1. Magic Bullet To Go – Mick and Mimi are at it again with their weird batch of friends that they seem to do everything with. This time they’re bringing their friends the gospel of the Magic Bullet To Go, a portable version of everyone’s favorite blender that takes care of all of your blending needs for about 45 seconds before the battery runs out.

The “ad” part of the informercial suggests all of the locations that you could use the Bullet To Go, like a boat or the beach or…the office. For those who aren’t familiar with the Magic Bullet in real life, this thing is loud. Good luck winning any popularity contests in the office once you’ve established yourself as the guy who has a Magic Bullet at his desk.

The strange “play-acting” part of the infomercial, the only part worth watching, takes Mick, Mimi, and most of the original Bullet gang on a camping trip. The whole thing is sort of a headscratcher but some parts that stand out are Berman’s insinuation that Mick and Mimi might have a strange obsession with the Magic Bullet, the revelation of Hazel’s steamy love affair with Berman the night before, the fact that EVERYONE IS SPOTLESSLY CLEAN IN THE WOODS, and finally the part where they brought enough ingredients to make about 15 full course meals and nobody thought about a way to prepare all of this food until Mick and Mimi reveal the Bullet To Go.

There’s more. There’s a lot more, but it’s really best to watch for yourself.

What is with their continual claim about how easy this thing chops garlic? Who’s complaining about chopping garlic?

2. Shirt Tales – (Probably) the first TV series adapted from a greeting card, Shirt Tales was produced by Hanna Barbera in 1982.

The Shirt Tales were a bunch of cute animals that lived in a tree in the middle of a park in the middle of a city. The titular shirts were magical in a sense, revealing the wearer’s thoughts in a smarmy way but otherwise not, like, useful magic. The tree they lived in was really a secret base with a lot of technology in it and the team would fly/sail/travel all over the world fighting crime. Their identity might have been a secret? I can’t really remember. As a kid watching this it was clear to me that the world in the show was okay with talking baby animals that wore clothes but might not be okay with those animals fighting crime.

For me, Shirt Tales was one of the big scores on the USA Cartoon Express, a program that aired cartoons unpredictably. You didn’t know what was coming on that day and some were duds, but when you hit Shirt Tales, fist-pumping was in order.



Here’s the intro:

A baby panda living in a tree in an American park these days would be an international incident on its own.

3. Vintage Disneyland Guide – Courtesy of Aporofan’s World, here are some gorgeous scans of a Disneyland guide from 1975. Hit the link for more, here are my favorites:

4. Berzerk Commercial – Perhaps trying to compensate for being the only arcade game to kill two people, here’s Berzerk’s softer Atari commercial.

5. Sinclair Dino Commercial – Only Sinclair Gasolines Have Nickel, Nickel, Nickel…

-ds