The Wedding Singer

What's more quintessentially 90s than...the 80s? If this blog has taught you nothing, I hope that at least you can take away from it the notion that decade-later nostalgia is the most enjoyable kind. The memories practically beg to be retrieved; they're just bubbling below the surface, aching for sweet boiling-over reminiscence*. It's easier to laugh at ourselves when we're not quite so far removed, and not yet old and crotchety enough to scorn our former idealistic selves. In this particular case, Michael Jackson red-leather-jacket-and-one-glove-combo-wearing selves.

Sure, a 90s movie set in the 80s is chock full of jokes that practically script themselves. What's that? A lacy Madonna glove on the ingenue's comic foil hot friend**? A Flock of Seagulls haircut on an airport employee? Billy Idol? In minor retrospect, these things are hilarious for no reason other than that it's shameful that people sought to emulate these wardrobe-misguided people. However, the heart of the movie is not in its cheap shots at a decade crying out to be mocked relentlessly, it's in, well, its heart.

In the mid-90s, many of us knew Adam Sandler from Saturday Night Live*** or as the goofy overblown yell-prone star of his eponymous title character films Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. This was most certainly before his Jim Carrey-esque "look-at-me-I'm-sort-of-artsy" phase (Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me) but represented a shift away from the one-dimensional character caricatures, veering into I-can-make-a-joke-without-being-a-joke territory. Don't get me wrong, Sandler as Robbie Hart in The Wedding Singer was still prone to occasional bursts of humorous rage, but he also had a tad more in the humanity department.

So 90s children, spray on some Aquanet and hold onto your linebacker-esque shoulder pads; prepare to be spun right round.

(Be forewarned, YouTube was very generous on the Wedding Singer front, so I apologize for the clip-heavy post to those of you stuck at work.)



Robbie Hart was nebbish incarnate. As a former spandex-donning hair band front man, he has since fallen into a bout of suburban steady paychecks by means of his burgeoning career as a wedding singer. All is well in quiet Richland as Robbie is charming and professional, most notably when sidestepping the awkward drunken debauchery of Steve Buscemi. Really, is there anything he's not in? This guy is everywhere.



We get the the set up that Robbie is a kind and gentle soul from his fair exchange rate of old lady singing lessons for meatballs. Sounds fair to me. Who doesn't like meatballs? And deposited directly from stove-top to hand? Sign me up! Oh, and did I mention there's this hot chick who works as a waitress at these events? Because that comes in later too. Am I getting ahead of myself yet? This movie is more complicated than I remember. This is probably because I was 12 when I first saw it.

In typical melodramatic movie fashion, Robbie is tragically left at the altar by his personality-void fiancee, vapid Vicky. As most people did in the 80s when faced with a bout of unquenchable depression, Robbie turned to a strict music diet of The Cure. Dark, n'est-ce pas? He makes the fatal wedding singer mistake of playing "Love Stinks" at a wedding and is promptly booted out. All the people seated at the function's reject table certainly get a kick out of it, though.



During all this, Robbie bonds with the aforementioned catering waitress, Julia (Drew Barrymore) and promises to help her with her wedding despite all of the obvious and easily avoidable pain it may cause him. Otherwise seeking to dodge contact with nuptials, Robbie's struggling to make it work with bar mitzvah gigs.

For those of you not well-versed in Hebrew or Yiddish, I promise he says nothing in this song outside of "Mazel Tov!" and "L'Chaim!". The rest of them are largely just Semitic sounds. Aren't guttural language humorous? Ḥa ḥa ḥa ḥa!****



Julia eggs on Robbie to play her some of his new stuff (from the aforementioned Cure-rocking phase) and we are introduced to the following brilliant little ditty. Isn't is charming?



So, Julia. Yeah. Her fiancee is a Miami Vice-worshiping junk bonds trader named Glenn, I'm not sure you can get more 80s than that. He's also kind of a jerk. Okay, so he's a complete jerk and cheats on Julia all the time. And then he tells Robbie about it, which is a totally smooth move because Robbie and Julia are practically sporting broken half-heart BFF necklaces. Oh yes, and Glenn's last name is Goolia. Julia is to be Julia Goolia. Oh my god, rhyming! Language can be so humorous.

To avoid an incredibly lengthy post, I'll skip to the good parts. Imagine me as your helpful 90s VHS fast-forwarder, bringing you only things of value and weeding out the dreck. Blah, blah, blah, things go awry, hilarious kooky mishaps, misguided romantic escapades, yada yada yada....

Oh, and a rapping granny totally happens:



I love that lady, not just for this or her work in Wedding Crashers, but mainly because she was once on Golden Girls and thus deserves eternal unwavering reverence. It's in the Children of the 90s bylaws. Look it up.

So, the granny raps, and Julia decides to elope with her tool of a fiancee to Vegas to avoid any sort of confrontation with Robbie. With the help of Billy Idol (because really, who wouldn't welcome the help of Billy Idol in the face of a romantic scheme?) Robbie manages to accost her aisleside and serenade her:



All together now: awww. Wasn't that just obscenely heartwarming? Guys, if you're reading this, let me give you a hint. Cheesy moments from 90s movies have forever warped the expectations of any of your potential future mates. You better start brainstorming now some type of completely unrealistic over-the-top grand romantic gesture, because this is the way we've been told it's done.

The Wedding Singer is on TV every 12 minutes or so (I'm pretty sure they're using it calibrate satellite clocks) so its familiarity is comfortable like an old friend. Sure, it's not everyone's can of Tab, but even the harshest of critics have to warm at least slightly to its endearingness. It's everything a romantic comedy should be: watchable by both genders, is actually comical, and still has room for quiet blubbering toward the end. In step with good ol' simplified 90s sexism, if it can give a girl a good cry and a guy a good laugh, it's a winner.



*Sorry, I'm making tea, so maybe I'm mixing metaphors a tad here. I found this Mara brand tea and had to try it. Oh, products that indulge my narcissistic nature, how warm and comforting and sweet you are...okay, we're back at the tea metaphors here. I should probably put a lid on it. Alright, I swear, that was last one. Now I'm just mugging it for the footnote readers. Okay, okay. Teapot/teacup/tea references have subsided, and we can all go on with our days. Whew! I realize this humor isn't exactly everyone's cup of tea.
**You may know Christine Taylor as Ben Stiller's wife, but she'll always be Melody from Hey Dude to me.
***SNL Gap Girls, anyone?
****Please take a moment to appreciate that Ḥ is the Hebrew hard "ch" sound and it took me almost 10 minutes to locate that symbol by googling "h with a dot under it". You're welcome. These jokes don't come easy, folks.

Lisa Frank

I feel a compelling need to apologize to my male readers for starting this week off in such an exceptionally girly manner. I promise that when the mood strikes, I will write about something fist-poundingly masculine, but for now, I have a serious urge to document the adorable way a kitten looks when trapped in a high-top sneaker. So for the moment, please bear with me; just understand that this bear will be a painting panda wearing overalls.

It's a pretty well-known fact that young girls will ooh and ahh over adorable animals unprompted. Actually, as an adult I must admit I occasionally indulge this need as well, but the appeal of psychedelic coloring has faded significantly. To a child, however, aesthetics are key. In many ways, children are naturally materialistic and superficial because their brains have yet to develop to their full potential in the critical thinking/empathy departments. They need no explanation for why something has value, and they have an aching need to make their peers jealous. In short, they're a marketer's dream.

If you were at least vaguely femininely inclined and desired any sort of non-shunning in your elementary school years, you knew that stickers were the key to your social survival. As long as you owned them and traded them fairly, you were in. But God help you if you even considered unsticking it from its original backing for any purpose outside of regulation-grade sticker-booking it. That was the height of sticker sacrilege, and your status on the sticker social circuit would undoubtedly plummet from such amateur sticker collecting behavior.

Lisa Frank was so much more than stickers, though. It was, if such a thing could possibly exist, a school supplies empire. I'd like to find out which ad agency they used, because truthfully their marketing bordered on transcendent. Although these acid-trip colored animal splattered folders and pencils could essentially sell themselves on visual merit alone, they managed to convince us that we wanted, nay, needed, the entire collection. Just watching this commercial brings me back to a time when my determination to collect every available piece of Lisa Frank merchandise was unquenchable. Also, I owned the spokesgirl's hat in both denim and black velvet.




Collect them all, indeed. Let us briefly explore the products of the warped minded designers whose drug-induced color scheme choices and whimsical animal worlds captivated children everywhere:

Ballerina Bunnies. Graceful, garlanded rabbits who appear to be performing complicated on pointe ballet in a meadow. I will concede that this is probably their natural habitat, but I want to know for whom they are performing at dusk in the wilderness in full costume.


Painter Panda. For some reason, the people at Lisa Frank insisted time and time again that motor skill-deficient cuddly critters possessed some great capacity for artistic expression. Or maybe one of the designers was just especially skilled at rendering paintbrushes.


Hip Hop Bears. I could not actually ascertain their official LF names, but this substitution will certainly suffice. May I just say that those are certainly some hardcore musical ursedaens. I especially like the way that one on the left in the sweet piano shades is rocking the one-strap-on-one-strap-off overall look that so many of us were so fond of. And of course, we all know the true emblem of being legitimately hip hop is emblazoning the phrase on any available patch of fabric.


Roary and Friends. In this drug-addled designer's tripped-out mind, polar bears and puffins frolic together on the candy glaciers in the psychedelic- sparkly rainbow night sky. The puffins seem pretty ambivalent to the relationship, but Roary is giving us a mix between "get-me-out-here"and bedroom eyes.


Love-expressing penguins. Children of the 90s didn't need Morgan Freeman's soulful deep-voiced documentary narration to learn about penguin monogamy. We learned the virtue of penguin love from our trapper-keeper covers, thank you very much.



Hunter. That's a pretty bad-ass name for such a lovable log-hugging little cuddlepuff superimposed over a sparkly/traumatic LSD-experience background.


Hollywood bear. Enough glitter to make a disco ball blush. He seems to be conducting something, as Hollywood-based bears are wont to do.


I have also recently discovered that unbeknownst to me, I am a Lisa Frank character. I curse the people at Lisa Frank for not granting me this type of playground leverage as a child, but also applaud them for recognizing that my parents did not just make up my name as many people have rudely suggested.

Screenshot via LisaFrank.com

Looking at Mara, the Lisa Frank character, is like looking in a mirror. Well, a very poorly tinted fun house mirror if the 1970s and 80s had thrown up on my body and hair respectively. And look, she dislikes bad vibes! My god, it's like they can read my mind. Actually, it looks like she can, as apparently she is slightly psychic.

While I may not have been able to bask in the glory of an eponymous Lisa Frank folder-gracing character, I was pretty content to settle for my hugging penguins and house-painting pandas. If they could hypercolor it and slap the image on a pencil or a party hat, by God, we would be there. And if you could somehow procure the largest and best character-featuring stickers, well then, you just about owned recess.


Check it out:
Lisa Frank Online
Lisa Frank MySpace Skin, for those of you who are into that kind of thing
Buy Lisa Frank Stickers Online

Electronic Mall Madness

There are only so many viable ways to ensure that young generations sufficiently absorb capitalist values to grow into eventual obedient consumers. The young and idealistic must be programmed to possess superficial values and a strong sense of materialism like the generations of buyers and sellers who preceded them. The real question is, how?

Of all the un
likely sources, the Milton Bradley Corporation seemed to have the answer.

They called it Mall Madness.



For those of you who managed to survive the 90s unscathed by Milton Bradley's sadistic form of capitalist indoctrination, let me paint a picture for you. If you were at any time under the spell of this board game, you will likely want to purchase this picture by the end of reading this post.

The preceding description may be a tad harsh, but it's difficult to deny the deliberate value placement this game projected onto impressionable young minds. As someone who will freely admit her mother denied her the purchase of this game following a particularly potent temper tantrum in the game aisle of Target, I can understand its allure. The 90s toy industry was big on gender stereotyping, and board games were no exception. A 1991 article in Discount Store News offers the following bit of insight into early-90s toy and game marketing:

"Boys play Nintendo," a Parker Brothers spokesman said. "Girls play board games."

As much truth as there may have been to this, it is a bit disturbing nonetheless to observe the sweeping generalizations made by toy companies in an effort to neatly separate children into marketable demographics. Mall Madness was a product of this marketing philosophy, and dictated to girls that it was acceptable to be vapid, superficial, materialistic, and openly money-hounding. The real problem was, I wanted to be all of these things. The commercial seemed to speak to me specifically. How exactly did they get inside my brain to produce a commercial tailor-made to meet my shop-till-I-drop needs? They were selling us a set of admittedly questionable values, and we were more than happy to purchase it with the adorable fake credit cards included in the box.


There have been a few subsequent reincarnations of this beloved late 80s/early 90s board game, so I believe this official description from BoardGames.com comes from the most recent one. However, its uncanny similarity serves to show just how far we have not come since the game's original release.

Talking! Electronic!

Find the steals and deals! And see what's in store for you!

Hey girls! Don't miss the big SALE!

Grab your cash and hit the mall! Get your shopping list ready and race from store to store. Quickly find the best deals and make your purchases. But remember, not every shopping trip goes smoothly. Sometimes an item you want is not in stock. Or you must go to the ATM for more cash. First shopper to make 6 purchases and get to the right destination wins!

Taking Mall Center: "Hey, this is on clearance!" "Cha Ching!" "Oh, we're out of stock, try again later"

Even just reading this description makes me want to go out and purchase it. The big SALE? Deals? Purchases? ATM? CLEARANCE? Sign me up!

This game told us exactly how we as girls were supposed to behave and what types of things we were supposed to care about. While in retrospect this should probably alarm and concern all of us, I'm sure the majority of you--like me--are out there thinking, "Oh, yeah! I loved that game!" It's hard to be outraged over something that you once coveted with near-religious fervor. Even the games instructions illustrate just how stupid they thought young girls were. Observe, an excerpt:

The Voice of the Mall will say, “Hi Red!...Hi Blue!...Hi Green!...Hi Yellow!” When you hear
your color called, immediately press the Move button. This lets the computer know which shoppers
are playing.

EXAMPLE. You are the red shopper, Anne is the green shopper and Donna is the yellow shopper. As
soon as you hear “Hi Red,” press the Move button. Next you will hear “Hi Blue!” Since no shopper
is blue, no one presses the Move button. Anne presses the Move button immediately after hearing
“Hi Green!” Donna presses the Move button as soon as she hears “Hi Yellow!”

The Voice will repeat each unselected color one more time — just in case a shopper forgot to press
the Button when his or her color was called. If you hear your color repeated, press the Move button.
 

They probably could have left it at that first paragraph, but no, that would have been needlessly simple and comprehensible. They had to assign these imaginary characters names, because no way would these girls ever figure out who Player 1 and Player 2 were without them.

Also, this creepy unexplained disembodied electronic Voice will actually repeat itself just in case any of you girls are too slow to have partaken in this ridiculously simple task in the first place. Got that, or do I need to explain it again? Milton Bradley would probably vote "yes".

Not only would the Voice tell you what to buy and where to go, it also informed you of your most basic needs. "You're hungry," it would declare. "Meet a friend at the Pizza Place."

Or, alternately, and arguably more straightforward, "Go to the restroom." You almost have to wonder to what extent game designers assumed girls would actually get up from their spots on the slumber party floor to take an actual bathroom break upon hearing this command. I think they may have built in an extended pause in the recording expressly for this purpose.

Or my personal favorite, "You left your lights on. Go to the parking lot." Not only are girls only good for spending money and buying useless material goods, they're also air-headed bimbos who can't be trusted to adequately perform even the simplest of everyday tasks. You've got our number, Milton Bradley (call us on those Dream Phones you gave us anytime!).

I suppose one could argue this game occasionally has the effect of teaching children how to budget, but the noticeably irresponsible level of spending is not exactly to its credit (yes, credit. Like the cards. I'm all for subtle humor). However, the game's written instructions actually drop heavy hints on how to circumvent overdrawn bank balances by highlighting some of the underlying glitches in the game's programming. If you make a purchase and then find that you actually had no money in your account, you can simply return that purchase to keep the money that is in no way rightfully yours. There's nothing likely clearly outlining the means of deception and greed to a couple of enthusiastic shopping-crazy 9 year-old girls.

The crowning glory of the game, however, is the inordinate amount of physical assembly it requires.

In light of all of their good-natured gender stereotyping, it seems the kindpeople at Milton Bradley were banking on the notion that these Mall Madness-purchasing households contained a father or some brothers, or else this game would never be up and running.