Clorox Makes It Dirty


Faint image of woman at laundry machine in domestic setting>

A few weeks ago my sister alerted me to an inadvertently hilarious detergent ad that
ran during Mad Men. It popped up again the other night, and thanks to the narration’s awkward grammar it’s still danged funny. You’ll find the relevant lines in the first comment on this post in case you don’t catch them or can’t play the video. [0:37]



Related: F Is for... Driving Miss Peasy What’s in a Name

Emmys Given Sunday


Yes, I know it’s Monday night (or maybe later).

I’d hoped to “live-blog” during the Emmys but the Internet connection was down.
Still, I took notes, fleshed them out during commercials, and have since edited them into a review — in the spirit of Bests & Worsts or Cheers & Jeers, accompanied by certain exclamations I realized were recurring from my fingertips. So here, late and surely redundant to countless other postmortems in cyberspace, are my 2009
Emmys
Yays, Heys, Hmms, & Huhs.

Hey! I’m just one letter off the Tetragrammaton.

The Opening

Yay! Neil Patrick Harris is already enjoyably smooth yet arch. It took me a few lines
to figure out that he was doing the faux-newsreel voiceover himself. And the white tux jacket is a bold yet winning choice.

I fall into the sliver of my generation who doesn’t have Doogie Howser nostalgia, by
the way. That series was on during my college years, when TV viewing was mostly limited to SNL, the news — just a few things going on like the Gulf War, the Clarence Thomas hearings, a couple of Presidential elections, the Rodney King riots, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union — and weekly indulgence in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I think the adult NPH is a real hoot, though, on How I
Met Your Mother
and in general from what I’ve seen of him.

Hmm… The song was a bit wan at the outset. And it’s hard for one guy, not hoofing
it much (partly ’cause he’s singing live, I think, so points on that score), to roam a huge stage minus a visible band or backup dancers and not look small. He ended strong and that staccato rundown of the various channels rocked, but some backing vocals might have made it sound meatier.

Hey! Jon Hamm is a very handsome man.

Hmm… So who does have quality opening montages nowadays, theme-song or
not? I watch approximately two sitcoms, 30 Rock and HIMYM, both of which oddly enough feature quick titles with vocals but no words — good ones, too, although 30 Rock’s is best skipped if you’re viewing episodes in succession on DVD. I don’t follow Desperate Housewives any more, but its original credits sequence was imaginative
and nicely executed. The recently departed Battlestar Galactica had an excellent theme. Big Love and True Blood, which I catch up on via disc, use actual songs quite effectively. Mad Men’s opening probably gets the gold right now for its music and visuals; I wouldn’t think of fast-forwarding past.

The Fugue of War


I highly recommend the UK film In the Loop, especially if you enjoy gleefully
cynical inside-politics satire.

'In the Loop' movie logo

Honestly, I’m afraid of how little exaggeration there may be in this fictional tale of
the run-up to a war in the Middle East based on flimsy — if not fabricated — evidence produced by factions in the US and British governments. But it’s less an indictment
of hawkish politicians per se or some would-be cinéma à clef about the Bush Administration than it is an all-too-believable comedic gloss on how any perspective can be spun and sold through power, determination, technology, and the right people saying the right kind of thing amidst the 24/7 news machine.

Ace o’ DC


DC Swirl or Swoosh logo

I’ve been a DC Comics reader for about 35 years now. While most kids in my generation dropped the comics habit by their teens, occasionally to rediscover the medium in college as it grew up with them, I went the opposite route, hitching my train to the industry and expanding my exposure to the art form. I had to go cold turkey several years ago, unable to work and in financial crisis, but when I finally, hesitantly put my toe back into the waters the first thing I did was check in on the characters I’d loved most dearly.

DC is different today. And while that’s true in the larger sense of these times vs. those times, I mean that DC is actually different today. Paul Levitz is stepping down as President and Publisher of DC Comics after a long tenure in corporate positions, and its parent company has announced the formation of DC Entertainment. [bad links]

Soda-Pop Culture


Given the nature of the opening car ride on tonight’s Mad Men, I’m relieved that the
sad news later in the episode wasn’t more tragic in its scope. I post today not to discuss plot, however; AMC’s main attraction might be done talking about Patio, the diet soft drink introduced by Pepsi-Cola in 1963, after tonight, which means that my window to relevantly blog about it is closing.

Patio Diet Cola button

I wasn’t familiar with Patio, but like most of the products featured on the series it’s real — albeit, of course, not handled by the fictional Sterling Cooper agency

Harmony and Irony


I saw the, um, original repeat of Glee’s first episode the other day and wish I’d been able to post a review before the encore encore tonight. Was it music to my ears? Not entirely, but I’m rooting for it.

a person's right hand making an L shape to fit into the word 'glee'
Glee photos © 2009 and logo TM 20th Century Fox Television.

Uneven but interesting, that pilot is certainly worth sampling before the series
finally continues next Wednesday, Sept. 9th, at 9 p.m. ET. It was previewed last spring — in prime real estate after American Idol — even though the show’s actual debut was always scheduled for this fall. Fox must have felt it had an offbeat winner and hoped
to stoke buzz throughout the summer; indeed, reception was generally favorable and songs from the series have been popular downloads on iTunes.