Category Archives: Popular Culture

Grumpy Thoughts

From Lileks:

I like Grumpy. Don’t identify with him, though – I’d go with Doc, maybe.

What? You don’t see many people wearing mildly abrasive Grumpy shirts? You need to spend more time in Disneyworld, where such things are encouraged as an expression of the outer limits of Disney-sanctioned negative personality characteristics. They’re aimed, probably, at the middle-aged men who accompany their families and need something that seems aimed at their particular demographic, and they accommodate Disney agnostics and Disney adherents. Doc speaks to them both.

Aside from that, though, what do adult males have for Disney character identification? Squat and diddly, it seems. We’re not in the mood to wear a Prince on our shirt: teh ghey. Sully: too hairy and fat for some. There’s Donald, but in his T-shirt form he’s Grumpy + anxiety disorder.

There’s no Disney version of Bugs Bunny. No character with the self-possession, the amused expression – he’s laughing at you, not with you, but he’s doing you the favor of not laughing out loud – the cynical tilt of the eyebrow, the carrot-cheroot, the eyes calculating the odds and the way this caper will play out. There’s a scene in “Roger Rabbit” where they finally meet, and I remember at the time it was a moment of great pop-culture significance. Which, I suppose, it was. It was fleeting, as it should be – together they would never work, like swing played on top of ragtime, but for that one moment there was a certain pleasure in seeing them together, like Bogart shaking hands with Harold Lloyd.

Which is a roundabout way of saying the only Disney shirt I’ll wear around the Kingdoms is a Classic Mickey.

No one opines on pop culture better.

[Update a few minutes later]

And don’t miss Red Planet Mars.

Happy 70th Birthday

…Bugs Bunny.

He doesn’t look a day over thirty. His youthful vitality is particularly amazing, considering that he’s a veteran of the Pacific War. I’m tempted to say we should send him to Afghanistan, but he’s probably too politically incorrect for today’s army.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s his (unembeddable) fifty-first-and-a-half anniversary spectacular from 1991. It seems like only yesterday.

Nobody Does Similes

…like Lileks:

…the power stayed on, damn the luck. In fact the entire storm skirted us – 60 MPH winds downtown, but here at Jasperwood we just got gusts and downpours, the far edge of the mayhem. I was stupid enough to put fresh batteries in one of the lights, too. Now they’ll be useless the next time I need them. They will sit in the lantern for a year and quietly drain themselves, like old men peeing in their pants while they sleep.

There’s a lot more where that came from.

[Update a few minutes later]

I know, I say to read the whole thing, and I didn’t before I posted this. So farther down, I found this:

And must we start with a rap song? Must we? It was like the trailer for “Nanny McPhee Returns,” which have “Everything Little Thing She Does (is Magic)” by the Police to remind you that, you know, Nanny uses Magic. Nevermind that it seems to take place in England in the 30s. I doubt it’s in the movie itself, but when they stick in the Obligatory Pop Song it not only takes you out of the world they’ve constructed, you feel like you’re being treated like a fool. Don’t worry! It may be set in the past, icky icky, but it’s hip as all hell! Here’s a 25-year-old pop song to prove it!

I watched a dumb Jennifer Aniston flick on the plane yesterday (captive audience, not enough seat pitch to use the laptop), and one of the annoying things about it was the occasional rap in the soundtrack. Is there anyone who would not go to a movie if they knew there wasn’t rap in it (other than a movie about rap, that is)? Because I know at least one person with exactly the opposite opinion. Why do they feel the need to do that? What value does it add?