Kitsch konnoisseurs live for artwork like this, especially when on a garbage can. Companies too cheap to pay for the real thing but desperate to cash in on trends with generic look-a-likes, in this case David Cassidy meets Andy Gibb with a splash of Davy Jones type guys with superwiiiide bellbottoms, Victorian shirts and Beatles meet John Kennedy hair helmets grown moppier for the 70’s, all pasted on top of psychedelic oil blobby color stripes that represented a totally different kind of music than these kind of guys sang. Add to that numbers printed on the can that make no sense – 68, 44, 99, what?! – as if the art director was trying to add some pop and didn’t know where else to go. All the more perfect to throw your garbage in!
Swear to God, this week Coldstone introduced some of the cold stuff that turns into pudding and never melts. Only available through July 28th, this joint venture with the King of Kitsch foodstuffs, JELL-O, has the texture of pudding but is cold like ice cream and stuffed into cones or cups. Jello Pudding Ice Cream, as this test monkey is known, comes in Chocolate-y Goodness™ with peanut butter, caramel and fudge and Butterscotch Velvet™ with Butterfingers, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and caramel. I’ll miss the drips but look forward to even more chemicals lighting my system up. I’ll have some red balls Orbitz to wash that down with, please!
One of the most spectacular examples of television Kitsch are reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show, 1955 to ’82, on PBS. My favorites are late 60’s/ early 70’s with their over-saturated technicolorish hues, cheesy sets and costumes, massive bouffants and Disco tweaked JFK hair helmets, bouncy musicians, extreme middle of the road interpretations of old and new pop songs, insert shots of the dancing octogenarian audience, not to mention the thicker than wiener schnitzel German accent of the wunnerful, wunnerful host himself, Mr. Champagne Music, Lawrence Welk.
