Up? No more like really down.

How is it that an animated movie by Pixar (a Disney owned company) creates one of the most depressing movies I have seen in a long time? Well for those who have not seen the movie lots of spoilers lie ahead, but here is how you take an animated movie and make it horribly depressing.

First start off with a brief explanation of how our hero meets his wife as a young child and how they both want to travel to South America to be explorers. Next start showing a montage of your hero's life in which you grow up, get married, want to have lots of children with your wife for her only to find out that she can't have kids at all. Now montage your dream of going to South America by slowly saving up money and have it crushed time and again by random bad luck occurrences (broken leg, car repairs, etc.) If that wasn't enough lets say you finally do save up enough money in your old age to buy a plane ticket and go see Venezuela but by now your wife's physical condition isn't too good and she is on the last legs of her life. And this is all within the opening 20 minutes of the film.

Now lets just go ahead and fast forward and list through the rest of the depressing things: young boy sidekick's family is basically in shambles; he tries so hard to get one badge ala boy scouts just to see his dad; despite getting the badge he still doesn't get to see his dad; the older man's childhood hero, the reason he wanted to travel to South America in the first place, tries to kill him and the young boy sidekick.

Talking dogs and a lovable colorful ostrich type bird cannot cover up the entirity of the depressing nature of the film. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. It did not even end happily.

So what is it about childhood memories of food that make us fondly think back, man that was delicious, but while we are in the grocery store never actually pick up and buy. Is it that we do not want to taint our childhood memories with cold hard reality that this food is actually about 32% stuff you shouldn't put in your body but do anyways cause its cheap and because, hell, you are a kid you don't know the difference? These are some of the examples of foods that I remember fondly but have since gone under.

Flintstones' Push Pops
Sherbet in a tube, with a little stick to push it up to eat. I have not had this stuff in years but can clearly remember the package and how awesome the stuff was. Except for purple, it totally did not stack up to the orange flavor. This is my number one candidate for food as a child that I wish was brought back. That and the Flintstones need to expand their market share past vitamins again.

Squeeze Itz
An attempted competition entry for Kool Aid. These simple sugar water bottles employed a selling tactic of making the bottle little faces that you squeezed while you drank to push that delicious sugar water into your mouth. Lets face it, we could taste test this with sugar water and food dye but as to not dilute the awesomeness that was in our school lunches let us just fondly think of our favorite face as we gulped down everything in the bottle in under two seconds.

Surge
Now while I personally never was a drinker of Surge, this was a favorite of some of my buds back in the Middle School days. Rumors of how much caffeine was in it, and how totally hyper you would get after drinking it was enough to get most of my adolescent friends to buy it. Apparently the only way to try and taste test it would be to go to Norway, the only remaining home of Surge.




Its almost as if it is better off for these products to have gone under before we reached adulthood. The rosy glasses of childhood leave these brave lunchtime and dessert companions with just the fond memories of how good they were with a childish palette. The real question will be in 20 years will children be blogging about their lost favorites not even knowing the tasty goodness they missed, or would my favorites even stood a chance in today's cafeteria?

Here is to Old Man Jenkins

After tuning in to Adult Swim a bit earlier to watch my nightly cartoons when I stumbled across something quite silly, The Othersiders. Now to me, call me skeptical if you like, all ghost hunting shows are, in a word, retarded. Grainy cameras, complete darkness, I'm guessing cutting and pasting 8 hours worth of boredom in a rusty old ship, decrepit house, etc. to make a 30 minute show 6 of which are commercials.

Now I know the show has not yet been released but come on, teenagers investigating ghosts? I feel like we are a VW van, a talking dog, some rubber masks and a lot of pot references away from Scooby Doo. The group make up is the same even: a head guy and girl (Fred and Daphene), an asian researcher (Velma), and two dweeby looking guys (Shaggy and Scooby.) If they were old enough to shave I think the producers would make one of them grow a little facial hair to complete the ensamble. So lets all hope that at the end of every show they get to unmask the ghost that would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for their meddling.

Drunk Texting

So alcohol + anonymity + text messages + the internet = hilarity.

www.textsfromlastnight.com