One of the most hilarious complaints of entertainment moguls is that the Internet makes it possible for anyone — no matter how talentless — to clutter up our lives with bad art.
And maybe they’re right. If only we could go back to that Pristine Time of Yore, when benevolent gatekeepers stood guard over our attention to make sure we only saw quality entertainment programming. Programming like the 1994 hit Muddling Through.
“Pistol-packin’ Connie Drego had just been paroled from prison, where she had served three years for shooting her cheating husband, Sonny, in the butt, in this raucous comedy. She had returned home to go back to work at Drego’s Oasis, the family’s truck-stop diner/motel in rural Michigan.” –The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows
Ha ha! You’re laughing already, aren’t you? And perhaps you’re wondering what makes this show Minisode Monday-worthy.
Two words: Jennifer Aniston. Before she was a waitress at Central Perk, Jennifer Aniston was a waitress at Drego’s Oasis: the daughter of an ex-con, and the young wife of the ignorant cop who had put her mother away. It’s worth watching to see just how good Aniston is — that even in this mess of a show, she managed to convey that something that made her a star.
With last night’s Lost season premiere, time travel is all the rage in pop culture. But what do you get when you combine time travel with history and humor? Why, Peabody and Sherman, of course! They are intrepid time-travelers whom every child should know.
This week’s Hulu Hump Day video takes us back to the era of Don Juan. And to a time on television when an entire 5-minute segment could be nothing but an elaborate build-up for one of Peabody’s horrible puns. Watch and enjoy.
Just because this blog is about pop culture, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the finer things in life. I just want the finer things in life delivered to my living room on a television. Take painting: you can have your Picasso and your Rembrandt, but I prefer the world’s first and finest TV painter, Bob Ross.
Not only did Ross introduce thousands to The Joy of Painting, but he also helped fuel tens of thousands of peaceful afternoon naps with his laid-back PBS show. And his descriptions of “happy little clouds” and “happy little trees” remain a part of the language even today. Your kids needs to know Bob Ross for that reason alone. So here is a Bob Ross video for a new generation, combining painting and snowboarding. I dare you not to fall asleep.
Hey, hey, hey! Thanks to websites like Hulu, our children can experience important parts of pop culture history firsthand. It’s like teaching them to review primary sources for a history paper — without having to teach them to load a roll of microfilm into one of those annoying machines.
So I think part of my job for Pop Literate is to dig through the vast video archives of Hulu to bring you and your kids pieces of pop culture history. Today’s featured Hulu video: Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. In this clip, the kids use the wonders of live theater to take on the societal blight of graffiti. (After you’ve watched the clip, you’ll have the option of watching the entire episode.)
If you take your children on only one vacation, it should be National Lampoon’s Vacation. So it’s exciting to hear Stuck in the 80s has word that the upcoming Super Bowl will feature an ad with the first family of National Lampoon: the Griswolds!
Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo will reprise their roles as Clark and Ellen Griswold from the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies in a Super Bowl ad this Sunday.
The ad is for HomeAway.com, a website that helps people exchange vacation rental locations. You can even check out Clark’s new Twitter account.
Minisodes are a great way to make kids more pop literate, in the time it would take them to find a clean pair of socks on their bedroom floor. The Minisode Network takes classic TV shows and distills them down to about 5 minutes. And that’s not as easy as it sounds, because the opening credits of some shows were like 3 1/2 minutes long.
For my first Minisode Monday, I’m offering an episode of Green Acres. If your children know only one ditzy Hungarian blonde, it should be Eva Gabor. Zsa Zsa got the men, but Eva got the comedic chops.
Incidentally, the little boy in the alien outfit is Buddy Foster, who you may recognize from such other roles as Mike Jones (The Andy Griffith Show), Wolf Boy (The Six Million Dollar Man), and Boy in Car (Foxes). Oh, and he’s also the brother of Jodie Foster, someone your kids might actually recognize.
Welcome to Hulu Homework, wherein I pick a classic clip and give you, my dear readers, an assignment. Today’s clip comes from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the great TV dramas of all-time. And it features two actors, each of whom starred later in TV shows with their character name in the title. One of them may even be known to your children from a recent run on a reality series.
Your assignment:
1. Identify the actors.
2. Name the shows in which their character name appeared in the title.
3. Name the reality show on which one recently appeared.
Leave your answers in the comments. And no peeking. And if you want to watch the whole episode, you can do it here.
It’s Grammy day! And even though Pants on the Ground was released too late to be nominated, there will still be a lot of bumping and grinding (and maybe a little incidental singing) going on tonight.
While you wait, here’s a list of the Top Ten Grammy Moments to show your kids. They include a brief video from 1984, when Michael Jackson took home 8 awards and took off his sunglasses for Katharine Hepburn.
Sure, we want our kids to say “no” to drugs. But that doesn’t mean they need to say “no” to drunks — especially of the fictional variety.
Some of the best characters in pop culture have been on the sauce. And if your kids never learn about them, they’ll be at a disadvantage when it comes time to make fun of their drunken friends in college. So without further adieu, here are Pop Literate’s Top Three Pop Culture Drunks.
1. Otis Campbell: he’s the only guy on this list who was ever drunk enough to ride a cow. A cow! Otis was the town drunk in Mayberry, on The Andy Griffith Show. He locked himself in jail after a bender. And he sometimes served as an emergency deputy. Hal Smith’s characterization is the quintessential “town drunk.”
2. Arthur Bach: Dudley Moore was the most likeable alcoholic millionaire ever. Everyone around him told him to grow up. But in Arthur’s own words, “That’s easy for you to say. You haven’t got 50 pairs of short pants hanging in your closet.”
3. Norm Peterson: Norm is Otis Campbell with better alcohol tolerance. The man could hang out at Cheers and drink for hours on end, and never get drunk.
Feel free to nominate your own favorites in the comments!
One way to help children learn is to relate their lessons to things they understand. So you give them math problems like, “Davey’s waist is 32 inches. He’s wearing jeans with a 36-inch waist. How long should his belt be?” (Answer: Ask General Larry Platt.) Or you ask them to rewrite the Bill of Rights as a hip-hop song. So I’m always on the lookout for modern equivalents of pop culture classics.
I have pointed out before that every young boy should be able to answer the question, “Ginger or Mary Ann?” And the celebrity gossip about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s possible split raises a similar question involving Pitt’s past two love interests:
Angelina or Jennifer?
Angelina Jolie is the exotic, glamorous movie star. Jennifer Aniston is the beautiful, down-to-earth girl next door. The parallels are uncanny. Except, in this case, Mary Ann has been dumped by the Professor in favor of Ginger, and the new couple has adopted approximately 43 of the native children who lived on the island before the shipwreck.
Come to think of it, that plot line would have made Gilligan’s Island a lot more interesting.
