Rogues' Roundup: Christmas robot toys!

 

It's time for yet another Christmas post, and as you might guess, I have a big backlog of junk I could use. The big surprise is that a lot of this is stuff people just give to me, or at least things I got in "white elephant" exchanges. For this post, I also did some maintenance and even took a bit of video. To kick things off, here's the central exhibit and I believe the first one I got, a jazz reindeer!

Legalize it! Mistletoe, that is...

For the history, I think I got this in 2016 or so. When I got him, he would play "Jingle Bells" and do a sort of dance. The tag that would give the usual date and manufacturer's info appears to have been deliberately removed. To my further recollection, there was some extra stuff tacked on that I removed. However, I never seriously doubted that the saxophone came with the figure, though at this point, it's only securely attached to his mouth, which makes it look like an oversized pipe. He proved to pose the most issues when I tried to get him to work, something I'll get to further in. For now, here's one more pic with generic Godzilla. The big guy's taller, but not by a lot.

"Oh yeah, I was tripping every frame of Godzilla vs. Hedorah..."

Next up, we have the most elaborate gimmick of the group. It's a regular dancing reindeer, except it also has a light-up fan that spells out a holiday message. I got it in a box I lost track of. A tag says "Newtoys", but doesn't give a date. Here's the toy.

And here's the other two. The first is a more or less realistic dog that "sings" and rolls around. A tag gives the company name Kids For America and the date 2007. The other is a more cartoony character that swings his head around to the tune. A tag on one ear gives the product name Puppy Precious, and advertises that it plays 10 songs, but I can find no other info. Both make a barking sound tuned to the music. Another common denominator is that they are very overpowered, which I will get to. Here's a couple pics, with a Marx Soviet soldier for reference, because we haven't had giant Marx lately.

"Gaahh! Capitalist consumerist killer robot attack dog!"

With this lineup in places the real question was if I could get them to work. I set up a work area on the Couch Mark 2, got out a bunch of batteries, and set things up to upload to my misbegotten Youtube channel. As alluded above, the big reindeer required the most work. At the start, he would play a few notes of music without doing anything else. With a change of batteries, he would play music again, but didn't move. I turned the neck and joints, and gave it a few more tries, and eventually he did start dancing again. Unfortunately, he's very prone to falling over, an issue I had noted previously. Here's the before and after.

The reindeer with the fan posed a different kind of problem. A change of batteries got it to play and light up. The real difficulty is that the head isn't clear of the fan. To get a good recording, I had to adjust the head to keep the fan from snagging. Here's the Youtube clip.

Singing Reindeer with LED fan! - YouTube

The kaiju dog proved to be the easiest to deal with. The Dogzilla is billed as singing and dancing, but he really just swings the giant head back and forth like he's shaking a rat. Here is his big moment.

Then for the finale, I had the rolling dog. I had him working before the others, with just a change of batteries. Most if not all the action is from the massive tail and what must be a very powerful motor. I quickly learned not to hold onto the toy during a demonstration, because getting your hand in the way borders on painful and certainly can't be good for the toy. For this post, I set up a squad of the giant Marx figures for a little fun. The humanity...

Vintage Marx figures vs. Christmas robot dog! - YouTube

And with that, I'm done for today. Merry Christmas; life and light; and praise to the Logos made flesh. That's all for now, more to come!

Movie Mania: Star Wars vinyl

 

I'm continuing with my disastrous efforts to get a full five posts this week, and this time I had no idea what to do. As necessity begets invention, I finally decided to follow up on a loose end from my non-depressing Christmas playlist. In the course of that post, I mentioned having one of the infamous Meco Star Wars albums at the family estate. Since I had absolutely no better idea, I dug through a cache of records that there hasn't been a player for in about a decade. Here's the first of two specimens I unearthed, photographed with my phone on the Couch Mark 2.

This is the original Star Wars soundtrack album, released in 1977. It's obviously not much to look at, but things are better in the back, which is the pic I opened with above. It's a two-record set that runs about 80 minutes total. You might think I ran this into the ground as a kid, which isn't wrong. The wrinkle is that I literally couldn't operate the record player when we did have one, so my family recorded the whole thing onto a 90-minute cassette that I played for the next few decades until I lost track of it. At any rate, the format meant there's an interior that they filled out with photos. Here they are in full glory.

This artifact is a perfect snapshot of why the audiophile trend/ craze left me behind. As alluded, my choices of media formats were dictated by my terrible eye-hand coordination, so it was cassettes all the way through high school. I can still muster some nostalgia for the days when you could record music directly off the radio and pass it along on a mix tape, but I have absolutely no fondness for the tech itself. What really was good about an album like this is that it's polished enough to sound like a concert performance instead of being broken into a bunch of short sound clips. If I could get it back on a playable format, I would definitely prefer it over the Star Wars digital album I got a while ago, but it just doesn't matter quite enough to go out of my way. And with that, here's the real main exhibit...

Here is the Star Wars Christmas album, which incidentally has nothing to do with the Star Wars Christmas special. It was released in November 1980, which I got wrong when I listed a track from it as from 1979. That means that it technically came out after Empire, released in May of that year, but I strongly suspect the new movie had little if any effect on the final form of the album. I can kind of remember hearing it as a kid. However, it was the album cover that made by far the strongest impression, in fact a painting by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie. Here's a couple closeups. R2D2 looks... chunky.

When I started this post, I finally listened to the majority of the album. I can say without hesitation that it doesn't come close to living up to the McQuarrie art. Its most redeeming quality is a certain informality that was already seeping out of the franchise. In and of itself, however, it barely holds its ground between tolerable and intermittently amusing. To spare you the trouble, here's the most worthwhile track besides the one with Jon Bon Jovi, "The Odds Against Christmas", which seems to reference the asteroid segment in Empire. It actually raises an intriguing angle on just how much of an accident our celebration of Christmas really is, which of course isn't explored. And yes, these are absolutely the high points.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. For once, I've made pretty good time and still covered what I want to do. It still leaves plenty I might come back to sooner or later. That's all for now, more to come!

Holiday Special: Return of the Xmas playlist!

 I needed a quick blog post for today, so I decided to do what I did last year: Curate one of my Youtube playlists. This is, in fact, a playlist I created before the one I covered last year, and it should be easier to cover. Here's a rundown, and the link for the list itself.

1. Christmas At Ground Zero (Weird Al, 1986): As self-explanatory as they get. It's a Weird Al classic I remember from when I was a kid, and a slice of late Cold War paranoia. Now that I think about it, it's in about the same spirit as Night Of The Comet. The line that still resonates: "If you hear someone climbing down your chimney/ You better load your gun and shoot to kill..."

2. Santa Got A DWI (Sherwin Linton, 1996): I remember this one from the Christmas episode of the late, great Schickele Mix, where the Professor drew liberally from an album called A Bummed Out Christmas.  That was, in turn, a major source for both this and my really "dark" playlist. By that standard, it's middle of the road, cynical but still actually funny. My favorite line: "I can't raise is bail/ No one will believe..."

3. Rusty Chevrolet (Da Yoopers, 1992): I got tuned into this one by a friend. It's still in "dark" territory, without going over the line, and it's actually high-energy. It's as good a point as any to note as a PHX metro near-native, we don't have to shovel heat. Best line: "I light a match to see the dash, and then I start to praayyy..."

4. Grandma's Killer Fruitcake (Dr. Elmo, 1995): Heard this one on 1990s radio, a kind of sequel to "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer", which the same guy recorded as one half of Patsy And Elmo. I personally find it preferable by a wide margin. My favorite line, "Oh no Grandma, please don't send us more!"

5. Putting Up Decorations (Bob Rivers, 2000): Another gem from the radio, where I first heard it played along with the classic 1950s/ '60s rock it parodies. Apparently, it was released as part of an album that also included the titular song "Chipmunks Roasting On An Open Fire," which would definitely be here if I had heard it back then. I remembered it as just funny, yet there's plenty of cynical edge about consumerism, overseas manufacturing and general kitsch. "God appreciates my plug-in tribute to the savior..."

6. You Ain't Getting Diddly Squat (Heywood Banks, 2003): All I will say is that I must have heard this guy live once, because I'm sure nobody else ever wrote a song in tribute to the pancreas.

7. Christmas In Jail (The Youngsters, 1956): A real oldie, this apparently got contemporary notice as a PSA against drunk driving. Given that it comes from an African-American group in the civil rights era, it's a lot darker in hindsight. "Rocks in my head, I wish I was dead..."

8. R2D2, We Wish You A Merry Christmas (Meco, 1980): Simply harmless, for a change. It's from the infamous Meco Star Wars album series, with Jon Bon Jovi somehow roped in. I still have the album this is from, but I don't think I'd have the heart to play it even if we had something to play it on.

9. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Woody Phillips, 1996): One more from Professor Schickele. The Nutcracker with power tools, what else can I say?

10. The Night Santa Went Crazy (Weird Al, 1996): One more from Weird Al. I have to say, it doesn't hold up as well as "Ground Zero". As often happens with Weird Al, it pulls its punches just a little short of what it advertises. It definitely has more bite with the animation video, especially Santa's "list".

And that's it for another day. It may seem like a "dark" selection in itself, but I was quite carful sorting these out from the ones that ended up on my "depressing" Christmas playlist: No songs about getting dumped, the death of a child, being abandoned on an icy road, etc. (Why not the link for the other one while I'm at it?) I hope your Christmas is merry, whether or not your sense of humor is as warped as mine or these artists. That's all for now, more to come!

Holiday Special: Depressing Xmas playlist!

I have been trying to plan out what I want to do for the holiday season, and there's one thing I decided I definitely wanted to get done. For quite a while now, I have had my own Youtube channel, so far consisting entirely of playlists. Over several years, I'v put together quite a few, and I've tried to keep them... interesting. There's one in particular I'm ready to curate. I had previously tried my hand at listing "weird" Christmas songs, which by now is practically "mainstream". I then decided it was time to make another go at it, and my working title was my "depressing" Christmas playlist. My ground rules were that these wouldn't just be songs that are "dark" in a funny way, but the ones that absolutely mean it. So here at last is what I have to say about it.

1. "Christmas Day" (Squeeze, 1996): This was one that I first considered for an earlier playlist, chosen in part because it sounds cheerful. In brief, it's a satirical song that puts Mary and Joseph in the amenities of a cheap, very modern motel room. I'm genuinely unsure what they were going for, but to me, it's always had a slightly-askew feel that really ramps up as you go. It might take a few hearings to start to "see" it, or maybe you won't; if not, feel free to move on.

2. Father Christmas (The Kinks, 1977): This is one that could have been my anthem during chronic unemployment. A guy talks about dressing up as Santa/ Father Christmas, only to be mugged b a group of young miscreants. The setup "story" doesn't exactly work, but the chorus perfectly captures the desperation of being poor and out of work.

3. River (Sarah McLachlan, 2006): This is the one that's the "obvious" pick, a breakup song originally composed and performed by Joni Mitchell. What takes it above a standard lost-love song is the middle verse. It's an honest picture of what it's like to hurt the people who care about and for you that will really resonate for anyone with mental illness in their background.

4. Christmas At Denny's (Randy Stonehill, 1989): Now we're already up to the darkest one by far. There's simply nothing that can prepare you for this song. It starts out as "funny-dark", but when you get to the narrator's backstory, it's not just lost-love sad but outright tragedy. It's absolutely brutal, with no sign of hope outside of the refrain, "silent night, holy night/ when things were all right."

5. Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis (Neko Case, 2000): After getting the last one out of the way early, I went to one that really is "funny-dark". It's a good cover of a Tom Waits original (see, of all things, my review of The Earth Dies Screaming), by a very gifted singer. There's really nothing to add, so moving along...

6. Merry Christmas, I Don't Want To Fight Tonight (The Ramones, 1989): This was one I had to replace because a previous video was deleted, which might well happen again. It's a song that can be funny, especially accompanied by the music video, but far from tongue-in-cheek. If it doesn't make you think of your own relationship, it will probably remind you of someone else's.

7. Christmas Eve Can Kill You (The Everly Brothers, 1972): This is the song this list was created around. It was one of the last recordings by a legendary rock duo just before a 10-year retirement, and will defy any expectation you might have from their career and work. The title sounds like a theme song for a horror movie, but it's actually the meditations of a hitchhiker on Christmas eve, which quickly becomes a poignant exercise in ethics and ideals.  The chorus is all too timeless: "God forgive the man who drives on by the other man..."

8. Christmas Will Break Your Heart (LCD Soundsystem, 2015): I chose this as a "middle of the road" song before the very end. It's a reflection on being lonely, whether or not you're alone, all done in a mockingly faithful 1980s-early '90s style.

9. Joel the Lump of Coal (The Killers, 2014): I went soft picking the last song. It seems to be one of several songs from this group that make Santa the bad guy, but the only one I've explored far enough to find any further depth. It follows the main character through a genuine emotional roller coaster (with amuch anthropomorphism as needed) before a happy ending.

That's all for now, more to come!