Geoffrey’s Junebug teammate, member of the comedy band The Whiskey Mountain Way, and audio engineer for Golden Age Radio, Kate Hardly is back this week to talk about commercials related to The Adventures of Mark Twain!
Image Description: The California Raisins singing a song on stage.
Buckle up, because we’re taking a wild ride through Will Vinton’s Claymation career, and learning all kinds of things about raisin advertising drama!
We started in 1986, the first year the California Raisins appeared in a commercial.
This led us to reminisce about Ocean Spray Cranberry World (East and West), and Kate mentioned some kind of memory related to Edaville in Carver, Massachusetts, but we utterly failed to get the whole story on that. Damn!
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the California Raisin Advisory Board in case you want to read that bonkers history for yourself.
Next we watched this Michael Jackson commercial.
This article on the history of the California Raisins confirms that, yes, that really was Michael Jackson, by the way. And he did his part for free. This wasn’t exactly a take on “Bad” as we say in the podcast. It’s from the same era, but it’s actually Michael Jackson covering the raisinified lyrics to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”.
And yes, according to the Simpsons wiki, it was actually Michael Jackson in that one Simpsons episode, too.
We also watched a commercial featuring construction workers.
And one with one of the workers later at home.
We also watched this commercial for Crispy M&Ms featuring Diedrich Bader.
And then we watched some of Domino’s Noid commercials. Starting with the first one.
And this one from a couple years later…
This somehow led to Julia and Geoffrey talking about getting Thrifty ice cream when they were kids, and discussing the distinctive shape of the scoops.
While were looking for crispy orange m&m commercials (since Will Vinton made some of those, like the Diedrich Bader one), we accidentally watched a Holiday M&Ms commercial that was not claymation at all…
What is UP with that list!? Where did she get infinite scroll paper?
And another accidental M&M find: This German commercial from 2007 with CGI (not Claymation) Red and Yellow fighting in the ruins of a castle.
Kate then caused us all to learn about the history of people thinking red M&Ms might give you cancer, which is pretty wild. And… of course we had to then look up M&Ms fanfiction. Because honestly, now. How could we not?
Thanks again to Kate Hardly, who will really have to come back on and tell us about Edaville properly… Go check out all her stuff! Now is a fabulous time to support musicians on Bandcamp, just saying.
And here’s a picture of one of the last Junebug shows from back in the Before Time, when we were allowed to leave our houses. One day we’ll be able to see live improv in person again!
Image Description: The cast of Junebug on stage at Improv Boston in February of 2020. Kate is the ship’s mechanic, third from the left in a blue skirt and a white top with blue embroidered flowers. Fouhy (from the Santa Claus Is Coming to Town episode) is next to Kate in the center of the stage as the ship’s captain, and Geoffrey is second from the right, fondling a stethoscope as the ship’s doctor.
Thank you for listening!
A quick note: under normal circumstances, next week would be our paid subscribers only week, but with all the Coronavirus quarantining going on, we’ve decided to give everyone some more free childhood nightmare fuel! Because who doesn’t love to distract from current trauma with past trauma, right??? So look out for a couple of bonus episodes about a truly traumatic childhood fave next week!
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After These Messages: The California Raisins with Kate Hardly