Vasco da Gama, episode #5 (or, “How Green Was MacSnoopeigh”)

     If you’re Scottish, you might want to give this episode a miss.

     I’m not saying that it will offend you. What I’m saying is that I’m concerned that there’s a chance it could offend you if you’re Scottish, of Scottish heritage, or just happen to like wearing kilts. Apparently (and I didn’t know this until fairly recently) I have some Scottish blood in me. It tends to pool just below my ankles. If I stub my toe, it bruises in a tartan. This probably also explains why I’ve always liked porridge. Or maybe it doesn’t.

     One thing this episode of Vasco does explain is why the producer of the Vasco sitcom, F. Scott MacSnoopeigh, is as feckless as he is. I didn’t have to make MacSnoopeigh’s father Scottish. All I had to make him was loud, violent, abusive, and generally offensive in each and every way. Or, as Rob Vincent puts it, “the time-honoured classic avuncular figure of the unbearable Scottish dad ... no wonder Fleance [MacSnoopeigh] and Prospero [his brother, introduced in Vasco episode #4] messed up”. Ian McKay, who played MacSnoopeigh Junior, remembers MacSnoopeigh Senior as "essentially a vaguely Scottish Vasco". Yeah, that pretty much sums it up...minus Vasco's squid fixation, of course.

     So, if you’re Scottish, and you’re offended—clap your hands!—er, and, um, I apologize. But I’ll also offer an excuse.

     I’m offering an excuse because I’m Canadian, and that’s what we do, and because I grew up when being Canadian meant deferring to anything with an accent from the British Isles. And I do mean anything. Seagulls who’d never been within 1000 miles of Cape Breton, much less Great Britain, knew that all they had to do was screech something that sounded like “I say, I say” near a Canadian, and he’d give them half his lunch. In my day, Canadian public discourse was infested with truculent blowhards who used their greater Britishness as a shield for their ever greater ignorance. Among them were a few real dyed-in-the-plaid-wool Highland loudmouths. The Scots weren’t necessarily the biggest of the dunces, but for sheer volume, you couldn’t match them. So, any resemblance between MacSnoopeigh paterfamilias and any Scots living, dead, or Mary, Queen of, is purely coincidental—unless you happen to know who Jack Webster was, in which case, draw your own conclusions.

     Now that the apology’s over, off with the hair shirt, and on with the rest of the notes. This is the first episode of Vasco that doesn’t open with an “episode” of the Vasco sitcom. Count this as a sign of things to come…as well as a sign of progress. It’s also the episode of Vasco that features the largest amount of unscripted material. I forget whether the two improvised scenes in this show—one where Vasco pitches a not-so-original script idea, and Old Man Mac S’s rambling exploration of socioeconomic theory via the seven-ten split—were in the original plot outline, or whether they were last-minute additions to fill time. I suspect, since it’s just Ian McKay and me in both scenes, that it’s the latter. Ian would have been there for the editing session, and would have shared the joy of finding out that the show was running short.

     I’m running short of things to say, so I’ll let you get on with clicking the link below and listening to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #5

     Sorry again to Scottish folks everywhere. If it’s any consolation, there aren’t any bagpipes in it. Oh, yes—and you now also know the correct spelling of MacSnoopeigh’s family name. It’s pronounced “MacSnoopy” but spelled “MacSnoopeigh”. Things like this are vitally important for your enjoyment of a radio program, aren’t they?

 



 

 

 

 

 

     In case you’re wondering about Sparky’s costume, he was planning to dress up as King Ethelred the Unready, but he couldn’t get it finished in time.

     And with that questionable quip, lo and behold, here it is, almost Halloween again. As usual, the excitement here in Funsville is practically palpable. Or it would be, if Civic Ordinance 27C—the infamous Act to Ban the Public Palpation of Excitement and Other Emotional States—had ever been repealed. (The prudery of the High Victorian Era still casts a long shadow over us all, folks.)

     So, why are you hearing this from me, instead of our resident expert on all things Halloweeny? Well, ordinarily, Milady Madeira M’Dear would take care of this detail, but she’s on special assignment this year. She and two of her witchy friends are scheduled to meet up with some penny-ante ward-heeler named Harper, to tell him that no harm shall befall him ‘til Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, or whatever other shell game gets him to march blithely on to doom and suchlike.

     Anyway, they pulled my name out of the old jack-o’-lantern, so I’ve drawn the awesome responsibility of outfitting you with clever costume ideas, suitable for trick-or-treating and whatever other activities you and your peers deem appropriate for All Hallows’ Eve.

     In these cost-conscious times (there have been other kinds of times recently? or ever?), I thought it apt and prudent to lay before your waiting eyes something I call Five Costumes for Under Five Dollars Apiece. I call them that because, well, that’s what they are, and because I was told I’d been given the honour of writing this thing about five minutes ago. (Short notice is the royal road to truth in titling…if not always to creativity.) Sparky’s well-intentioned but clichéd suggestion of toilet paper mummies didn’t make the cut, but you’re free to try it, if you don’t mind being accused of having a singular lack of imagination.

     With that in mind (will you get that toilet paper off me, Sparky? I’m trying to type), here are the Famous Five for Under Five (costumes and dollars respectively, that is):

-Put on whatever you’d ordinarily wear and say you’re dressed as Doctor Who. When people ask which one, tell them, “the one two actors from now.”

-Using the same costume, you can also say that you’re Edward Snowden or Julian Assange after plastic surgery and a witness protection program.

-If that doesn’t work, just say it’s Miley Cyrus’ new look. If we wait long enough, there’s every chance it will be.

-Get a child’s dress shirt from a thrift store, stick it on a wire hanger, and tell everyone you’re a guy who’s about to sue his drycleaner.

-Why ruin a perfectly good bedsheet by cutting eyeholes in it for a ghost costume? A magic marker, some cardboard, and a length of twine work just as well.

 

     When it comes to ghosts, people believe whatever they want to, anyway. That’s five low-cost costume notions without breaking a sweat, but here’s a bonus idea, in a similar vein to the last one:

-Sheets of store-brand business card stock are pretty cheap—especially if you can borrow them from a friend. Borrow a friend’s printer as well, and you can have a splendid custom-made-for-Halloween identity that won’t set you back one red cent.

 

     Halloween’s not on a full moon this year, so you don’t even have to let your hair grow for this one.

     And with that, I must be going. I heard Sparky muttering something about trying a Satchel Paige costume on me, and here he is now carrying a valise and a sheet of foolscap, so that’s my cue to take to my heels. As Satchel Paige himself might say, I’m not going to look back—something might be gaining on me. In this case, I know exactly what it is, and I’m determined to give him a moving target.

Uncle Fun  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #4 (or, “Occupation: Unemployed”)

     Four episodes into Vasco da Gama, Rob Vincent quit the show. Not Rob Vincent the Vasco da Gama cast member—he stayed with the series ‘til the bitter end. Rob Vincent the Vasco da Gama character, as played by Rob Vincent the Vasco da Gama cast member, quit the Vasco da Gama part of Vasco da Gama.

     Confused yet? I should hope so.

     It wouldn’t be the last time this happened, either.

     You see, part of the plan for Vasco—and, contrary to popular belief, there was a plan—the apparent lack of a plan was all part of the plan, you see…clever, clever—now, where was I?...oh, yes—part of the plan for Vasco was that Rob the character in the show would quit his job on the show-within-a-show every few episodes. It probably says a lot about me that the show’s basic format was to deviate as often as possible from the show’s basic format. My problem is that I can’t think of what it says, exactly. Maybe I have a short attention—hey—is that lightning? Wow, that was close. Better hit “save” before another one knocks the power out.

     Or maybe it’s just that I have trouble finishing what I

     Anyway…having The Fictional Rob Vincent quit every now and then offered as good an excuse as any for taking the show out its familiar confines, and into other, less familiar, confines. The Actual Rob Vincent remembers that The Fictional Rob Vincent’s search for a new (but not necessarily better) job in this particular episode led him to, and I quote, “The Quinn Martin Employment Agency! Special Guest Star: James Franciscus”. (This would sound better if you could hear the theme from Cannon playing in your head as you read it. If you don’t know what the theme from Cannon sounds like, google it. If nothing else, it’ll give the mental soundtrack of your life something to liven up those duller moments.)

     I don’t know if Ian McKay had the theme from Cannon running through his head while he was thinking about it, but one of his memories of Episode #4 of Vasco involved him “trying to do a convincing Renfield, never having heard him nor having seen the prerequisite amount of old monster movies.” As I recall (and I don’t, really, but this sounds plausible, if nothing else), I think the solution to the dilemma involved telling Ian to do the worst Peter Lorre imitation imaginable, then telling him to make it just a little bit worse than that. If you’ve seen Dwight Frye’s Renfield in the 1931 Bela Lugosi version of Dracula…well, I guess the thing to do is to imagine the theme from Cannon playing under that, and you’ll probably come out ahead in the entertainment department…if not necessarily in the sanity department. You have to give something to get something, is my motto. At least it was, until I gave it away to get something else. I forget what it was, but I’m sure it was important at the time.

     Most of the time, I don’t forget things, though. No—most of the time, my excuse is that I’m naïve and ignorant. Take, for example, the introduction of Science Boy’s original female assistant, which happens in this episode, which is why I’m asking you to take it for an example. She needed an appropriate nom de guerre, and “Annoying Girl” seemed like a perfectly good one. The trouble is, it had already also seemed that way to Bill Watterson, who’d used it for Calvin’s imagining of Susie Derkins as Spaceman Spiff’s arch-nemesis in Calvin and Hobbes. I’d stopped keeping up with the comics section of the newspaper about the same time as Johnny Hart got religion, so I had nary a clue about this until well after the last episode of Vasco went out on the air. This is why Science Boy is now accompanied by Gullible Girl, not Annoying Girl. Someday, I may bring back Annoying Girl, retconning her name and backstory so that she’s known as Copyright Infringement Girl.

     The backstory for the “original” Copyright Infringement Girl Annoying Girl is also courtesy of Ian McKay:

She was the cashier at the Mr. Sub I worked at. She would only work cash. At random times she would take the cart and restock the drinks fridge. To do this she would insist on wearing rubber gloves, as it made her feel like a nurse. She would usually be late coming back from her break […] This was annoying as it threw off everybody else's schedule. When it was pointed out to her that she was 5 minutes late coming back from lunch, she went out to the restaurant, pulled one of the tables over to the wall, climbed up on the table and set the clock back 5 minutes.[…] She was quite fond of her cats. Unfortunately for her, this seemed to be a one-way relationship as her cats kept throwing themselves off her balcony. She eventually was put on long term stress leave.

    This isn’t all he remembers, but it’s all I’m putting up for public view. I’m not keen on facing a character defamation suit on top of copyright infringement action. Unless the theme from Cannon can play in the background while it all happens, that is. Or, failing that…

Vasco da Gama, episode #4

     Hope you like the way I tied the link into that last bit there. I worked a long time on it, to get it just right. Well, as long as I ever feel like working on anything, that is.

     Hey, folks—five seconds is five seconds, no matter how you look at it.

 

 

This post is for the…oh, you know—read it and see…

Hello, bird lovers, wherever you are…I hope your troubles are few.

     But enough of the Rogers and Hammerstein parodies. If you’ve been following the goings-on in this corner of the World Wide Web (and if you have been following them, hurry up and catch them, before they get away from you), you’ll know that folks here in Funsville take a special interest in the discovery of new species of fauna. (The evidence can be found here and here—go ahead and click—we’ll be right here, waiting for you to come back.)

     We in Funsville take a justifiable, yet still somehow excessive, degree of pride in our ability to identify and catalogue the arkload of previously undiscovered forms of animalia which reside in our hometown and environs. It must be something in the water. Or maybe people in Funsville just see things differently. Come to think of it, that’s probably what it is—the nearest optometrist is fifty miles from here.

     The point is that we take this stuff seriously, to the brink of sheer and utter hubris. When we all heard through the zoological grapevine that a new species of owl had been discovered in Oman, we said “so what?”

     That’s exactly what we said, since that’s the name of the owl that was discovered in Funsville a few years back.

     The So What Owl is a distant relative of the saw-whet owl, but one not known for showing up at family reunions or sending thank-you notes for Christmas presents. This wonder of the avian world possesses the unique ability to do note-for-note reproductions of the trumpet solos from Miles Davis records. The most familiar portion of its repertoire of calls leans heavily on selections from the album Kind of Blue—although during the mating season one or two of the more haunting ballads from Sketches of Spain come into prominence.

 

     For years, talk of the So What Owl consisted of nothing more than legends, apocrypha, urban myths, and/or incoherent drunken pick-up lines, all mostly heard at closing time. After considerable bickering and dickering (also mostly at closing time), the new species was finally confirmed by the Funsville chapter of the Autobahn Society (this is not a typo—the organization was founded by a philanthropist who suffered grievous remorse after running over a covey of quail while vacationing in Germany).

    The discovery of the So What Owl has opened the door to legitimate, semi-legitimate, and merely entertaining claims for other jazz-based wildlife in the Funsville area, such as the Getz Weasel, the Bix Beiderbecke Bison, Lucky Thompson’s Gazelle, the Pee Wee Russell Terrier (a feral crossbreed which lives only in abandoned Model A Fords), the Suite Yardbird, and the Djanghart Rhino—but not (thankfully, and for obvious reasons) the Thelonious Monkey.  Without running the risk of making an even worse pun than that (I’m going to make one, but I couldn’t care less how bad it is, so it’s really not much of a risk at all), I’ll  simply close by saying “owl be seeing you”.

Uncle Fun  

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #3 (or, “Tempest-tost”)

EVERY SERIES HAS THAT EPISODE…

     Yes, every series has that episode—the episode that no-one can quite remember…not even the people who made it. And yes, dear reader, even the singular media phenomenon that was Vasco da Gama had that episode.

      This much we all can agree on: we had a guest star for this one. Okay, we agreed on that after I listened to the episode and asked everybody what they could remember about working with a guest star. The sum total of these reminiscences turns out to be a big old round old zero. Sic transit gloria mundi. I suppose I could make up something about our guest star being a joy to work with, or a pain to work with, just to give the proper air of showbiz nostalgia to the whole thing. I could start some rumour involving guest star perks, or parking spaces, or those little fish called ‘tetras’ that they sell in pet stores, for all that it would matter. After twenty years, there are some episodes of Vasco that I don’t remember being there for.

     Another thing that I didn’t remember was that this episode features an origin story for Science Boy. Since I’m the one who wrote it, I can categorically state that it is completely and absolutely 100% apocryphal and untrue. Science Boy deserves a better backstory than the one I made up for him back in 1992. Now I just have to write it…and then spend the next twenty years forgetting that I did.

     Speaking of forgotten science fiction things, I didn’t even remember that the music we used over the closing credits of this episode was the theme from Lost in Space. What comes back to me after hearing this is that our producer Dave Edwards and I went on a hunt for the cheesiest TV-sci-fi music we could find in CKCU’s record library. Lost in Space seemed about as cheesy as you could get—after all, this was the show with the robot that waved its arms and bellowed “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” every chance it got.

     The problem is that, taken out of context and without visuals to support it, the theme from Lost in Space doesn’t sound like something out of sci-fi. Frankly, it sounds like it should be on a game show…possibly as a contestant.

     Enough already. If I remember any more about this episode, I might not want to give you the link to it, so here it is:

Vasco da Gama, episode #3

     I’ll let whatever you hear speak for itself. After twenty years, it looks like it’ll have to.

 

 

Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in the chains of Friedmanite economics…

Hello, Ladies:

     I greet you all like this to apologize for any apparent sexism in the title of this posting. Blame Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The quote I appropriated was originally his. If the Confessions are anything to go by, he had a weird way with women. Or is that a way with weird women? My French is too rusty for me to be completely sure.

     Be that all as it may, this week’s episode of Vasco da Gama is about money, so we thought we’d hop on the bandwagon and share a recent quip by our genteel host, The Cousins of Cousins Manor. This one can also be filed under the general heading “Cousins slightly amuses those more noteworthy than himself”. (Click the link and see this posting for another example of this.)

     A week ago (give or take), Cousins family friend Nile Seguin posed a query to the huddled masses on Facebook. For those who really ought to know anyway, Nile is a stand-up comedian in the ascendant, and in the words of Cousins:

He’s funny as hell. No—hold on—is Hell funny? Yeah, I guess if you were just visiting, and you saw all the people who didn’t expect to be there, like Hitler…or Shakespeare…or your ex-girlfriends or something. Or the guy who invented Ziploc bags. You know, the ones with the plastic pull tabs on them that don’t work properly, or come off when you pull on them…if he were in Hell, his punishment would be that he’d have a really bad case of the hiccups—you know, hiccups so bad they almost make you throw up—and there’d be this amazing miracle cure for the hiccups—I mean, like no hiccups ever again—but it’d all be in Ziploc bags…and every time he’d try to open one of the Ziploc bags, the little pull tab would come off, and it wouldn’t open, or it’d open too quickly, and spill everything all over the floor, and the little tab would come off too, so he couldn’t close it again…

…it’d be kind of a blast, actually. So yeah, he’s definitely as funny as hell.

      But back to Nile Seguin. This is the question he asked on Facebook last week:

 

 

     Mr. Cousins’ response was succinct:

 

 

      I’d like to point out that this represents a considerable mellowing of Comrade Cousins’ views on this particular subject. Up until now, he hasn’t been able to mention Friedman or Friedmanites without working a few strategic uses for boiling oil into the conversation.

     Anyway, here was Nile Seguin’s reaction to Citizen Cousins’ comment:

 

 

     Once again, a Cousins bon mot (or, in this case, is it a “mauvais mot”?) has grazed the funny bone of a professional maker of mirth. It’s enough to make a fellow give up his day job—but the ink is already dry on the contract for Jack-of-all-trades-and-Master-of-Arts Cousins’ long-awaited scholarly monograph on how Spike Milligan is more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who (or whatever it’s actually about).

 

     Don’t despair that the seductive life of the ivory tower has deprived the world of a late-blooming comedic voice. Taken all in all, the great compendium of Cousins wit and wisdom is rather more like hit and miss-dom. The run of the mill tends to be of a piece with his impersonation of a Dalek imitating Paul Lynde.

 

 

     It didn’t sound as bad as all that when he did it, I must admit. You really had to be there, I guess.

Uncle Fun  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #2 (or, “C’mon baby, leitmotif”)

IF I GET MY HANDS ON A DOLLAR BILL…

     You could still get your hands on a dollar bill in Canada in 1992. Examples of our lowest denomination of paper currency remained in circulation, even five years after the introduction of the coin affectionately known as the “loonie”. (It says something about what it means to be Canadian that we’re at ease with the idea of giving money the same name you’d apply to someone on heavy meds in a straitjacket. I try not to think too much about what it says, though. That sort of thing gives me a headache.)

     As you’ve probably figured out by now, Episode #2 of Vasco da Gama is all about money. This is a subject I have lots of experience with…mostly in theory. I used to have a vague notion that money is something you’re supposed to have, and an even vaguer notion that, if you put enough time and trouble into something like, say, making a fully-produced radio comedy show for the spare-time enjoyment of the general public, you really ought to be paid for your time, your trouble, or better yet, both. The pattern that’s established itself during my life in the lively arts suggests that this actually amounts to something less like a notion and more like wishful thinking…if that.

     Well, never mind. I’d have spent any money I made by now, anyway. Back to the subject of patterns…if you’ve listened to the first episode of Vasco (and if you haven’t, by all means do), you’ll notice some patterns starting to emerge. I thought it was important to establish a set of ground rules early on to give the series a sense of continuity—but mostly to give me an excuse for breaking them any time I felt like it. Such is the iron discipline of the seasoned comedy writer.

     But back to the iron discipline of the seasoned blog writer, and therefore back to the patterns. One of them is a standard plot, which can roughly be summed up as “Rob encounters a problem created by people who complicate it by trying to fix it”. Going hand in hand with that is another of Vasco’s emerging patterns—forgetful, easily distracted, but well-meaning late-middle-aged men in positions of authority.

     Speaking of which, you won’t have to listen too closely to hear that this episode’s Mr. Klamm is essentially Mr. Skeffington from Episode #1—right down to the voice. I forget if this was because I wanted to give people the impression that Vasco had a rep company of stock characters who showed up in different roles, or because I’d forgotten that I’d used the voice in the previous recording session. Such is the iron discipline of the seasoned voice actor.

     Iron discipline or not, one voice you won’t hear doing double duty is Mojo, Rob’s perma-stoned doorstop of a roommate. Where else could you slot in a guy whose entire life consists of listening to psychedelic rock music while consuming psychedelic drugs…or anything that looks like it might possibly have some sort of mind-bending properties?

     In case you’re interested (and let’s say for the sake of argument you are), I wasn’t on anything psychedelic when I wrote the scene set in the bank. I just had Gabby Hayes running through my brain. (If things like this don’t happen to you, I feel sorry for you. It helps to pass the time.) When you have Gabby Hayes running through your brain, it isn’t long before you think—or say—to yourself, “Gabby Hayes—running through my brain”. If it’s my brain, the next thing that happens is that you realize you’ve got a Jimi Hendrix lyric. I’ll let the other members of the Vasco cast pick up the story from there:

IAN McKAY: I forget who, but somebody needed a full explanation of who Gabby Hayes was as well as who Jimi Hendrix was.

KEL PERO (née Morin): Yes! I think I needed the explanation. I remember the song, though. At least I know Hendrix.

ROB VINCENT: I think it was whasisname the assistant tech guy, who had the bright suggestion of putting on Purple Haze under the soundtrack, because people wouldn't get the joke otherwise.

IAN McKAY: Sagebrush and a prairie sky ... Excuse me while I shoot bad guys!

     Well, there’s a surprise spoiled for all of you. I should have put the link to the episode at the top of this posting to keep stuff like this from happening. As long as I’m giving stuff away for free, here are a couple more explanatory notes:

     - For internet listeners (readers? whatever.) tuning in (clicking in? whatever.) from outside Canada, a T4 is the standard tax form for individuals. It’s our equivalent of the American 1040 form, the British Whatever-they-call-it form, the Australian I-don’t-know what-they-call-it-any-more-than-I-know-what-the British-call-theirs-but-someone-from-Australia-will-know-what-I’m-talking-about form, and so on and so forth.

     - And, for those of you who feel like expanding your literary horizons, Mr. Klamm’s name isn’t just an excuse for puns about shellfish. It’s an homage to a character in Franz Kafka’s The Castle, a novel whose protagonist gets swallowed up by an impenetrable, inexplicable bureaucracy. It seemed like a good fit for a story dealing with the fun and frolic that lurk around every corner in the worlds of consumer banking and taxation.

     Oh, and here’s one more of those emerging patterns I was talking about: during the bank scene, Rob can be heard valiantly straining not to laugh as he delivers the line after Gabby Hayes sings Hendrix. This is the first audible example in Vasco da Gama of the in-studio corpsing that made recording sessions enjoyable—and sometimes time-consuming. It came to be known as “Kormaning”—another homage, this time to Harvey Korman, the Carol Burnett Show cast member who was in perpetual danger of collapsing into uncontrollable giggles when paired in a sketch with Tim Conway. (Thanks to Ian for the reminder on this one.) Whenever it happened in a Vasco session, all but the guilty party would immediately chime in with a rousing cheer of “KORRRRR-MANNNN!!!”

      I probably shouldn’t be fonder of those moments than I am of almost any others in the whole Vasco da Gama experience. Such is the iron discipline of nostalgia.

     But enough about that for the time being. The memories are starting to flood back on me. If it’s possible to Korman while writing, I’m about to do so. Time to leave you with that link I’ve haven’t gotten around to putting in yet.

Vasco da Gama, episode #2

     Well, that’s it for now—and if it isn’t, it doggone well oughta be. I can’t tell you everything before you listen to this stuff, you know. There has to be some reason why you’d want to find out what Richard Wagner and Greta Garbo are doing in that bank along with Gabby Hayes.

 

 

 

Truth is beauty, and beauty truth, but truth in advertising often isn’t pretty…

 

     Well, there’s some truth in advertising that’s easy on the eye…as far as I’m concerned, at any rate. This week’s first instalment of Vasco da Gama has a little somethin’-somethin’ (as Sparky tells me the kids like to say) about false advertising…or misleading packaging, at any rate. M’Dear (pictured, in purple dress and flaming red dye job) and I took advantage of the lull in between Funsville’s annual celebrations of Rod Carew’s birthday and Buster Keaton’s birthday to put together a couple of odds and ends for you, on the general topic of packaging and advertising and what have you.

     After exhaustive collegial research and deliberation (that is to say, an evening with a couple of bottles of domestic Asti Spumante and a bootleg DVD of the Dick Sargent seasons of Bewitched), M’Dear and I have divined that there are three basic categories into which the purely inexplicable in advertising and/or marketing can be sorted.

     The first one is something that M’Dear decided should be called “Get out much?” Her rationale for calling it that is that anyone who comes up with stuff like the example we’re about to show you is so out of touch with reality that, in her words, “they must be spending all their spare time staring backwards through binoculars at the damp underside of a flat rock”.

     And with that, on to the example. A certain German candymaker puts out a line of fruit chews, and other crimes against the separate and conjoined concepts of fruit flavours and chewy textures, under the brand name “Mamba”.

     Mamba.

     Let that sink in.

     Now, I don’t know much about making candy, much less selling it, but I do know a little something about a planet called Earth. Rumour has it that one of the deadliest, most merciless killers on this particular planet is a certain species of poisonous snake called…

…have you guessed it yet?

That’s right—

it’s called…

the…

Mamba.

     I may hang around a lot with Sparky, and therefore don’t have much experience with what’s considered normal for children, but I’m pretty sure that normal children wouldn’t be thrilled to the gills by the prospect of chomping down on a gobstopper chock full of snake poison.

 

 

     In case you’re thinking something got lost in translation…well, the German for “mamba” is, um…well, as it turns out, that’d be…“mamba”.

     “Die Mamba”, to be precise. Not such a Jim von Dandy piece of der old Image Management by der old Candymaker. I don’t imagine the mamba thinks the whole thing is too good for its image, either.

 

 

     Leaving poisonous snakes and candymakers to settle their differences as best they can, we move on to the next category, which I’ve chosen to call “Stupid—like a fox”. Every now and then, you come across a piece of advertising so bizarre, so boneheaded, that you wonder what the people behind it were thinking. Then you realize that it doesn’t matter what they were thinking. They got your attention. Take this sign outside a clothing store, for example:

 

     Indelicate but not ineffective, eh M’Dear?

 

     No indeedy do it isn’t, M’Dear. You can bet your bottom…uh, dollar, that is.

     Then there’s a third category of advertising—a summum bonum of the ad biz—that sets itself apart from all the rest. We call this one “Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. Let’s face it, some products don’t exactly sell themselves. If, for instance, the product you’re trying to sell is turkey roasting bags, here are your major selling points:

1. It’s a bag.
2. It’s made of tinfoil.
3. You stick a turkey in it and roast it.

     It’s every bit as exciting as it sounds. So how do you sell this turkey…uh, I mean, turkey roasting bag? Well, you can either turn tail, admit defeat, and write it all off as a dead loss, or you can do what one company chose to do:

 

 

     I don’t know if I want one, but I sure took a good—what’s the word I’m trying to think of here…it’s right on the tip of my tongue…I can almost see it—before making up my mind.

     The name of the game is product recognition—and recognition is a whole lot easier when the suckers…er, marks…er, customers have their eyeballs pointed at the product. Getting them to do that thing the turkey roasting bag is telling you to do is half the battle won. It all comes down to this: when you need to roast a turkey in a bag—and one day, you may have to, no matter what you think right now—whose turkey roasting bags are you going to remember?

     Yes, you’re right—you’ll probably go to the deli for a sandwich instead…but you can’t blame those lovable rapscallions in the ad business for trying.  

 

     We hope you won’t blame us for trying to find out how many of you out there in Internet Land have run across ads and packages that seemed inspired by something other than rational thought. Jot your findings in the space provided below for comments—we’re always glad to hear from you.

     And, just in case you think we haven’t been responsible for our own share of strange ads over the years, here are some station ID’s done for radio by El Cousins-o (click here and here)…and something with me and Sparky in it.

     As always, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you,

Uncle Fun  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #1 (or, “Meet me at the back of the blunderbuss”)

    As promised, here is the first episode of Vasco da Gama…well, a link to it, at any rate.

Vasco da Gama, episode #1

     See? There it is. I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to The Cousins Lad, who was there at the time, and knows all the juicy details from behind the scenes. Let ‘er rip, Ricky m’boy.

Uncle Fun  

WHAT DIFFERENCE WILL SIX MINUTES MAKE TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW?

     Quite a lot, actually. Skip to the six-minute mark of the first episode of Vasco da Gama, and you won’t even hear Vasco da Gama. You’ll hear him mentioned once, and you’ll hear a show called Vasco da Gama mentioned a few more times than that, but, if you’re waiting for Vasco himself to show up, you are sure as sherbet out of luck, Jack.

     Why is this?

     Think about it: the show’s called Vasco da Gama, and for the last four-fifths of its first episode, its title character is absent.

     I repeat…

  WHY…

                 …IS

                           …THIS???

     The answer’s simple— in fact, it’s so simple you’d expect to encounter it meeting a pieman en route to a fair and saying “let me taste your ware”. You see, Vasco da Gama isn’t a show about Vasco da Gama—it’s a show about making a show about Vasco da Gama.

     Okay, now I’ve got to explain that, I suppose. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, someone came to you and asked you to write a sitcom. You with me so far? Now let’s say they told you the sitcom had to be about Vasco da Gama…you know, the Portuguese explorer who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope…maybe you read about him in school or something. Fair enough. Okay then—here’s where it starts getting a little complex—they want it to be as much like a certain other “classic” sitcom as possible. I won’t spoil things by telling you which one…let’s just say that Vasco is supposed to have a best friend named Norton.

     Oh yes—and there’s one more thing that’ll make your job as the writer of the “Vasco da Gama” sitcom an absolute paradise on earth and a joy surpassing even the most heavenly of joys.

YOUR STAR THINKS HE ACTUALLY IS

VASCO DA GAMA.

     And he could actually be Vasco da Gama, for all you or anyone else involved with the show really knows. And that’s Vasco da Gama, from minute six to minute thirty. Well, sort of. Back to that in a second…or six minutes…or however long it takes you to read what I’m about to write.

     So, those first few minutes of Vasco da Gama give you the pretext for the show, without yet giving you the show’s premise. The premise, like the pretext, is pretty simple-minded: something goes wrong with the making of an episode of Vasco da Gama, and it’s up to the show’s head writer to fix it…or, more likely, to find out why it can’t be fixed.

     Something did go wrong with that first episode of Vasco da Gama. Because I was the show’s writer, I had to help fix it. Because I was the show’s writer, I was also responsible for it.

     Here’s what went wrong: the show, as originally recorded, ran six minutes long.

     There’s that magic “six minutes” again. Twenty percent of our allotted half-hour of air time. One minute out of every six we were about to offer up to the unsuspecting audience was superfluous. We had two options: open the show with an announcement—“special offer to first-time listeners of Vasco da Gama—20% more show!” or start cutting. The first option wasn’t likely to endear us to the show that followed us on The Mighty ‘KCU’s broadcast schedule, so out came the razor blades and grease pencil (for those of you who grew up in the digital age, that’s the analog equivalent of a left-click-and-drag and a CTRL+X).

     The easiest way to do this was to find six consecutive minutes that could be cut without making things more confusing than they needed to be for the listener—simple enough to do in this case, because the second half of the show was a series of stand-alone sidetracks from the main plot. In the end, the choice came down to a pair of scenes, either one of which could be jettisoned without their absence being noticed.

     Thus it was that our pilot episode became a Pilate episode, as we happy few who remained in the studio at some ungodly hour (I forget exactly who, or what hour), were forced to wash our hands of six minutes of perfectly good (well, reasonably good)—and already edited—material. The Barabbas we pardoned was an extended jag on the ambiguous labelling practices of a certain peanut butter manufacturer. Cast member Kel Pero (Kel Morin as she then was), recalls the genesis of the whole thing:

We were on a break in the unicentre, and Rick was talking about how Squirrel brand peanut butter only said "Extra Smooth Squirrel" on its label. He riffed about how confusing this could be to, say, new Canadians whose English was perhaps uncertain--they'd see the label, see these little creatures scurrying around everywhere they looked, and would figure, "Hey! I could make that myself!"

I refused to believe that the label was so . . . potentially misleading. I knew that we had that brand of PB at home, so I remember right there ringing my parents, while we were on our break, and saying to my mother, who was watching something on TV with my dad, "Would you please go and get the peanut butter and bring it to the phone?" My mother was pretty used to odd requests from me by that point, having raised me and all, but this one still struck her as extra-strange. Nevertheless, bring the PB to the phone she did.

"Okay," I said, "now read the label out loud to me."

"Extra . . . smooth . . . squirrel," she said.

Laughing almost unto barfage, I conceded the point to Rick. And, as I recall, a sketch was born out of that.

     Well, that’s probably as much as you need to know for the time being…and then some. If you haven’t already clicked the link at the top of this posting and listened to Episode #1 of Vasco da Gama, now’s the time for it. Sit back, put your feet up, and by all means enjoy a nice squirrel—um, peanut butter—sandwich while you do. Unless you’re allergic to peanuts—in which case, by all means don’t.