All Talking! All Singing! All Cockroaches!

If we’re going to discuss the modern cinema with any degree of intelligence we need to distinguish between stoner movies and stoned movies.

Stoner movies are movies made by people who aren’t on drugs for people who are. You can trace them from the Salvador Dali sequence in Spellbound through Lost Weekend and The Fly to The Trip to Up In Smoke and (N)Ice Dreams to the various Harold and Kumar flicks to Jack-in-the-Box ads.

Stoned movies are made by people who are on drugs for who the hell knows, because they’re made by people who are on drugs. Flying-day-glo-unicorn drugs.

It’s hard to tell the difference between a stoned movie and a really bad one, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Joe’s Apartment is the No. 1 stoned movie of the ‘90s.

I don’t know what was being ingested by the creative-so-to-speak forces behind Joe’s Apartment, but Jay-Z has to take out a title loan to afford an ounce of it.

Right now I’m sure of two things: you’ve never seen Joe’s Apartment because you’re a person of taste and refinement, and you’re dying to know the plot. I use hand sanitizer every time I call this burrito filled with random events a plot, but here goes: A country boy named Joe moves into a big-city apartment and finds it inhabited with cockroaches.

So far so good. It’s not really a plot, but it’s plot-like. It has some plotness and a little bit of plotitude, and its plotivity displays a tenuous connection to reality.

Let’s not get carried away, though, because shortly after Joe rents the apartment and finds it infested with cockroaches he discovers that A) he hates cockroaches and B) the cockroaches can talk. ( I realize it would make more sense if B) came before A), but not in this movie. Never in this movie.) And not only can they talk, they sing and dance and display the highest level of human intelligence: They do standup comedy. With matches for microphones. Because they can’t do Kafka.

You can pretty much guess where the movie goes from here. Joe starts a comedy club under his sink for other insects and becomes filthy rich, only he can’t spend any of it because insects pay for tickets using small bits of rotted flesh, dandelion pollen, and the carcasses of other insects, even when they use PayPal.

Actually, that would be a better plot than the plot-burrito that is plopped on this movie’s dirty plate. You can figure it out, if you promise to use no imagination whatsoever: Joe meets prospective girlfriend. Prospective girlfriend is grossed out at first but then comes to respect  the talking cockroaches.

(Because the way for people to respect gross, disgusting insects is to give the insects the power of speech. I suppose. It worked for Chris Christie.)

Throw in a couple of bumbling crooks that are conquered by Roach Power and everybody lives happily ever after, including the bugs, because you, like, can’t kill cockroaches.

Like it? If you don’t you need to cozy up to your friendly neighborhood pharmaceutical representative right this minute, because that’s all the ploticity this puppy can deliver.

It also doesn’t star anyone, with a Subway-style capital “ANY.” The lead is Jerry O’Connell, the love interest is Megan Ward, and the crooks are led by Robert Vaughn (long way from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Bobby). This cinematic turd-de-force is on its knees begging for Daniel Stern, George Wendt, Abe Vigoda, Al Lewis, Harvey Fierstein, Classy Freddie Blassie or anyone with a dram of charisma to camp it up, but no one shows. They were all at a David Hasselhoff celebrity roast.

Even with all its negative castification Joe’s Apartment might have been able to pull itself out of the sump by its bootstraps, but then you listen to the lyrics the cockroaches sing and you’re right back in the septic soup again.

Here’s a sample: “Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage/Garbage in the moonlight gives off a lovely smell (lovely smell)/Sipping sewage with my baby in our little roach motel (please don't tell)/zum zum zuma zum zum zum/doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doot de doo doot de doot doot doodly doo/Take an ocean trip on our garbage ship with the cockroach I adore/We'll take a taste of the medical waste that washes up on shore.”

“Positively 4^th Street” it ain’t. Or “Mairzy Doats and Doazy Doats,” either.

There’s only one more thing to be said about this celluloid angel-dust aftereffect: Donruss had the trading-card license.

Of course Donruss had the trading-card license. How the heck else could it follow up Kazaam?

You ought to be getting the message that Donruss’ ear for trading-card licenses was crafted of the finest tin, but it’s not all Donruss’ fault. In the pop-culture licensed-product market at that particular time Joe’s Apartment  had multiple positive attributes: It had a soundtrack, the card license was available, and it was made by MTV.

The history of MTV and trading cards as I remember it goes something like this: First the Yo! MTV Raps! Cards from Pro Set (memorably profiled here), then Beavis and Butt-Head sets from Fleer (including – unless I’m hallucinating again – a Flair/Ultra-ish version, since the one thing B&B-H fans want to do is pay more for trading cards), an MTV Toons set that showed all the shows that weren't music videos and weren't as good as Beavis and Butt-Head, and the MTV Films/Joe's Apartment set, and then everyone said, "Uh, I think we’re good."

So the big problem for Donruss wasn’t that it had a bad eye for licenses; it picked a good(ish) license, only at a really bad time.

(Okay, so it picked a really bad license. As former Cards Illustrated editor Don Butler remarked when he heard I was writing about this set, “Yeah, unbelievably a card set about an agoraphobe and talking cockroaches did not become the next Mars Attacks.” He also dismissed its wretched sales by saying, “It came out about the same time as the Flipper set.” Because a card set for a dog movie featuring a semi-talking dolphin takes down a card set for a dog movie featuring talking cockroaches any day.)

The set didn’t do buyers or collectors any favors, though it has about as much fun with the material as your average Project Runway All-Star, with nary a Heidi Klum or Alyssa Milano in sight, sorry to say. The set is pitched in terms of “Etymological Order & Phyla,” making it the only trading-card set ever to be categorized the same way as dung beetles or, yes, cockroaches. (Can’t say these guys didn’t know their subject matter.) Chases include seven Roach cards, because 10 would be too many, and every pack has a free tattoo – yet another reason why tattoo removal is the growth industry of the twenty-teens.

In case you’re curious, the cards were advertised with the line, “The TRADING CARDS crawl from behind the fridge into stores everywhere.” It’s no “He's A Rappin' Genie With An Attitude ... And He's Ready For Slam-Dunk Fun!”, but it’ll suffice. At least it didn’t kill any sales that weren’t dead already.

At one point in the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby Katharine Hepburn is trying to explain to her aunt why Cary Grant is standing in front of them in a peignoir. Her aunt says, quite sensibly, “Why, that doesn’t make any sense,” to which Cary Grant replies, “And take my word for it, madam: It never will.”

The Joe’s Apartment set is like that. The difference is that in Bringing Up Baby you get Cary Grant in a peignoir, and in the Joe’s Apartment set you get talking cockroaches. It doesn’t make any sense, and it never will.

Wham! Bam! Damn, Kazaam!

George Santayana never worked in the movie business, and that’s a good thing for all concerned. Instead of “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we would have had, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to remake it.”

We’re plagued with remakes as it is. New movie versions of Annie, Robocop, Godzilla, and Gilligan's Island are coming in 2014, along with TV-series versions of everything from Fargo to The Road To Bountiful.

Fortunately, the search for new stars for these new/old shows has shifted from athletes to rap artists to internet sensations and reality-TV stars. While this hasn’t brought us to the point where Phil Robertson stars as Miss Hannigan (“Scrub them floors, girls; you’re a-gonna be married in a couple months!”), it has upped the thespian quotient somewhat. I don’t know what kind of acting chops you need to star in Something Borrowed, Something New or get thrown by a Sit ‘n’ Spin through a plate-glass window, but it has to be more than what it takes to drain stepback three-pointers. And more importantly, it’s quelled the clamor to remake Kazaam.

You’ve probably forgotten Kazaam; I had until I stumbled upon this promo card this morning, and I’d really liked my life up to that point. But Kazaam brings back memories I’m not sure I want to remember.

For those of you who are not completely up to speed on pooch-screwing, shark-jumping, egg-sucking movies of the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Kazaam was a thinly veiled (no pun intended) remake of Aladdin, with Shaquille O’Neal in the Robin Williams role.

Shaquille O’Neal as a seven-foot-one, three-hundred pound genii that grins a lot, wears size-18 curly-toed velvet slippers, sports a Superman tattoo, talks like a cement mixer full of stove bolts, raps with the rhythmic sensibilities of Flo, and can’t shoot free throws: Why didn’t I think of that? And better yet, why didn’t I think of throwing myself on top of that puppy of a license like a Sgt. Rock hero flinging himself onto a live grenade to save the rest of his platoon?

I couldn’t do that last thing, because Donruss beat me to it.

When I think of non-sports cards, I don’t immediately think “Donruss.” And when I think “Donruss non-sport cards,” my mind trips back pleasantly to Odd Rods and images of Bill Spaceman Lee lookalikes stuffed into GTOs with engines the size of the Sears Tower protruding from the hood. I had actually forgotten that Donruss, just like every other cardmaker flush with sport-card loot, had gamboled barefoot through the poison ivy of the non-sport market in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

A smorgasbord of licenses and properties were laid out before these rich, innocent cardmakers. Some of the properties were jewels, some were paste, and some were the toneless, plotless brainchildren of committees of bean-counting corporate yes-men doing their best Wolf of Wall Street impersonations, movies that made Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate look like Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal.

And then, underneath those, was Kazaam. 

It's no My Giant, that's for sure. And acting-wise, Shaq is no Georghe Muresan.

Since I had to read the copy on the promo card, you need to share my pain. “This summer, Shaquille O’Neal materializes into theaters in Kazaam, a major motion picture featuring Shaq in his first movie role as a wise-crackin’ Genie for the ‘90s,” the card reads. “And you can collect all of Shaq’s magic in Kazaam Trading Cards exclusively from Donruss this summer!”

And then, underneath this deathless prose, lest you get any ideas to the contrary, the card sports another big “Exclusively from Donruss.”

No problem, dude. You got this one all to yourself, free and clear.

You can see what Donruss was thinking. It couldn’t be any more transparent if their corporate skull was made out of cellophane. Shaq sells. Shaq sells. Anything Shaq sells. A Shaq movie’s gonna sell. And a Shaq card set of a Shaq movie has to sell. Right? RIGHT?

Amazingly, Shaq is not the worst thing about Kazaam. (He’s not the best thing either, but only because there is no sense in using the word “best” around Kazaam.) The worst thing is the slogan: “He's A Rappin' Genie With An Attitude ... And He's Ready For Slam-Dunk Fun!” The second-worst thing is the plot, which was fished out of a dumpster behind Nickelodeon’s world headquarters. The third-worst thing is the kid lead, Francis Capra, who is so one-dimensional that he makes the Sprouse twins in The Suite Life on Deck look like they’re going to jump out of the screen and plop in your lap. The fourth-worst thing is Shaq’s outfit. His Laker warmups would have been a far better choice than the neo-Babylonian tunic with cardboard bracelets. (The slippers are cool, though. They are without question the best part of the movie. In fact, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Kazaam are the only two movies where the best thing about them is the shoes.) The fifth-worst thing is Shaq.

Given the essential dreckiness of the movie, could there be any hope for the cards? Of course not. Kazaam the card set is even more formulaic than Kazaam the movie. There actually was trading-card potential here; a bad movie does not automatically translate into a lazy, indifferent set. Donruss could have cut up the slippers and made SlipperCards, or donated Shaq’s pants to a family needing emergency shelter. But Donruss was too far removed from its Odd Rod days to have any ideas on how to fun up a set of cards where the major characters are a basketball-star-turned-cheesy-genie, a nondescript kid, and a boombox. Donruss was just meatballin', trotting out the tired old formula in the service of a movie whose most effective marketing tactic was distracting people's attention from the movie. Uncle Allen Caplan would have known what to do with Kazaam, that’s for sure.

Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that trading cards are a disposable medium. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Fortunately, a Kazaam comes along every now and then to remind us.

Hard as it may be to believe, Kazaam did not represent the nadir of Donruss’ dalliance with the movies. We’ll go there next time.

In the meantime, if you’re an 11-year-old orphan girl, you’d best stay out of North Louisiana and away from strange old guys with beards. Not even Shaq’s gonna help you there. 

Happy Caplan Christmas

Let us pause a moment at this time of year to remember some of the good folks that have passed through the card business, and laugh a little at their cards.

I first encountered Allan Caplan when we started doing consulting work for SkyBox in the mid-‘90s, though my partner Dean had known Allan before, from Dean’s days as the advertising manager for the highly late and constantly lamented Baseball Cards magazine.

Dean warned me about Allan. “He’s something else,” Dean said. “Wait ‘til you meet him.”

I didn’t meet him first; I heard him.

There’s something about the way Allan Caplan greets you over the telephone that’s unique in the way that red-bean-sandwich-flavored Kit Kats are unique. You have to be ready for it, and even if you’re ready for it you may not like it.

“Hi, Kit,” Allan said when he called the first time, drawing out the “I” in “hi” like homemade caramel, and talking in a sort of Mean Streets patois but higher-pitched, so I understood right away why some people called him “Uncle Al, the kiddies’ pal.”

So he said, “Hi, Kit,” and then he said, “this is Allan Caplan.” He always said, “this is Allan Caplan,” stretching the syllables until you could read a newspaper through them, no matter how many times we talked, as if there could be another who talked with that peculiar mix of elasticity, gentleness and Brooklyn.

I don’t remember the question he asked me, but I’m guessing it was unanswerable, because that’s the way Allan’s mind works. He’s a marketing genius; he knows more angles than a geometry textbook, and if he called someone for help in those days it was either because he needed one of us to look up some arcane fact (good business in those pre-Google days) or the question couldn’t be answered.

Plus, I think he liked talking to a couple of Midwestern hicks who laughed pretty easy.

Allan was somewhere in that gray area between trusted-and-valued consultant and employee, and he was in charge of most of the SkyBox’s non-Star Trek non-sports cards. He had a key role in developing the original Marvel Universe cards, and he played a crucial role in the development of movie cards for Disney and others.

That means he takes at least a little culpability for Pagemaster[1] cards (though I don’t know what role he had in picking that lhasa apso of a license), and a whole lot of credit for the non-sport-card business as it shaped up through the ‘90s and into the 2000s.

Allan used SkyBox and all those non-sport sets to figure out The Formula, the exact mix of chase, autographs and other elements that would deliver collectibility and value to the buyer and profits to the seller, and once he had The Formula perfected, Allan took a couple of key people, left SkyBox and started Inkworks.

Inkworks did good work. I have a mess of its sets on a bookshelf behind my guitars, and they’re arguably the best base-level non-sports sets of their times. Inkworks did the best James Bond set, the best Elvis set, the best Simpsons set. They're perfect examples of The Formula in action.

Here’s what I mean. I just pulled my SimpsonsMania set off the shelf. It’s housed in a deluxe binder (extra, from your local Inkworks dealer or direct, via an on-pack offer). The base set consists of white-bordered cards that parody conventional trading cards; for instance, the set’s first card, Comic-Book Guy, has a word balloon with “Worst trading card ever” coming out of his mouth and his favorite aroma (“The smell of Mylar in the morning”) inset in the right-hand corner. There are puzzle cards, Wacky Packages ripoffs (my favorite: “Barnacle Bill’s Home Pregnancy test – just add urine”), a chase featuring comic artists’ reinterpretations of Simpsons characters, a mod day-glo chase, and fold-in inserts, all for less than $2 a pack – with a full set in a box guaranteed.

Given everything else that was on the market then and now, that’s value. Hey, it’s still pictures on cardboard, but it’s pictures on cardboard done right. It’s the difference between Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and generic. You can see and smell and taste the difference.

The other thing I love about Allan Caplan is that when he ran Inkworks he kept Christmas well.

A couple of years ago I cleaned out the Christmas-card bin and blogged about it here. In that piece I showed two Inkworks Christmas cards and talked about how Allan talks, but in the meantime I've found a couple more Inkworks Christmas cards to share.

Everyone signed this holiday card from 2003, including Godzilla. That’s his John Hancock in the lower-left corner. The thing I like about this card is that it doesn’t promote anything – except perhaps Inkworks in a snow-soft sort of way. It’s merely a Christmas trading card from a trading-card company. It’s like a bakery sending a Christmas card made out of bread, or an advertising agency sending a holiday greeting made out of weird.

Even though this card works the commercial side of Christmas Street I like it anyway. After all, few things say Christmas better than a come-back-from-the-dead gumshoe appearing (so to speak) in a wretched movie starring Gabriel Macht.[2]

This card also points up Inkworks’ greatest flaw and its eventual undoing. The company lacked the wherewithal to go after the slam-dunk licenses with the built-in fan base, so it had to bet on the come on licenses that either were dormant and underappreciated (e.g., Bond) or properties that could go big and develop critical mass (like the Buffy The Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel). The Formula also got a little tired after 10 years of constant use.

Let’s not dwell on that now. Let’s join hands with this cardboard card of a cardboard character and gaze up at the holofoil Christmas tree and sing.

Have a grand ol’ Landfill Christmas, everyone.

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[1] Talk about a movie that vanished from the planet. They don’t show The Pagemaster anywhere. You can’t even buy it for $5 at Walmart. I can understand why, but they still show Land Before Time XI: Invasion of the Tinysauruses without an ounce of compunction.

[2] A movie so bad that Roger Ebert remarked memorably, “There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.”

That's Dich Trickel To You

My running feud with racing cards has been well-documented. Basically I assert that racing cards – stock-car-racing cards, as if there were any others – try to make way too much out of way too little[1]. Racing cards fire back with something snappy like, “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re old. And ugly, too.[2]” And then we push each other a little and NASCAR cards pretend to fall down and break their leg because they watch a lot of Premier League soccer, and we both wind up in the principal’s office on double-secret detention.

Honestly, though; do the math. There are roughly 40 NASCAR Winston Cup[3] drivers and subs. Each one has a car. There is no reason for a racing set to contain more than 80 cards, yet Traks and Finish Line and SkyBox and Upper Deck would roll up to the start line with 200-card sets so overstuffed with mechanic cards and transporter cards and impact-wrench cards that getting a Lake Speed in a pack was a real accomplishment. When you’d find him you’d do your little NASCAR-card happy dance and point in the air with your pointer fingers and titter, “I got Lake Speed! I got Lake Speed!” It was only a couple minutes later after the initial charge had worn off that you sat down and said very quietly to yourself, “Oh. I got Lake Speed.”

So given all that, I ought to like, or at least not hate, the Hi-Tech Brickyard 400 Race Preview set. Right at the top of the spec sheet it says, “75-80 card set.” Now, you might quibble that it’s missing a hyphen, or that if you’re making a spec sheet to sell your card set that you really ought to know how many cards are in your set, but no matter. It’s an appropriately sized set, and that’s what matters – right? Right?

Well, maybe not so much. Note that the card set is for one race and one race only – the Brickyard 400 – and the race hasn’t even been run yet.

To give you a parallel, that would be like making a football set for the Texans-Jaguars set before the game. Gotta build up that anticipation.

Okay, so maybe it’s a little more than making a football set for the Texans-Jaguars game. Maybe it’s like making a set for the entire league for a really important game. Like Donruss Opening Day.

Hmmm. Better scratch that analogy, too.

So there is no analogy that makes the Hi-Tech Brickyard 400 Race Preview set look like anything other than a bad idea. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea. Let’s look at the rest of the specs.

According to the sell sheet, the cards feature five-color printing (for those times when four-color simply isn’t enough), purple and gold foil, UV coating, and a limited edition of 2,500 sets. Especially on a day when I was reading about Collector’s Edge’s plan to strictly limit production to 100,000 of each card, 2,500 sounds all right.

In fact, things were going along swimmingly between me and the Hi-Tech Brickyard 400 Race Preview set until I read this: “On August 16, 17, 1993, thirty-two teams and thirty-four drivers participated in practice sessions at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in preparation for the inaugural Brickyard 400. Excitement and enthusiasm ran rampant among stock-car teams and dedicated race fans in anticipation of the August 6, 1994 event. This set, second in a three-part series of the Brickyard 400, details the action and events of the two-day test session leading up to this year’s run to the bricks on the Greatest Race Course in the World.”

Reading between the lines of slipshod writing (Run to the bricks? Greatest Race Course in the World? Greatest Semi-Round Strip of Asphalt Encircling Drunk Morons in Winnebagos, maybe), do you realize what this is? This is a race-car set of cars not racing but practicing to race a race that isn’t going to be raced for a year. Not only that, but this isn’t a 75-80-card set but one of three 75-80-card sets, pumping up to 225-240 the total number of cards dedicated to a practice run for a race that had never been raced before. That is one big ol’ heapin’ helpin’ of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Not only that, but – hold me back, now; hold me back – take a good, close look at the sample cards. Do you see what I see, high up on the page, shepherd boy? (Sorry.) It’s a star all right – Jeff Gordon, the biggest star in the sport at that time. Only look at the spelling of his name: Geoff Gordon.

No freaking fooling. Hi-Tech, in the course of promoting one of its three sets of cards showing cars practicing to run a race one year later, screwed the unscrewable pooch of stock-car racing, the one name that’s absolutely impossible to mess up, Jeff Gordon.[4]

What kind of wacky-ass cardmaker does that?

To give you some perspective, because of the small number of drivers in NASCAR each driver is worth about 25 baseball or football players. So in essence Hi-Tech just misspelled the names of the 25 biggest stars in the sport of your choice – as in Gerry Ryz, Emmitt Smyth, Steve Younge, Jo Montana, Barrie Sanders, et al.

Several months ago, in one of my periodic paroxysms against racing cards, I named off all the race-card manufacturers but omitted Hi-Tech. On one hand, how prescient of me. On the other hand, how could I? They’re perfect.

And ugly. And old.

Neener neener neener.

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[1]  Except for Morgan Shepherd, Dick Trickle, Dave Marcis, and your choice of Sterling or Coo Coo Marlin. Never can get enough of them cats.

[2] Sorry; that’s what my kids say. Stock-car cards just say, “Well …,” and then breathe real heavy for a while before turning and clomping off.

[3] Still the best marketing concept used in service of Death on a Stick.

[4] Confused him with the nonexistent F1 racer Geoff Gordon, obviously.