My Week with Muppet Breakfast
November 4 - 8, 2002
If
you spend a lot of time in the breakfast cereal aisle, like I do, then you've
probably noticed the new General Mills/Columbia Tristar promotion that sticks a
free DVD onto cereal boxes. Three of those free DVD's are Henson-related -- a
disc with two Bear in the Big Blue House episodes, another with The
Muppets Take Manhattan, and a third with the Creature Shop flop Buddy.
Because I am the original fearless Muppet journalist, I'm going to spend three
mornings this week watching these DVD's over breakfast, as I munch down as much
of the cereal as I can stomach. (I'm not going to bother with the fourth DVD,
because even I cringe at the thought of watching two episodes of Jackie Chan
Adventures while eating Golden Grahams. I mean, it's not like I'm getting paid
for this.)
In other words, I've got three balanced breakfasts to figure out the answer to this question: If it's so cheap and easy now to produce Muppets Take Manhattan DVD's that they can just give them away with a four-dollar box of breakfast cereal, then how come the DVD alone has a retail price of $19.95? Food for thought.
Pantycakes!
Monday, November 4
Honey Nut Cheerios and Bear in the Big Blue House
Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 1 cup (30g) and 2 episodes (48 min's)
Calories: 120
Calories from Fat: 15
Cheerful Songs: 7
Ingredients: Whole Grain Oats, Sugar, Oat Bran, Modified Corn Starch, Otters, Gentle Good Humor, Honey, Brown Sugar Syrup, Mouse Describing His Dreams, Salt, Ground Almonds, Calcium Carbonate, Tooth-Brushing, Trisodium Phosphate, FBI Warning, Vitamin E. May contain trace elements of Shadow.
Well, to start with, I've got mail, apparently. I pour myself a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and put the disc into my DVD player, and immediately I've got an AOL commercial to watch. There's a big eyeball, and a guitar shrieks -- and suddenly, there's a bunch of twelve year olds with good skin dancing around and screaming at me about how great AOL is. "Click, click, talk it up!" they say. "Grab some movies and tunes!" A well-scrubbed white girl smirks and snaps her teeth at me. I think there's a demographics issue going on here -- isn't this a Bear in the Big Blue House disc? Am I in the right room? Cause I'm not sure that the three year olds watching Bear and the precocious middle schoolers click-clicking and talking it up are going to get along very well.
Plus, by the way, my Honey Nut Cheerios box has a seal of approval from the American Heart Association, which reminds me that "diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease." Apparently, at some point, somebody did a research study that showed that eating obscene amounts of oat bran helped to lower people's cholesterol, and the folks at General Mills can't stop reminding us about it. There's little hearts all over the box -- even though, presumably, the three year old Bear fans aren't super concerned with their cholesterol levels yet. So far, this breakfast is all over the map demographically, and I haven't even started eating yet.
I take a sip of coffee and a healthy spoonful of Honey Nut Cheerios as Bear
in the Big Blue House starts. It's an episode called "Morning
Glory," which is all about waking up in the morning and eating breakfast.
It's nice that I get to have kind of a breakfast theme going here; it helps me
to relate. All of Bear's friends had a sleepover last night in the living room,
so he goes in to wake them all up.
Honey Nut Cheerios, by the way, tastes neither like honey or nuts. I'm not sure what they taste like, exactly. I guess like Cheerios covered with a generous helping of sugar. I check the box. There's 11 grams of sugar in a 30-gram bowl, and I personally can taste every gram right now. I try to wash it down with coffee. Pre-school television and black coffee, the breakfast of champions. Plus I can feel my cholesterol getting lower by the minute, which is comforting.
Meanwhile, back in the living room, Tutter is laughing in his sleep. Bear wakes up Tutter, who starts laughing and screaming about the dream he was having: Bear was really small, and Tutter was really big! Oh, that's rich! Bwa ha ha! says Tutter. Apparently Tutter is incredibly over caffeinated the first thing in the morning. I'm envious, and I swig some more coffee.
Then Pip and Pop wake up:
Pop: "Ooh, uh... Bear... I feel funny!"
Pip: "Me too!"
Bear: "Really? What do you feel like?"
Pop: "Uh oh! I've gotta PEE!"
I spit coffee all over my cereal.
Pip: "Me too!"
Bear: "Really?"
Pop: "Yeah!"
Pip: "We'll be right back, Bear!"
Bear: "Okay..."
Pop: "We've got to use the POTTY!"
Bear: "Good idea, guys! Breakfast will be waiting for ya!"
Now, luckily, I'm trying to clean up a little with a paper towel and I don't have a mouth full of cereal when I hear that last line, because frankly that's kind of a disturbing way to put it. If you get what I mean.
Bear adds: "You know, sometimes when you wake up, you have to go to the bathroom! Everybody does!"
All this toilet fanfare strikes me funny, cause I usually have to go to the bathroom about every ten minutes, and nobody ever gets this excited about it.
All the rest of the animals go to the kitchen for breakfast -- and by the way,
Honey Nut Cheerios with a light frosting of spit-out coffee isn't as bad as you
might think -- but Ojo's still asleep on the couch.
Bear walks over to Ojo and calls to her gently.
Bear: "Good morning, Ojo..."
Ojo: "Good MORNING? What's so good about a morning when everybody's talking so LOUD!"
Bear: "Ohh... I think Ojo's having trouble waking up!"
Now, if you ask me, I think Ojo's waking up with a hangover, but who am I to judge. Bear invites her into the kitchen for a little hair of the bear that bit her.
As we transition to the kitchen, Bear embellishes a little on this whole "morning" concept: "The morning starts when the sun rises, and when you wake up, rested after a good night's sleep. And you stretch... and go to the bathroom!"
Okay, could we stop hitting this bathroom note quite so hard? I'm trying to get these Honey Nut Cheerios down. I've finished my first bowl, so I pour a second one.
On screen, we've got some film clips of kids talking about what they eat in the morning. Eggs! Cereal! Juice! And then there's this one girl who appears on screen just long enough to look us in the eyes and shout: PANTYCAKES! I swear to you, that's what she says. She doesn't mumble at all, it's the most clearly enunciated PANTYCAKES I've ever heard. This breakfast is just getting better and better.
Everybody's eating breakfast now, and Bear explains to us that "Eating
breakfast gives you ENERGY," which is interesting, because at the moment,
all it's giving me is a weird, sticky aftertaste that seems completely
impervious to coffee. They've all got spoons, but I notice that Pip and Pop are
just holding the spoons and eating their cereal by sticking their faces into
their bowls. I decide to try this technique in solidarity with my otter
brethren. It isn't a good move. The second bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios is always
the hardest, and it doesn't get any easier if you're eating it in panoramic
sensurround.
They finish breakfast, and now it's tooth brushing time, which means they all troop upstairs and sing the Brusha Brusha Toothbrush song. Then they're all planning on going out to play, but one of the otters can't find his inner tube -- so now we've got to Clean Up the House, singing the Clean Up the House song. Gosh, mornings are so eventful at the Big Blue House that it's a wonder they ever have time to get on with the day. I'm still stuck digging through this second bowl of cereal. I don't care how low my cholesterol is getting, a bowl and a half of Honey Nut Cheerios may be about my limit. It's just sitting in my stomach now, like a big sticky rock. From here on out, my cholesterol is going to have to take care of itself.
Bear reads a bit, talks to Shadow, and then before you know it, it's night time,
and he goes upstairs into the attic to talk to the moon. Bear boasts that he
felt good all day -- because he had such a great morning! Well, Bear may have
lived a whole day in the last twenty-four minutes, but I'm still finishing
breakfast. Maybe watching a Bear episode first thing in the morning isn't a
great idea; they always end at night, which makes me feel like I've wasted the
whole day eating Honey Nut Cheerios.
There's a second episode right after this one -- but I don't think I can struggle through another bowl and a half of Honey Nut Cheerios for it. General Mills, you were a worthy opponent. I concede.
But as I reach for the cereal box to put it away, this ad catches my eye: "If you like Honey Nut Cheerios, you'll love Apple Cinnamon Cheerios!"
Ooooggg, what a thought. I feel funny; I have to go use the potty. We'll meet back here in a couple days for another complete breakfast.
The
Empire Strikes Back
Wednesday, November 6
Lucky Charms and Buddy
Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 1 cup (30g) and 1 movie (84 min's)
Calories: 120
Calories from Fat: 10
Character Actors: 38
Ingredients: Whole Grain Oats, Cultural Imperialism, Marshmallow Bits, Sugar, Corn Syrup, Misunderstanding of Theory of Evolution, Corn Starch, Salt, Disdain for Ignorant Working Class, Calcium Carbonate, Trisodium Phosphate, Hypocrisy, Wheat Starch. Trailer advertising the same movie you're currently watching added to DVD to preserve freshness.
Staring into a bowl of Lucky Charms transports you into a different and a dreadful world.
It's like being confronted with your own mortality. You know that it's
inevitable, and yet it seems unknowable, opening before you like a yawning chasm
of unbeing. It is the worst fears that your subconscious ordinarily shields you
from, made manifest and studded with colorful marshmallows. The idea that
American children actually face down a bowl of Lucky Charms before heading out
to elementary school fills me with the greatest respect for their sheer nerve
and determination. They eat more breakfast before 7 am than most people do all
day, and my hat is off to these brave little souls.
When you pour a bowl of Lucky Charms, there's a sudden sharp odor of concentrated sugar that immediately smacks you in the nose and takes up residence. You can literally smell it before you even sit down in the chair. Lucky Charms is not a cereal that sneaks up on you gently with a quiet murmur of snap, crackle and pop. It snaps at you, all right, but it snaps like a Venus flytrap in a Charles Addams cartoon. You want to count your appendages afterwards to make sure it didn't take a finger.
But that's not the bad thing. The bad thing is that while I raise this spoon of malevolent breakfast material to my lips, the DVD player is starting to play Buddy at me.
Buddy is a movie that Jim Henson Pictures made in 1997 and is basically
the entire explanation for why Jim Henson Pictures didn't make any more movies.
It starts out by saying "The Following is Based on a True Story," but
it's based on a true story in the sense that a defense lawyer's closing
arguments are based on a true story. You have to read between the lines a bit.
Rene Russo plays Gertrude Lintz, a bored socialite lurking somewhere in the underbrush of 1931, dressing up the wildlife in hats and starched collars. As the movie opens, we find Gertrude at the movies, bringing along her two chimpanzees, Maggie Klein and Joe Mende. "Named after the Mende tribe," she tuts at a confused usher. "Cannibals." She raises one plucked eyebrow -- enough said as far as Mrs Lintz is concerned -- and that right there is pretty much your worldview for the next 84 minutes.
She returns home from the movies, walks out onto the terrace of her richly
appointed mansion, thrusts her head back, and begins to make the most unearthly
ululating shrieks. She continues to make screechy faux-animal noises for a full
minute, sounding for all the world like a one-woman Tarzan movie -- all
oo-oo-ack-ack and fakey bird trills. It's what you think wild animals sound like
if you're eight years old and you live in Connecticut. This unholy racket
somehow manages to attract a menagerie of animals, pretty much going down the
probability scale from dogs and horses (possible) to raccoons and porcupines
(not super likely to respond when you call them) and all the way down to -- I
kid you not -- a Galapagos tortoise. For all I know, maybe paramecia and West
Nile virus particles prick up their unicellular ears when this woman goes into
her Snow White at the Gates of Hell routine. It's a true story, after all.
The chimpanzees are clothed and fed at the table like human children by Mrs
Lintz's housekeeping staff. She's apparently operating under Standard Jewel in
the Crown - Sun Never Sets on the British Empire Rules, in which animals are
just like foreign people -- they're shorter and hairier than us, and they
require a certain firmness of purpose when teaching them table manners, but in
all other respects, they deserve to be treated with the same patience and
understanding as our children, our servants and our houseplants. The basic
hierarchy here is that well-bred white people are at the top, and everything
else from retarded children to sea life is basically a lateral move. Apes and
Mexicans, it's all the same to Mrs Lintz. They can understand English
when they choose to; you just have to speak very slowly and clearly to them or
their attention will wander.
She gets a phone call and instantly whisks herself off to the Philadelphia Zoo in her fur-lined coat -- her adoration for all animal life apparently not extending to our friends the ermines -- where she ruthlessly browbeats a badly-shaven zoo employee with all the respect due to a degraded member of the human working classes. Apparently, the zoo employee has managed to acquire a sick baby gorilla that he doesn't know how to care for; he acts like it just dropped off the back of a truck. "WHERE is his MOTHER?" cries Mrs Lintz, slipping oh-so-easily into full-on hysteria at a moment's notice. "NO gorilla has EVER survived captivity without its mother. Not ONE. How did you expect HIM to?" The zoo employee stammers and shuffles his feet, so Mrs Lintz grabs the gorilla and announces, "I'm taking him HOME!"
The good thing about all this drama is that it's taking my mind off the Lucky Charms. I've found that the little marshmallow bits should be swallowed whole if possible, as biting down on them releases a burst of super-sweet powder which coats my teeth with each bite. Thank goodness I'm distracted by the display of naked imperialism playing out on screen.
Back at the ranch, lunch is served to the chimpanzees by the Lintzes' cook. The
cook is the only major black character in the movie, and her name is listed in
the credits as "Emma." Apparently she didn't have a last name. Even the chimpanzees have last names in this
movie. I can't remember the last time I found a movie this offensive on this
many levels, and I'm only up to minute 12.
For whatever reason, the parrot -- who up to this point has only imitated animal cries -- suddenly starts imitating the cook yelling at the apes to "get outta mah kitchen!" This startles the chimpanzees, who get excited and start jumping around and knocking over dishes. They hop up on the counters and start tossing a meat cleaver back and forth across the kitchen. The cook -- who, I have to remind you, is the only major black character in the movie -- goes and stands in the corner, with her eyes screwed shut and her hands clasped firmly over her ears. Thank goodness the white lady comes in to restore order at this point, and she calms the chimpanzees down -- I swear to you that this part is true -- by shaking a voodoo rattle and saying, "OOOOOO -- he-eere comes the boogeyman!" I swear to you, she actually reaches over and pulls out this wooden stick topped with a voodoo skull and braided beads. The theory here apparently is that chimpanzees, like children and people of African descent, are superstitious and easily trained.
So why doesn't Emma know how to use the voodoo stick when the chimps act up? I guess she's too busy perfecting her Hattie McDaniels impression. A few minutes later, she actually rolls her eyes and says, "I got enough to do without chewin' up food for monkeys!" This is the kind of role you just don't see for black actresses anymore, thank goodness. My message for filmmakers: Just because your movie is set in 1931 doesn't mean you have to pretend it was made in 1931.
Anyway, that swarthy zoo manager may not have known what to do with a gorilla,
but Mrs Lintz is going to do a little research, looking in a big leather bound
book called WILD ANIMALS OF AFRICA. That's not much help, so she goes to visit
Professor Spatz at the Museum of Natural History. She's taken aback by the dead
animal heads that line Professor Spatz's office, despite the fact that she
herself is carrying a leather purse and wearing a fur-trimmed hat. He tells her
that gorillas have no feelings beyond carnality and violence, but she determines
to raise her gorilla like a human child, the same way that she does with her
chimps. "That's preposterous," says Spatz, correctly.
"Revolutionary as it might seem to you, I have encountered no limits
or even real difficulties," she snaps. "When they catch cold, do you
have any idea what they need? Chicken soup." That's
interesting, I desperately want the Professor to answer. What do you give the
chickens?
But, unfortunately, the characters refuse to talk sense to this despicable woman. In fact, the movie is venerating her, presenting her as supernaturally wise and uniquely connected to the natural world. The fact is that she's the most spoiled, patronizing, psychotic imperialist dingbat who ever looked through her opera glasses at a landmass and said yes, I'll have that, but could someone tidy it up a bit, please?
This movie is not just unwatchable, it's anti-watchable. I'm stunned that
somebody actually thought it was a good idea to package this free with a box of
breakfast cereal and show it to children first thing in the morning. I'm twenty
minutes into this nightmare, and already I can feel the Lucky Charms doing
irreparable harm to my teeth, and the movie doing the same to my respect for
Western civilization.
I can't take it anymore. I need to stop and go brush my teeth. Then I might change my name, join the French foreign legion, and try -- just try -- to forget.
Goodbye Kansas
Thursday, November 7
Cinnamon
Toast Crunch and The Muppets Take Manhattan
Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 3/4 cup (30g) and 1 movie (94 min's)
Calories: 130
Calories from Fat: 30
Scriptwriters: 3
Ingredients: Whole Wheat, Sugar, Optimism, Fashioned Rice Flour, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Friendly Bland Girl, Fructose, Romance, Maltodextrin, Dextrose, James Coco, Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Cinnamon, Splashy Wedding Sequence, Soy Lecithin, Dabney Coleman, Caramel and Annatto Extract Color, Something Missing.
Here's the theory right up front: Cinnamon Toast Crunch is just like The Muppets Take Manhattan.
Both of them are basically the downmarket substitutes for something really great
-- Cinnamon Toast Crunch is pretending to be cinnamon toast, and The Muppets
Take Manhattan is pretending to be The Muppet Movie. Neither of them
is really very good if you compare them to the original thing they're based on.
Nobody would choose to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch if offered actual fresh
cinnamon toast, just like nobody would willingly watch The Muppets Take
Manhattan if The Muppet Movie was available. Still, judged completely
on their own merits, both of them are perfectly adequate for an occasional
snack, as long as you don't indulge in them too often.
There, that's out of the way, and now I have the rest of the morning to myself. Which is a good thing, because I'm still trying to wrap my head around this brave new world of disposable movies.
Now, I don't know if I've mentioned it this week, but I grew up in the 1970's,
and back in my day, if you wanted to watch a Muppet movie, well, there weren't
much a body could do but sit around and wait for it. Sure, we had The Muppet
Movie on a Cheerios box back in 19 and 79, but it wasn't like you got the whole
movie. Instead, we got twelve photos from the movie printed on the box, and you
could cut them off the box with your mom's kitchen scissors and call them
trading cards.
Movies were mysterious and shy back then. They played The Muppet Movie in theaters for a few months, and then they took it away and locked it in a vault so nobody could get at it. Then they'd take it out every once in a while and play it on some local station at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon when nobody was looking. If you wanted to see it again, well, that was your tough bananas. The best you could do is squint and flip through the pages of The Muppet Movie Book really fast. Movies were not meant for mortal eyes to see.
Now, of course, content delivery technology is getting so cheap that they're giving movies away with a box of breakfast cereal. It's not even a mail-in type deal, they're actually just giving you a whole movie right there on the box. I bet there are families across America right this very minute looking at the Muppets Take Manhattan DVD and saying, this again? All I wanted was some Cheerios. And then they throw the DVD in the trash, or use it a coaster.
Younger people who are reading this may not grasp exactly how weird that is for
those of us who didn't grow up with VCR's, so I'll tell you a little story. I
was in elementary school back when The Muppet Show was first on the air,
and I had a secret fantasy that I only shared with my very best friend. My
fantasy was that someday they would invent a TV that had a button for every
single show, and whenever you wanted to watch a particular show -- which for me,
obviously, was always going to be The Muppet Show -- then you could press
that button, and it would send a signal to the TV station, and they would send The
Muppet Show to your TV so you could watch it. I used to fantasize about that
all the time. How great it would be not to have to wait for Monday night to
watch The Muppet Show! But when I told my friend about my dream, he said
that was a ridiculous idea -- there are too many shows, the whole set would be
full of a thousand buttons. How would you ever find the button you wanted?
And this is how primitive my concept of all this was -- that argument completely stymied me. I couldn't get around it. From then on, any time I thought about my dream TV set, I couldn't figure out how they could ever invent a TV with that many buttons on it. I literally could not conceive of a system where I wasn't completely dependent on the invisible, unreachable TV-station employees to "send" me the show I wanted to watch. The idea that I could actually own a copy of the show myself, that I could hold it in my hand and watch it whenever I wanted -- that thought was literally beyond me.
And even when VCR's were invented and I finally got one of my own, pre-recorded
videos were so expensive that I still had to wait for a TV station to play a
Muppet movie before I could tape it and own it myself. And they never put out
episodes of TV shows for sale, so I just had to wait for them to show The
Muppet Show on cable.
So the idea that they are now literally giving away whole entire Muppet movies for free just feels so incredibly casual and urbane. I feel like the country mouse going to the big city and finding out that you can get cheese delivered in the middle of the night.
This rare and magical thing, it isn't rare anymore. You can have it for nothing,
you can toss it in the trash and get a new one tomorrow. This thing that used to
be treasure, now it's just an everyday part of life.
Now, at this point, you might be expecting me to say that this diminishes the power of the movies somehow, that by making them so common, we cheapen the magic that really made them special.
But actually, I think it's great. Muppet movies should be common. I should have to fight them off with a stick. They should give away Muppet DVD's with six-packs of soda. Muppet DVD's should come out of ATM machines when I make a withdrawal. People should be handing me Muppet DVD's when I walk down the street; I should find them on my car windshield and tucked inside the Sunday paper. Every day that passes by when I don't get handed a Muppet DVD is a wasted opportunity in my book.
1979 was Kansas, basically. It was black and white and dull all over, and all I
could do was sit by the pigsty and dream of a better world. If you had told me
back then that I could travel to a future where Muppet movies came free with
breakfast cereal -- but warned me that if I went there, I'd never see my Auntie
Em and my Uncle Henry ever again -- why, I'd be catching the first tornado to
leave town, and I'd never look back. Auntie Em wouldn't even get a postcard.
This is better than Kansas, way better, and I don't know as you've noticed, but this whole broadband content delivery thing is getting faster and cheaper every day. The future looks loud and wild and full of Muppets, and if this is breakfast, then, Toto, I can't wait to see what's for lunch.