I haven’t done a food review in a while, so here’s one.

I found this in the cupboard at my mum’s house, with no prior knowledge of the product’s existence. I have to believe there’s some kind of devilry, or at least bewitchery, involved.

I find fault with the box design. It’s not really very conspicuous, just a regular Corn Flakes box with some retro typography thrown onto it. I can imagine many dazed housewives just grabbing it thinking it’s regular Corn Flakes, and all the hijinks that would ensue at the breakfast table the next morning.

I never realised the Corn Flakes rooster had a name before, but there you go: Cornelius. It’s kind of unsettling for a stylized logo to have a name. I can accept the Yogorilla and the Paddlepop Lion, cos they’re animated characters with life, but the fact that this is just a symbol who’s never been shown to move or talk or go whitewater rafting makes it a little bit disturbing that it has been named.

Now, through the magic of poorly animated GIF imagery, here’s the addition of milk to a bowl of Choc-Malt Corn Flakes! 

As for the taste, it’s nothing to write home about. As I said- I have no idea what ‘Choc Malt’ signifies, so I have nothing to compare it to. That said, it tastes kinda like those ‘Choc Dot Krispies’ that came out in the mid-90s (yeah, I’m full of useless knowledge about discontinued cereals. Remember ‘Grinners’?). And by that I mean it tastes gross, if you can’t recall Choc Dot Krispies.

I dunno, man. I’m usually pretty progressive, but there are certain things you don’t mess with. Corn Flakes is one of ‘em. The taste is fine as it is.

Let’s talk about Kit Kat Chunky for a moment.

I was just as excited as the next guy when they first came out. All the chocolatey, wafery goodness of Kit Kat at four times the size? Fuck yes!

But the Kit Kat Chunky was too successful. The junk food and drink world is a constant Darwinian struggle, and it seems the Kit Kat Chunky has won out against its lesser cousin, the regular Kit Kat. I can’t remember the last time I saw a normal, four-finger Kit Kat, much less ate one. I think you can still get them in the “Fun Size”, but eating one of those is about as enjoyable as dancing with your sister.

I think the demise of the regular Kit Kat is best summed up by the disappearance of the “Chunky” epithet. As you’ll see below, the big boi of the Kit Kat world is now just called “Kit Kat”, which would seem to point to its final victory.

There are actually three new flavours, but the Safeway I went to didn’t have the mint one. That’s okay, I’m kinda sick of mint. It’s like that’s the default flavour choice that chocolate companies go for when they wanna walk on the wild side.

It’s a bit strange that they would release a sudden flood of new flavours at once. I would’ve thought it’d be safer to just do one at a time, to focus attention on that one product. These trial flavours never last for long, so it seems wiser to just have one out at a time, considering that consumers are buying less luxuries these days due to fuel prices and stuff.

But hey- I’m not complaining. It’s just more blog fodder for me!

Kit Kat Honeycomb

Hey, they even come with the ingredients listed so I don’t have to type it up. How’s that for convenience?

The Kit Kat Honeycomb is pretty nice. The fact that it’s “shattered honeycomb” makes the taste not so overpowering as it might be if it were a solid hunk of honeycomb like in a Violet Crumble or something. I rate it three and a half out of four Kit Kat fingers.

Kit Kat Cookie Dough

Of all the new flavours, this one should have been the stand-out. It should have been like Michael Jackson to Jermaine, Tito, and the rest (yes, I can name all the Jackson brothers and sisters, but I want to make it appear that I’m all devil-may-care).

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t live up to the awesomeness that the words ‘cookie’ and ’dough’ are usually synonymous with. The cookie dough flavour kind of gets lost amongst the caramel and chocolate. I don’t know why they even included the caramel. What, Nestle, cookie dough isn’t enough of a flavour by itself? Has to have its hand held by caramel? Huh? Cookie dough is a taste sensation, okay, and you have to respect that. One finger out of four.

I went to Safeway today to pick up the three new Kit-Kat Chunky flavours that I alluded to recently. In true Geelong fashion, though, the store I went to didn’t have them. A fucking Foodworks in Melbourne had them, but Safeway in Geelong didn’t. It’s Sleepy Hollow, alright.

Before I got too unreasonably pissed off, however, I noticed not one but three other limited edition chocolate bars on the shelves. Naturally I picked them up for blog fodder.

From the top, and very nicely arranged in order of size (looks like a pyramid!), we have Mars Triple Chocolate Hit, Twix Mint Slice, and Picnic Hedgehog.

Now let’s strip ‘em down and humiliate ‘em.

Mars Triple Chocolate Hit.

Not much different to a regular Mars Bar, here. The wrapper proclaims that the ‘triple chocolate hit’ comes from the regular nougat and caramel both being chocolate as well. It didn’t taste much different to a normal Mars to me, but I guess if you’re really into chocolate it’ll be your thing. A Mars a day helps you work, rest, and develop diabetes.

Oh, and I like the drug connotations from the word ‘hit’ as well.

Picnic Hedgehog

This one’s been out for a while, but I’ve never been able to summon up the enthusiasm to try it. That was before the Kit-Kat Disappointment, though. The hedgehog connection comes from the fact that it has chocolate biscuit ball pieces scattered throughout, which kind of get overshadowed by the already incredibly rocky terrain of the Picnic bar. It’d be far more effective, I think, if they took a smooth, wussy chocolate bar like the Mars or the Milky Way and pimped it out hedgehog style. GIVE ME A JOB, CADBURY OR MARS!

Twix Mint Slice

Here’s one that I was really pumped for, but which was ultimately disappointing. Twix doesn’t need me to say anything for it, and I love Mint Slice biscuits (and thanks to the recent outbreak of Mint Slice flavoured ice creams and chocolate balls and whatnot, I think most of Australia agrees with me). The two of them together should be an exercise in awesomeness, right?

Unfortunately, it just wasn’t executed very well. The Mint Slice flavour totally overwhelms the Twix texture and flavour, so what you get is basically a Mint Slice bar. And they’ve tried that before, which makes this bar a complete waste of time and shelf space that COULD BE USED FOR THE NEW KIT-KAT CHUNKY FLAVOURS.

I’m about to go into a sugar coma from all this chocolate, so I’ll catch y’all later.