Julia and Geoffrey watch commercials for the Ramada Inn (since that’s where Ginny Grainger grew up in One Magic Christmas), and also commercials about Christmas, including the infamous Folgers incest one...
But first we talk about a couple of things we forgot to mention in the main episode. Specifically the way it, like many other things we saw growing up, referenced The Honeymooners. This was a show we never watched, but understood to be about a married couple, and the … joke … was that the husband habitually threatened his wife with violence. Grrrrreat.
Anyway, we wondered how on earth this movie was advertised to people, so we tried looking up a trailer, but what we could find labeled as a trailer was just this clip of Harry Dean Stanton watching the kids’ hockey game.
we concluded that this wasn’t a trailer, but also that if you did see it, you’d still have no idea what the movie was actually about.
We also found this spoof trailer someone recut to make it look like a horror movie.
But honestly, the actual movie is scarier for the cold hard bleakness of life in that town.
Eventually we found this behind the scenes making of preview from the Disney Channel.
Harry Dean Stanton says it should have an uplifting effect. The director says it’s based on a true story, which is that when he was a kid he saw Santa in a farmhouse in Canada. The trailer they cut together here makes it look like this is a movie about a girl who really believes Santa is real and then gets to meet him. Which is true, but elides the bulk of the movie, which is focused on the deeply depressing town.
We finally had a short phone call with Julia’s mother to find out what she thought of the movie before moving on to our commercial viewing.
This movie had a bunch of product placement for the Ramada Inn, so naturally we started with this 1985 Christmas commercial for a Ramada Inn in Ontario.
Then we watched this commercial from 1979.
Nice people. Taking care of nice people.
Next we looked up some of the people in One Magic Christmas. We learned that Harry Dean Stanton was also a musician, so we watched a clip of him playing and singing “Red River Valley” from the Twin Peaks reboot.
Fair warning: someone says the F word at the end of this clip.
Next we looked for some of Mary Steenburgen’s music, and we ended up finding this ten minute documentary about it.
Gosharooney!
Then we watched some general Christmas commercials from 1985. We started with Sears.
And then we watched a classic Folgers ad.
This led to Julia explaining the long internet history of people associating Folgers with incest and writing fanfic about it. But this clearly wasn’t the incest commercial, so we decided to hunt that down.
There is in fact an updated version of the “Peter Comes Home” commercial. Does it imply incest? You decide!
In the time between our recording this podcast and now, Gabriella Paiella has compiled a long oral history of the ad for GQ.
We have our own theory about this commercial, and it involves aliens!
Finally, we watched a Shoppers Drug Mart commercial from 1985, starring Bea Arthur!
And that wraps up this Christmas special week! Thanks for listening! You’re our present this year!
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After These Messages: Ramada Inn and Folgers