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.
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.
An old friend wonders how he is supposed to motivate a 13-year-old, when he himself is “stuck somewhere between my ambition and inertia.”
I think we all know how he feels. After a long day of feeling unmotivated to get out of bed, unmotivated to work, unmotivated to stop working long enough to eat lunch, and unmovitated to finish the day strong, most of us hardly have any energy left at all to motivate someone else.
The good news is that I’ve found a simple tool that will do the motivating for you, while helping make your kids more pop literate. It’s 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes. If you don’t come away from this video ready to paint your face, grab a spear, stick your head out the window, and rush onto the football field to bring the state championship home to little Hickory, there’s something seriously wrong with you.
One of my favorite pop culture blogs, Pop Candy, has published a list from the author of another of my favorite pop culture blogs, Stuck in the 80s. And the list is about John Hughes movies! So how can I not link to it?
It does my heart good to see kids appreciating the finer things in life. Like Abbott and Costello. They’re not just the stars of a bunch of sillymonstermovies. They’re the creators of the single greatest comedy routine of all time: Who’s on First?
If you don’t know Who’s On First, watch it in the YouTube player below. It’s a miracle of comedic timing. Your kids should know it. (I think they should actually memorize it, but I don’t want to be overbearing.)
When you’ve finished watching the original, take a look at a great parody from some young players of the online game, World of Warcraft. They take all the baseball references from the original, and replace them with geeky references from role-playing games. It’s like a kid appreciating Shakespeare or Bach — only better, because Abbott and Costello ROCK!
It’s important your children learn to speak with authority, lest they become the target of overly aggressive Jonas Brothers fans in 3rd grade. So the latest Pop Literate: Toddler Edition features Jessie talking like a 1930s movie gangster. It’s a simple tactic that all children should know before they enter preschool.
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!
