Waiting for Superman
I AM CONSUMED! I have allowed the spirit of Superman to ride me like the loa. This is necessary like breathing, because right now the only thing keeping me from curling up into a ball of impoverished, jobless depression is the expectant, bubbly pre-joy at the prospect of Superman Returns. I even researched where the closest 3-D IMAX cinema was (1 hour, twenty minutes away in Manchester, CT) in case I decided that I wanted to get not just consumed but utterly bloody immolated with Superman-anticipation.
To aid me in this obsession, I have been logging on to the Quaker Oats ‘Win Superman Merchandise’ website every day and duly plugging in the little “no purchase necessary” code. And this morning, I won some Silly Putty! It’s not called Silly Putty, of course, because it’s not made by Binney & Smith. And despite the fact that it looks an awful lot like Gak or Gloop or something patented by Nickelodeon, consumer reports indicate that it’s essentially Silly Putty. No word yet on whether it can reproduce mirror images of the comics page from the Daily Planet. Anyway, that was nice, seeing as I had failed to win either free tickets or a laptop in various other Superman-related sweepstakes.
Until then, I rely on music to keep my eagerness on a quiet simmer. Chris McLaren, blog commenter extrordinaire, once pointed me towards a miscellany of Superman-related MP3s, which claimed to be the Top 20 Superman Songs. I was bemused by the fact that they named the post after a Sufjan Stevens song that they didn’t include, and noticed one or two other discrepancies in opinion. As they make sure that their links are no longer valid after a brief period of time, I have compiled my own list of top Super-tunes, which I will have on high rotation until Wednesday:
- Lazlo Bane, “Superman“, Scrubs soundtrack
- Crash Test Dummies, “Superman Song“, God Shuffled His Feet
- Iron and Wine, “Waiting for a Superman“, Yeti Compilation #2
- Sufjan Stevens, “The Man From Metropolis Steals Our Hearts“, Illinois
- John Williams, “Main Title March (alternate)“, Superman: The Movie soundtrack
Also of note is the ReFrederator cartoon podcast, which is going to be making a classic Max Fleischer Superman cartoon available to watch each day next week. The cartoons aren’t long on plot — or indeed, dialogue — but they are lovely to look at, and truly exemplary of the sort of three-dimensionality that hand-drawn animation can exhibit. As you count down to Wednesday, I hope you give ReFrederator some of your bandwidth.
Not a Jot Nor Tittle
Jottings and small thoughts:
+ I had occasion to go to a florist a few weeks ago, and it had been a considerable amount of time — at least a few years — since I had had occasion to visit a florists’, and so I may have looked a little out of sorts as I stood patiently at the counter. However, despite any sense of experience I may have felt I possessed, the proprietor of the shop seemed to think I looked sufficiently at sea that I must be a teenager buying a corsage for the prom. You know how women will say they like getting carded because it makes them feel young? I can’t actually imagine wanting to be a teenager again, except for the marvelous metabolism, but I decided to take the comment in the same spirit: as a twisted, misguided compliment.
+ Went to a Chuck Palahniuk signing in Boston at the Brookline Booksmith. I’d never read anything by Chuck, but he was giving out free gelt to people who stood in line: bunny-ear headbands and stuffed rats. I got a plush snake, which he signed, “Chucky P.”
+ Hem and Vienna Teng, who I saw play a gig together at the Iron Horse last year, are both coming out with new albums this summer. This is Hem’s fourth album in three years, so I’m a little worried about quality control, but Ms. Teng is releasing her first album with Rounder Records, so I hope that it combines her excellent songwriting and technical expertise with their stripped-down, schmaltz-resistant sensibilities. I like her music, but it’s a guilty pleasure, as she does tend to have records produced with that extra dose of cheese. I found out about the releases on NPR’s All Songs Considered, which is darling enough to have RealMedia full-length previews of a track from each album. We’d prefer MP3, but we’ll make do with what we have. The Hem track is called “Not California“, and the Vienna Teng is quite good and titled “Blue Caravan“. Hem also has a zipped MP3 available from their website, a live recording of “Reservoir“.
+ Superman Returns is due out soon, and I’m all aflutter for its eventual release. However, for some unknown reason, Warner Brothers marketing people are trying to get in the way of my peaceful coexistence with commercialism as brokered by the fine folks at Universal Studios and as recorded in the previous post. Listen, WB: if you’re going to get Superman plastered all over the cereal aisle, at least contract out with General Mills or with Kelloggs… those guys are whores, and they will make sure that their cereals contain crappy toys. Crappy toys that I will lust after and buy cereal in order to acquire. You, however, have decided to go with Quaker, who are more wholesome, and are content to offer coupons and “Memory”-stylee matching games on the back of their boxes. This is insufficient. I require more crass commercialism with my blockbuster DC Comics movies, and you are not giving it to me. Admittedly, it is pretty damn cool that there’s a red cereal that turns the milk blue, but that’s not technology that I can place around my computer monitor and shoot at my students.
+ Lastly, on the cereal front: the “Memory” game? It comes on packages of Life, with a different set of eight cards on each flavour. Of the four pairs of cards, the first three are different pictures of Superman, Lois, and Lex Luthor. The fourth pair of cards is a location. And on the plain box of Life, that location is “SPACE”. Look, guys… I know you’re already lame, because you’re trying to pass off cut-up pieces of recyclable pressboard as a toy. But you couldn’t come up with three locations from the film that didn’t include “SPACE”? You have the entirety of the Warner Bros. press machine to provide you with material for this sham of a promotional item, whereas I’ve only watched the trailer. However, I can come up with three locations from that limited footage. Actually, more: Metropolis, Smallville, The Daily Planet, the Fortress of Solitude. Even allowing for the fact that the use of “Smallville” might involve sticky trademark issues, that’s still three better “Memory” cards than “SPACE”. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
+ I have more free disc space on my e-mail account than I do on my computer. How did that happen? Gmail really has caused a paradigm shift in the base expectations of what webmail should and can provide. That and the fact that my harddrive is only considered “sufficient” by pre-BitTorrent and DVD-burner standards. Ah, the quaint days of 1999.
‘Bout Damn Time
I began watching Firefly on September 20, 2002. I bought tickets to Serenity on April 27, 2005, and joined the Browncoats message boards the same day. After seeing the film eight days later, as part of the whole “fan premiere” promotion effort, I spent a while on the boards to find out which of the stars had appeared at which of the locations, and then wandered off to less focused internet nerditry.
But then the boards instituted a merchandizing scheme that allowed people to get free stuff for participating on the site and accumulating points. Reading posts and watching videos and getting other people to click on links and submitting fan art could get one points… so all stuff that cost nothing but time and patience. And after some silly drawings and some failed attempts to have my friends click on links to get me points, I finally accumulated enough to earn a patch. This all reached a pitch because the site was closing down with the release of the DVD, and it was all a bit of a scramble to increase my participation points by more than 200% before they stopped doing promotions. I got my last clicks in, and resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to accumulate 15,000 points for an autographed Josh Middleton illustration of Summer Glau, and ordered the patch on November 5, 2005. Two to four weeks for delivery, the invoice said.
The site closed down on January 3, 2006. Still no patch. I had mostly given up hope by that point, but faint vestiges remained. But as I have felt the month of August looming closer, and my eventual move from my current address became more imminent, these cobwebs of hope had been blown away, and I had well and truly accepted that the patch would never grace the sleeve of my nerd overcoat (which already showcases the emblems of the Ministry of Space, Couscous Express, Death of the Endless, GIR, and Jill Sobule). Then, today — seven months since I ordered it — the patch is in my hands. And it will soon adorn my sleeve. Thank you, Universal Studios promotion intern; you’ve restored my faith in marketing.
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