"Yeah, I got yer 'Softer Side' Right HERE, pal!" - Part III - Feliz Negatividad

Hello, Recurring Visitor!

Do you know how many pre-internet hours I spent as a child staring at pages in the "Sears Christmas Wish Book"?  When they said "Wish Book", they weren't just whistlin' Dixie, folks.  As a kid of the late 70's/Early 80's, this magical tome (which was left on your doorstep increasingly earlier every year) represented childhood dreams incarnate in a slick, glossy, full-color package.

As a Telephone Sales Representative at "Sears" I was now part of that proud tradition.  I was the guy behind this:

 AAAAAAAAAGGGHHHHH!!!

*WOOF!*   Sorry, 'bout that folks!  Let's pick something a tad less creepy.  Like this:

Awwwwwww, puppy!  Everybody loves puppies, right?

Going into my first Holiday season with "Sears", I thought that my brief time spent at "Zellers" (http://emblogificationcapturedevice.blogspot.com/2010/04/travails-in-retail.html) had adequately prepared me for what was to come.  I also assumed that being on the other end of a phone line would insulate me somewhat from the worst of frontline abuse heaped upon the heads of the average retail drone.   

I would be proven tragically wrong.

Before the coming of the storm I was distracted somewhat by my success on the job and the increased shift frequency that resulted.  At the apex of the holiday season I thought it rather interesting that I was getting close to full-time hours but (curiously) none of the benefits and perks that usually comes from being a full-time employee.  Wow, sounds like the sort of mystery that might precipitate a few Horatio Cane one-liners, furrowed brows, hands on hips and possible eye wear placement, n'est pas?  


But I wasn't complaining at the time.  With the money I was making from all the extra hours I could give my girlfriend and family more than just a card and a hearty handshake for Christmas.

Regardless of my relative financial stability, it was soon eclipsed by the true horror of Holiday retail sales.  This can best be summed up by the following cartoon courtesy of Jerry and Mike at "Penny Arcade":

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/25/

Gabe isn't exaggerating when he says "Holiday retail is WAR", folks.  I'm a survivor and sometime I still wake up screaming.

The Holiday season has now become an exhibition for just how out of whack our society has become.  Every year it's the same friggin' thing and every year we fall for it like lemmings with a credit limit.

Manufacturers hold focus groups amongst kids to determine what this year's "dream toy" will be.  Once decided, they advertise the crap out of it on "YTV" months prior to Christmas, under produce the thing in some Malaysian sweat shop and then short-ship them to retailers.

When L'il Joanie and/or Johnny are suitably brainwashed by the potent combination of direct-delivery adverts and peer pressure they begin to irrationally desire this completely impractical "thing".  This typically kicks off a two-to-three month campaign of dedicated whining.  After all, if the child doesn't get what it wants it may be left out of this grotesque groupthink experiment.

Combine this with an entire generation of overcompensating parents who are absent from their children's lives either because both of them are forced to work to make ends meet or they had kids merely because it was the next thing on the unwavering "things to do list".

Mix all these ingredients together and bake during the high-pressure Holiday season and you'll end up with the sort of rampant, unchecked consumerism that makes life in the western world borderline shameful.  To prove my point, does anyone really care now about the following "Main Offenders":

Remember these eerie l'il f#@%$ from 1998?  No?  Probably for good reason.  People went positively bat- shit insane over "Furby's".  They'd step over the body of their own mother to acquire one of these things for their petulant, spoiled larvae.  If I had a dime for every time I had to explain to a customer that the manufacturer (Tiger Electronics, I'm looking in your direction...) only made a small handful of these hairy abortions to meet the demand I'd likely have a thousand dimes.

We as front-line sales people bore the brunt of some major wrath when these blinking electronic retards flew off the shelves.  To our collective amazement this resulted in parental in-store death matches and enterprising chaps snatching them up and selling them for profit on the internets to complete morons.

And where are these now?  I'll tell ya where.  Sitting deep in the attic someplace, slowly turning into a dust bunny the size of a tumbleweed, rocking back and forth and muttering incoherent gibberish like "U-Nye-Way-Loh-Nee-Way!"

Yeah, I'll help you "go to sleep now" you little Tribble-bitch Mogwai wanna-be f#@$!  


*Ahem*.  Sorry 'bout that.  Let's move onto this inexplicably appealing chronic seizure victim:

In 1996 this crimson, spastic bastard caused us a huge lungful of grief and misery.  I actually had a woman tell me that I personally ruined her Christmas because "Sears" wouldn't sell her a "Tickle-Me-Elmo" for her kid.  Do you think I could make it logical in her thick skull that "Sears" would have liked nothing better than to sell millions of these creepy, molestation-craving muppets to every brain-damaged soccer mom on the planet so they could easily bribe love from their afterthought child?  Damn right we did!

Finally, there's this jaundiced, morphine-drunk polyp:

Just like "Elmo", they made a talking version of this as well, which made no sense to me at all since all the perky mutant would ever say is variations of his own name over and over again.

My opinion of "Pokemon" can be best described by the following "Robot Chicken" sketch:



My point is, what did we really go through all that misery for?  For zeitgeist-flavored pop culture sugar bombs that have barely any value a mere few months after the mania subsides?

Think about it people!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to appraise my collection of "Star Wars" action figures...

EPIC: http://www.wishbookweb.com/

EPIC TOO: http://www.sprword.com/videos/consumingkids/ 

FAIL:

"A Creative Force" Part II

After I saw Star Wars I can safely say that I walked out of that theatre a different kid then before I went in.

I became obsessed with the damned thing, much to my parent's chagrin. I begged them for "The Story of Star Wars", a story book and cassette tape with dialogue and sound effects from the movie.  I listened to it so much the voices began to sound like Hank Hill on Quaaludes.  Before this happened I'd already committed huge chunks of the script to memory:

LEIA: "Darth Vader, only you could be so bold. The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this once they hear you've attacked a diplomatic..."

DARTH VADER: (interrupting) "Don't act so surprised your Highness, you weren't on any mercy mission this time. Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by Rebel spies; I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you!"

Cripes, how sad is that. I just typed that right from memory!  I pity the poor kid that saw Episode II first during his impressionable years and now walks around muttering dialogue like:


ANAKIN: (to Padme) "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft...and smooth." (Awkwardly paws at Padme)

Cripes, he'll never get laid.  I mean even less so than the average Star Wars fan.  But I digress. Whenever any event came down the pike that might earn me some sort of present or gift credit (birthday, Christmas, National Accordion Awareness Month) I spent my allotment on something that had Guerre des Etoiles stamped on it.  Action figures, vehicles, posters, play sets, t-shirts, books, comics, magazines, shower curtains, spice racks, home enema kits, batting practice helmets...whatever I could get my hands on.

I'd try and draw the characters but I sucked at it.  I made up stories with my action figures and recorded little passion plays with my tape player.  I remember when I first moved to Stephenville around '79 I tried to sucker my new school mates into appearing in my own version of the sequel, filmed with an old Super 8 movie camera my Dad got from somewhere.  Regrettably this ambitious project was dead before it even got off the ground since props, costumes, sets and the film stock itself would have forced me to be Jon Peters' butt monkey to this day in order to raise that kind of scratch.

A year later the official sequel came down the pike and our religion was confirmed. I once read somewhere that in order for a film to become a franchise, the sequel to the original has to be as good, if not better than the first. Then it doesn't even matter what the third or subsequent films are like, you can keep crapping out new entries indefinitely and people will still pay to see them.

The Empire Strikes Back would end up proving that.

The second film was a helluva lot darker. As a ten year old kid I couldn't conceive of how my favorite characters could be abused so badly. I didn't want to see C-3PO get blown up, watch Luke get his hand lopped off or Han Solo get tortured, frozen in carbonite and then abducted by Boba Fett.  Even worse, the revelation regarding Vader's uncomfortable proximity to Luke's lineage did little for my brain, which I'd finally managed to cobble together over the past few years like pieces of your mom's missing vase, long shattered in an ill-conceived game of indoor Frisbee.

Needless to say, with Empire ending on a cliff-hanger, the years between May 1980 and May 1983 WERE THE LONGEST YEARS OF MY FRIGGIN' LIFE! I tried to pass the time by rolling around in all my Star Wars paraphernalia and reading speculative articles in magazines ("Who is Boba Fett?" "Why, it's no less than Luke Skywalker's MOM!") . But, in reality, the wait was killing me and many other members of my sad little generation.

Being a good little dork, I was a member of the Scholastic Book Club in the Spring of 1983. I almost experienced a diaretic hemorrhage when I noticed that the storybook for Return of the Jedi was featured in the most recent SBC catalog, months before the film's release in May. This was indeed the Holy Grail right before me.

Well, needless to say, I saved up my shekels, sent off my order form and then proceeded to have the following interaction with my teacher for five hours every day for the next week:

"Is the book here yet?" "No." "Is the book here yet?" " No." "Is the book here yet?" "NO." "Is the book here yet?" "NO!" "Is the book here yet" "No!!!"

But, lo and behold, one morning the answer was different:

"Is the book here yet?"

"YES!!!" screamed back the teacher. "Yes, for the love of God, yes!!!"

I gaped at her in amazement. In turn, she began to stare at me as I promptly began to exhibit signs of crack cocaine withdrawl. I began to chew on my fist, shuffle in place and slap-wash my face like Curly from The Three Stooges.

"Can...um. Can I have it? Huh? Can I have it? Please? I...I really need to look at it for just a second. I gotta find out what happens..."

"No. You'll be distracted all day. You'll just have to wait until 3 pm like everybody else."

It's a damn good sight it wasn't given to me right then because as soon as that storybook was in my hot little mitts I would have bolted like a jackrabbit or jumped out the nearest window like a pint-sized ad executive.

Well, if the past three years had been torture, that school day felt like another three years on top of it. I was completely miserable the whole time, grunting out surly, monosyllabic responses to everything, drumming out a tattoo on the desk top with my fingers, tapping my foot, sweating profusely and shooting the teacher dirty looks.

Just as soon as the final bell rang I sprang from my seat like Toad from the X-Men, landed on the teacher's desk and grabbed her by the dickie.

"GIMMIE IT!!! GIMMIE IT!!!" I raged.

She managed to push me back a few paces, buying herself enough time to reach into her bottom-right desk drawer and throw the book at me like a piece of steak towards a slavering lion.

"Here! Take it! Take it!" she screamed then fled from sight, sobbing uncontrollably.

Finally re-united with "The Precious" I slunk out of the school, muttering to myself all the while:
"Must find out if Han gets rescued. Must see if Luke and Leia get together. Must find out who the f#@^ this 'Other' person was that Yoda was babbling about."

I ran home and resigned myself to a stone cold supper as I plowed through the storybook as fast as I could.

Only to find myself crushingly disappointed for the first time in my young life...

Part III right here.
 
EPIC   Testify...

BONUS EPIC Encouraging kids to read for over fifty years... http://www.scholastic.ca/clubs/

FAIL:   "I thought this sleeping bag smelled bad on the outside!"