Charles Phoenix is adorable. And ridiculous.

Charles has developed this Dessert of the Future, the Cherpumple. Inspired by the terducken, this monstrosity… well, I’d better let Charles explain it.

Charles is taking his famous slide show on the road up and down the west coast this holiday season, and it is not to be missed. UNLESS YOU LIVE IN THE BAY AREA, APPARENTLY. Ahem.

Apparently this is the handy work of Stan Freberg. Is he doing the voiceover? [via Martin]

1. There’s a Hard Rock theme park.

2. In said theme park is a section called Banana Splitsville.

Sadly there’s not much info or photos of it on the web yet, but apparently the Splits themselves perform there several times a day. Can anyone help me out?

3. The Ben & Jerry’s Banana Split ice cream changed their logo to something that does not infringe on the Splits. Hopefully photos will be coming soon. (thanks Humu for the tip!).

And perhaps a little less cool:

4. The Banana Splits have updated their website, and recorded new videos and songs, which are on sale on iTunes, if you’re so inclined!. Sadly, they sound nothing like their old selves.

Check out JYC’s other Banana Splits posts:

Ben & Jerry’s Steals Banana Split’s Logo
Rare Banana Splits Stuff

From the collection of Bay Park Buzzy

It gets even better…. the back side is after the jump…

Hee hee!

… but you haven’t experienced the sheer terror of An American Hippie in Israel. Okay, maybe sheer terror is a little strong. How about “bad scene?” (NSFW due to some slight hippie boobage.)

Fools. Fools! Fools! FOOLS!

[Thx to Christy]

I don’t know where Billoney finds this stuff.

[Via BooBerry Alarmclock]

They don’t make cartoons like they used to.

Since, well, 1979 or so, I have been in the possession of one of the most startling and dangerous pieces of culinary literature of the 20th century… the 1979 Marysville United Methodist Women’s Cookbook.

I’m fuzzy on the details of how I acquired this little ticking time bomb… my mother grew up in Marysville, and my grandmother is still there, so I suspect that my grandmother had something to do with it. Grandma isn’t Methodist, and she’s cheap, so I can’t picture her buying this to support the church. She must have been given it as a gift and she turned around and gave it to us. At any rate, it’s mine now, and has been since forever.

The whole thing is an abomination, but the salad section is downright audacious in its abuse of the word “salad.” There is very little green in this section, unless you count the many instances of lime Jello. There is a recipe for “Vegetable Salad,” which sounds promising until you learn that it calls for 2/3 of a cup of sugar, a can of Chung King Chinese vegetables, and a can of something called “Veg-All.” But then comes “Asparagus Salad,” which you would think would at least have asparagus in it, but you’d be wrong. It has “asparagus soup” in it (surely Campbell’s Cream of Asparagus), a pack of cream cheese, mayonnaise, and lime Jello. So, you know, at least it’s green.

Asparagus Salad (curiously missing any acutal asparagus)

But it gets worse — oh, does it get worse. It’s hard to select just one recipe as an example of the horrors contained within, so instead I’ve unleashed them all on the world by scanning in the whole danged section.

Pretzel Jello Salad

Don’t miss gems like “Corned Beef Salad” (with lemon Jello and Miracle Whip!), “Super Salad” (with lime Jello, cream cheese, pineapple and marshmallows!), “Pretzel Jello Salad” (with, you guessed it — pretzels — plus Cool Whip, sugar, more sugar, and raspberry Jello), TWO! different “Coke Salads from Texas” (with cherry Jello, Dr. Pepper may be substituted for Coke if you’re feeling exotic), “Tomato Shrimp Aspic” (with tomato juice, lemon extract, lemon Jello and shrimp), or “Vernell’s Mint Salad” (with lime Jello, a box of buttermints, miniature marshmallows, mint flavoring, and green food coloring).

Vernell’s Mint Salad

There’s more — so much more. It just keeps going and going. Say what you will about these salads (oh please, do!), but it sounds like a photographic paradise to me. These recipes are just begging to be made real so that their jiggly, cavity-inducing goodness can be captured in full Technicolor grandeur. It must happen.

I’m taking requests — take a look through the recipes, and let me know which salad you think I should make next.

But in the spirit of getting shit done and moving on, I present to you crappy photos of my previous two paper wallets, taken today, on my desk under the yellow light of my K’nex lamp, with the bare minimum effort put into setting up the shots.

Today we have two paper wallets.

60s Legs Paper Wallet

NOTE: At the time these photos were taken, the wallet’s seen a few months of wear and tear, and is looking a little weathered not unlike an off-the-strip Vegas cocktail waitress (Sorry mom! No offense!), but when it was new it looked fly.

This wallet was made out of two extra-long postcards I found in some gift store. I thought legs would make a great theme. I was wrong. Still I like how it turned out, and it has only offended a few so far.

North Woods Inn Paper Wallet

NOTE: At the time these photos were taken, the wallet was so badly worn that I retired it (and made the Legs wallet above), so it’s looking a bit like the box to a “We swear it works fine” returned digital camera at Fry’s. When it was new, it looked badass.

I love Clearman’s North Woods Inn. A lot. It is so fantastic it deserves it’s own post here. But here’s the Cliff Notes: The North Woods Inn is a themed family restaurant in Southern California that takes it’s cue from the rustic romanticism of the snow dusted Klondike. It’s a big log cabin (and by big I mean freaking huge) with permanent, fiberglass snow on it’s rooftop. The place has not changed since it opened in the 60s … but is has also not fallen into disrepair. It looks pretty much like I imagine it looked like on opening day; preserved in time perhaps better than Disneyland. The food is good, the service is friendly, and the crowd has real appeal — multiple generations of families gathering to celebrate good report cards and new drivers licenses. I ate lunch there on a Sunday and must have heard Happy Birthday (sung to the real tune of Happy Birthday) and Happy Anniversary (also sung to the real tune of Happy Birthday) at least thirty times.

Anyway, at the gift shop I picked up a couple of North Woods Inn pint glasses, and a set of North Woods Inn steak knives, and of course some of these fancy North Woods Inn postcards, which I used to make perhaps my favoriteist wallet of them all: the North Woods Inn Paper Wallet.

I need to make a new one of these soon.

Wait! Here’s some photos I just found when the wallet was pretty new, and I took it back to the motherland to be reunited with cheese toast, their famous “two salads”, and a stein of Molson (okay, okay, it was probably Anchor Steam):

And now for the reverse angle:

I hope to post more, with better pictures, as I make new ones. And there’s a whole story about why I started making them in the first place. Watch this space for more!

I was having dinner with a friend of mine two weeks ago, and she asked me what kind of music I listen to. In reality I listen to a lot of stuff — too diverse to lump into a single category — but for a few years now I’ve jokingly used the term Electro-Acoustic Soundscapes of the 70s. (My friend Martin coined that phrase after unsuccessfully searching through my iPod for 80s music). She had no clue what kind of music I was talking about and she pressed on, so I half-seriously elaborated with “You know, electronic boops and beeps, like outer-space stuff” even though I mostly don’t listen to that; it’s just a small sliver of my collection. And then the conversation moved on.

Little did I know that the 30 seconds I spent rattling off that term would pay me back so heartily. The next week she invited me out to a bar in San Francisco and warned me not to be late. After a quick drink, we walked down the street a few blocks until we came to an old looking wood-paneled building.

Opening the door revealed a museum-esque interior with a ticket booth, stationed by a very distinguished looking older woman. We purchased two tickets at $15 each, and we’re handed two programs labeled Audium: A Theatre In Sound-Sculptured Space. At this point my friend tells me that she remembered me talking about electronic beeps and whooshes from the previous week, found out about this place just by blind luck, and took me here sight-unseen because she thought it might “have some of that kind of beeping stuff in it”. Little did she know how right she was.

We stepped into a very serious looking room filled with sound-related sculptures as well as an array of speakers playing ambient noise: gentle water gurgling, hummingbirds zipping from one side of the room to the other. But this was just the lobby. Clearly this place was built in the 70s, and it looked like not much had changed. And after a bit of waiting around, the ambient noises got louder and the lights in the lobby grew dim, at the same time a spotlight appeared on a wood-paneled hexagonal door, where an gray-haired gentleman appeared.

He informed us and the other two dozen-or-so people in the lobby that we were about to enter the Audium, where we would be treated to a 139 speaker audio-performance-in-the-round dealing with “space and time travel”.

And it was going to be completely in the dark. For an hour.

And then we went inside. The theater itself looks as if the designers were going for 2001: A Space Odyssey but instead ended up with a set from Dr. Who. It was exactly what I was hoping for. The theater is arranged in a circle, with speakers all over the place … hanging from the ceiling, built into the walls, and under grates on the floor.

The real kicker, however, was when the lights dimmed out to complete blackness and the experience started. The soundtrack was straight out of the 1970s and didn’t sound like it had ever been updated (although I found out later that it had). But this was not music. Electronic beeps and boops were everywhere, “flying” through air, along with droning Wagnerian-style synth power chords, abruptly shifting to lo-fi organic recordings of nature, before popping back to beeps. Despite the 139 speakers in use, most of it sounded like it was just coming out of the four big speakers in each corner. It was largely rhythmless, and had no apparent story arc or narrative that was discernible from just listening. And the fidelity matched the decor. This was cliche 70s sci-fi art-school-project-on-drugs sound effects with a dash of the Space Mountain queue soundtrack thrown in. And it just kept going and going.

Half way through the performance there was a 5 minute (lighted) intermission and half the audience left, never to return. At this point I turned to my friend and asked her if she had it in her to listen to the second half, because she had no clue going into this what she was in for, isn’t into electronic music, and even I was kinda worn out by it. But she was gung-ho for soldiering through the second half … which ended up feeling like it was twice as long as the first half.

After the show was over, I was in shock. An hour in the dark listening to 1970s sound effects will do that to you. A zillion questions raced through my mind. Why have I never heard of this place? How did my friend find it? How has it not changed since the 70s? Why were they still getting crowds? I desperately wanted to talk to the gray haired guy, who turns out is the founder and sound designer, but I was worried he was going to chew my already-tired ear off with space and time travel theories.

The entire night was a completely surreal experience. If you’re into the mid century space-age movement at all, you need to go check the Audium out before it closes or gets remodeled. Even though I didn’t “get” what the soundtrack was about, and I thought it was a little long to sit through, I absolutely loved it and now I want to take all my friends. It’s definitely worth doing once for the sheer novelty effect even if you’re not into electronic music. But you better go soon … it really feels like it could close its doors for good any second.

Check out the Audium‘s website.

Audium 8 is performed every Friday and Saturday at 8:30pm. Price $15
Arrive by 8 pm since part of the fun is the lobby.
Please double-check before showing up, I really get the feeling this can change at any time.

1616 Bush St. (@ Franklin), San Francisco
Information: (415) 771-1616

*For the record, the 1970s electronic music I prefer is actual music, with percussion, melody, and harmony. The Audium had none of that. And yes, I did apologize to my friend for fibbing a little about my musical tastes.

Details available on tikiweekend.com!

Neato Coolville has done it again with another amazing post. This time it is a collection of giant advertising characters, including several Paul Bunyons, a couple of Big Texs, a spaceman, and even a lumbering Alfred E. Newman. Be sure to check them all out.

Everyone here at the Junkyard Clubhouse love a good flapjack. So I was quite thrilled to see Neato Coolville‘s post about the Perkins Pancake House menu. It’s a great example of the wonderful design sensibilities of the the midcentury. The colors work well with our blog, too. Neato Coolville has full scans on the inside menu as, well.

Okay, okay, the original song was “Mexican Breakfast,” and is equally awesome. But it’s uncanny, no?

It took me well into my second viewing to realize she has sunglasses lurking deep in that ‘fro.

[via Perez Hilton]

YouTube also has the original Madge commercial — the quality on that one is pretty poor, though.

I saw this posted on Eye of the Goof last week, and it’s too cool not to share… but I hesitate, because the theme song you’ll hear is so catchy that I can’t help but wonder if I could have legitimate legal claims filed against me for subjecting you to it. So, DISCLAIMER: WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK. If you find yourself tossing and turning at night, unable to get to sleep because of an urgent need to dance violently and find a ticket for a double decker London bus… well, you asked for it.

Here Come the Double Deckers was a kids’ show from 1970-71, co-produced by the BBC and 20th Century Fox and filmed in England. Seventeen episodes were created, and it aired both in the UK and here in the States. The show stars seven young kids who know their way around a Watusi, and have nicknames that scream “packaged product”: Scooper, Spring, Billie (it’s a boy’s name, but it’s really a girl!), Brains (he wears glasses! he’s so smart!), Doughnut (he’s overweight! he can’t stop eating!), Sticks (he plays the drums! so hip!) and Tiger (that’s the name of the littlest girl, and her stuffed animal! so wacky!).

It didn’t sink in for me until the second viewing that their hangout is a junkyard clubhouse (!). I was distracted the first time ’round by the flailing dance moves of the kids. You can tell that the director had been yelling all morning, “Bigger! Bigger! More movement! More action! I want to see wild arm swings!” These kids make the Barney’s kids look like lumps. Lumps with lame dance moves.

The Quests’ Go Go ReQuests

A post on Robot Action Boy pointed me to this treasure trove of Asian pop album covers from the ’60s and ’70s. Good god, they just keep going and going… and every last one has got some kind of crazy-cool thing about it.

The Quests’ Go Go ReQuests album (pictured above) — well, you can see for yourself how fabulous it is. One of the songs on the album is “Ding Dong Twist,” which sounds like either a new Hostess snack product, or an obscene gesture. Sing Along With the Christones features a band of young, hip, Asian priests — each wearing one of those little white & black priest collar things. Four Hits, also from the Quests, has a very soulful-looking pointing finger on the cover — appropriately, to illustrate their song “Soul Finger.” Now, that’s a song I want to hear.

Off Beat Cha Cha

Some of the albums look funky, like they may be soundtracks to obscure Thaispoitation films… others look like the Ravi Shankar’s schtick re-arrived back home after being filtered through the Beatles… and lots are clearly light, fluffy Go-Go dancing frothiness, complete with smiling, happy girls. Well, except for Off Beat Cha Cha, which has three girls who are clearly dancing under court order and are miserable about it.

Don’t take my word for it, go check out the entire gallery of albums for yourself at David Greenfield’s photo site.

Walt Disney’s 1965 passport is up for sale on eBay. He died just a year and a half after it was issued, and its only use was for a trip to London. The UK premiere of Mary Poppins was on August 23, 1965, just four days after this passport was issued, and that seems a likely use, but the London arrival stamp isn’t shown, and the New York return stamp says September 29. It’s currently at $3,600, and is estimated to close in the neighborhood of $14,400-$21,600 when the auction ends on Saturday. [via TMZ]

I really don’t need to say anything. The cover says plenty. Go on, I know you just want to look at it for a bit. I’ll be right here when you’re done.

I Love This World posted about the cover to Mastermind, and made my day. Has any game ever had better packaging? I think not. Hanford said it all, when he looked over my shoulder as I was preparing that photo to post — “Ooh, Mastermind! That was a very adult game.” Yes, yes it was. It was a game that demanded the most refined demeanor your seven-year-old self could muster (which mostly involved one raised eyebrow and a lot of “hmmm… interesting”s and soft, knowing chuckles under one’s breath). I loved this game, but even to this day, I cannot tell if it was really the game I loved, or if it was the cover. Mastermind was mental dress-up in a box.

I mean, look at it! Clearly, those two are plotting world domination, and are taking a break from their evil schemes to play a little mind game with you. They will win. It is a foregone conclusion. But you’re happy to be their little plaything, because they are so urbane and suave, and maybe if you play along with them they’ll be nice to you after they take over the world, and MY GOD THEIR TABLE IS SO SHINY.

And that woman — is she just along for the ride? Is she playing him, and biding her time until she can cast him aside? Or has he warped her to his purposes? Hm, maybe you should try to save her. But you can hear her laughs mocking you even now, at the thought that she might need saving. Yes, we will play this game as a distraction, while you suss out what’s really going on here.

If you’d like the mystery broken (and by broken, I mean shattered into a thousand little pieces, never to be reconstructed), move along past the jump, and learn the story of the making of the Mastermind cover, and see a recreation of the photo with this same couple, 30 years on. (Hint: They didn’t succeed in taking over the world.)

Mastermind, 30 years later

And here they are. Meet Bill Woodward and Cecilia Masters (nee Fung).

The Mastermind box cover photo shoot took place in Leicester in 1972. Bill Woodward owned a chain of local hair salons, and was only chosen to sit for this photo when the original model they had booked didn’t show up. Cecilia Fung was a computer science student (rock on!) at the nearby University of Leicester, and was spotted on the street and approached for the Mastermind cover shoot.

Another concept for this photo included a cat to sit on Woodward’s lap, but the cat peed on him. Yes, when you look at this distinguished man sitting at the table, you can now know that his lap is secretly spoiled with cat pee.

The dress they had for Fung was way too big for her — they actually had to have another woman behind her, reaching up to cinch her dress for the photo (been there!) so that it wouldn’t just look like an ill-fitting sack.

This new photo on the right was taken when the two were reunited by the company that owns Mastermind, Invicta. Presumably, this photo shoot went a little more smoothly. But maybe they threw in a little cat piss, for old times’ sake.

Woodward has retired from the salon business. Fung, now named Cecilia Masters, developed a career in information systems for the banking world, and has her own banking software company. Hmmm… it’s entirely possible her cunning plans are still underway…

Wendy McClure found a collection of Weight Watchers recipe cards in her parents’ basement a few years back — no one in the family would admit to having purchased them, and she got to keep them. Photos of midcentury food are always a spectacle, but it’s her addition of MST3K-like commentary that really makes it something else. Not that the recipe cards need much help being ridiculous, with names like Snappy Mackerel Casserole, Fluffy Mackerel Pudding, and the relatively straight-forward Mackerelly. Weight Watchers was really pushing the mackerel.

I first saw these when they were posted on Tiki Central a few years ago; Tiki Wahine brought the thread up again the other day with a new link (the old one had died). Now Wendy McClure has a book out of these culinary masterpieces, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. I actually kind of want to make the Frankfurter Spectacular.

Just when you think that the Internet holds all the answers, it fails you. My search for information about Boomerang, a ’70s kids’ TV show from my native Seattle, has turned up nearly bupkes.

I did learn something very interesting… I had no idea that Marni, the host of Boomerang, was none other than Marni Nixon.

Nixon is the reason Julie Andrews won her Oscar for Mary Poppins. Well, that’s not fair — that was a well-earned Oscar. (Those who already know this story can skip ahead a couple of paragraphs.) Julie Andrews had starred on Broadway in the hit musical My Fair Lady, and won a Tony award. But when My Fair Lady was turned into a Hollywood film, Julie Andrews was not yet a name movie-goers would recognize, and Warner Brothers cast Audrey Hepburn in what really should have been Julie Andrews’ role. Walt Disney knew better, and cast Andrews that same year in Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins, and Julie Andrews, became a smash sensation.

When the press started to dig a bit, and learned that Audrey Hepburn didn’t actually sing her parts — that the beautiful voice behind “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” was actually Marni Nixon… well, Jack Warner started to look like a fool for having ditched Julie Andrews. In Julie Andrews’ Oscar acceptance speech for Mary Poppins, she thanked “the man who made this all possible… Jack Warner,” which makes me love Julie Andrews even more.

Marni actually has a brief role in Mary Poppins, as one of the animated geese, but didn’t meet Andrews while working on that film. When Nixon and Andrews later worked together on The Sound of Music (Nixon played one of the nuns), Andrews introduced herself with a hearty handshake, and exclaimed “I really love your work!,” probably with a cheeky look in her eye. Marni also was the singing voice for Maria in West Side Story, and she did some vocal work for a Mr. Magoo album, “Magoo in Hi-Fi” and provided “ethereal voice effects” for some Esquivel albums. She was a very, very successful session singer in Hollywood.

I’m still having trouble reconciling the host of Boomerang with this Hollywood figure, but it comes together a bit when I hear the Boomerang theme song again — the song’s not exactly a winner, but it sure brings back memories, and that voice is loverly:

This still leaves plenty of holes about Boomerang the show, though. I can fill in a little bit more from my own memories: It aired on channel 4, KOMO, which was Seattle’s ABC affiliate. It was filmed during the late ’70s into the early ’80s, and continued on in reruns for a while. Marni’s co-star was a yellow puppet boy, who looked like a cross between Bert from Sesame Street and Terrence from South Park. I can’t remember his name, and I couldn’t find it online. His name was Norbert. (Thanks melberoo!) There’s one episode in particular that I remember, where Marni was hired to do a commercial for some silver polish, but she tries the polish and it doesn’t work very well, and she decides to not do the commercial. It was a lesson about not whoring oneself out, and whenever I’m faced with similar scenarios, I always think of Marni’s frustration with the silver polish. Overall, the show was on the schmaltzy side, and if we’d had the variety of cable back then, I probably would never have watched it.

So anywhere, there you go. That’s all I could find about the Seattle show Boomerang. Maybe someday something more will show up.

German singing sensation duo Cindy und Bert sing a song about the Shelock Holmes story “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” in German, to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” German youth dance, morosely. An utterly un-houndlike dog yawns. Cindy und Bert sing with all the fiery passion that might go into ordering a bowl of potato soup. The camera tries, valiantly but unsuccesfully, to perk the scene up with some violent zooms in and out of the “Hits-a-Go-Go” logo.

I’d never heard of Cindy und Bert, but apparently they were all the rage in Germany and the Netherlands in the ’70s. Just so you don’t think they were all doom & gloom, here’s a much perkier Cindy und Bert, in 1973.

*phew* … I’ll take it down a notch or two now, before someone reaches through the screen to throttle me.

Dean Jones puts his chimps to work, in Disney’s "Monkeys Go Home!"

Alright now, where was I? Oh yes. Monkeys, Go Home. I mean, Monkeys, Go Home!. In this delightful, fun for the whole family maybe some of the family film, Dean Jones plays Henry Dussard, an American who has just inherited an olive farm he has never seen, in the south of France. Ooh la la! Being an American, he’s got some nutty ideas about how to turn this olive farm into a profitable venture — by hiring chimps instead of people to work the farm. Luckily, he previously was a chimp trainer for NASA, so he’s got a team of recently-retired space chimps at his disposal. So wacky!

In the ’60s, even the chimps were protesting

The little French town doesn’t like the idea of having to compete against a chimp-run farm, and they mount an underground resistance against Dussard. The chimps strike back by mounting a protest of their own, fighting for their right to work just as humans do. At the same time, a boozy French broad shows up claiming to be Dussard’s long-lost cousin (and she is truly fabulous, played by Yvonne Constant), staking claim to half of Dussard’s farm, and threatening Dussard’s budding relationship with a barely-legal French tartlet, played by Yvette Mimieux.

Maurice Chevalier, with the French corner of It’s a Small World

And just for good measure, Maurice Chevalier plays the town priest, who shows up now and then to impart some heavily-accented wisdom, and sing a song or two.

This is quite possibly the slapstickiest, monkeyest, wacknuttiest of all the Disney films. The hilarity, it ensues. This film… well, it’s sort of the Disney version of the Star Wars Holiday Special. I can’t help but wonder why they’ve released it on DVD, but I’m so glad they did. I kind of love it.

Oh! The music! The music is the best part, and I’m not kidding around here — I would sincerely buy Robert F. Brunner’s soundtrack/score. It’s great ’60s light-quirk-funk-pop stuff.

* Technically, chimps aren’t monkeys, but for the sake of simplicity, today we’ll say they are. It’s Topsy-Turvy day! Shrimp are fish! Tomatoes are vegetables! Mama’s Family was funny!

[Via A Sampler Of Things]

Predicta, the Personal Car With a Hint of Tomorrow

Science and Mechanics magazine cover

A funny coincidence — it just so happens that Jim Cherry met with Taschen this afternoon to sign the deal for the book. It turned out the agreement paperwork needed a little work, so it’s not actually a signed deal yet, but it’s “definitely on.” Taschen has turned out some real beauts over the years, so it’s great to see them taking this one on. They want Jim to expand the book to include futuristic prototype cars from throughout the 20th century, so it’s going to be an even bigger book than he thought, and he gets to make some field trips to Detroit to hit the manufacturers’ archives. No word yet on a release date, but a rough draft is scheduled to be done by August, so maybe early 2008? Congratulations, Jim!

To tide you over until Cartopia the book arrives, spend some time at Cartopia the website — there’s a trunkload of great midcentury images of futuristic cars, including advertisements, magazine covers and even toy models.