Did I mention this one was Japanese?

Which came first?  The diva or the diet?

It’s pretty weird that Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, and Janet Jackson all happen to be in ads for Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and NutriSystem respectively.  I wonder which one inspired the remainder of the campaigns (Coinkydonk), or did they all happen to happen at the same time (Coinkydink)?

(SIDENOTE: It’s no Coinkydink that Mariah’s is the most annoying commercial of all time.)

BUT WAIT!  These musical divas aren’t the only ones chiming in.

You also have Charles Barkley (for Weight Watchers) and Terry Bradshaw (for NutriSystem):

The only riddle that remains:

When will this athlete do ads for Jenny Craig?

That's called a (calorie) burn, Tom Brady.

...nobody knows anything about this except for five people I know.

So instead, I’ll focus on other TV shows that made the leap to the big screen with the original cast (or at least most of it) in tact.  This is not about the remakes.  Here are some TV Shows That Tried To Find New Life In Film.  Some did; some didn’t.  Awesome Battle, begin!

WE’RE GONNA STICK WITH THIS MOVIE THING FOR AWHILE

These were the TV shows that had either finished their run (Star Trek: The Original Series), were about to finish their run (The Muppets Show, Star Trek: The Next Generation), or barely had a run at all (the short-lived Naked Gun), but went on to produce more motion pictures than thought possible.  These are the successes.  These are the ones that the cinema kept alive… even up to now.

The Muppet Show - Star Trek: TOS & TNG - Naked Gun

WE’RE GONNA GO BACK TO TV A LITTLE WHILE LONGER

It’s weird that this group mostly consists of cartoons.  These are the TV shows that decided to release a movie to capitalize on the boob tube success, and in many ways, they did.

• Transformers: The Movie was released in 1986 to reboot the toy line and cartoon series, and how did it do that?  It killed most of the original cast.  It’s officially time to throw out Optimus Prime to buy Rodimus Prime.
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America extended the show one more season, but it must have also entered it into the nostalgia lexicon.  It returned to MTV with a new season late last year.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut came out somewhere around season 3 or 4.  The show just finished its fifteenth season.  Oh, my god!  They didn’t kill this show!
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters should have killed ATHF, but it didn’t.  I saw this at the show.  It was horrible!  This happened in 2007.  The show is still on the air.
• The X-Files: Fight the Future got me to watch the season before the film was to be released.  I wasn’t a fan of the show prior to that, but I knew a fair amount of its mythology.  (I’d only watch it here and there for the random, spooky episodes.)  The show went on for four more years.  Somehow.  The revelations in the movie were boring.  And I think they changed all the mysteries anyway.  Long story short, I stopped watching the show; others didn’t.

Transformers - Beavis and Butt-Head - South Park - The X-Files - Aqua Teen Hunger Force

WE’RE JUST LUCKY TO HAVE ONE MOVIE

These shows probably shouldn’t have had movies, but because of the fans, they did.

Kids in the Hall begat Brain Candy; Twin Peaks begat Fire Walk With Me; Firefly begat Serenity; Strangers with Candy begat Strangers with Candy; and for some reason… when no one was asking, The X-Files begat I Want to Believe.  They were trying to pull an ol’ Star Trek: TOS on us.  You’ll have to do better than pedo-priest and severed heads, Chris Carter.  Mulder needs his Khan.

Kids in the Hall - Twin Peaks - Firefly - Strangers with Candy - The X-Files

WE’RE NOT GOING TO COUNT THESE

Any film based on Saturday Night Live skits is not up for discussion at this time.

And I didn’t include Monty Python because they’re British.

Now, I know that Kids in the Hall are Canadian, and I added them up above.  And they, too, were produced by SNL’s Lorne Michaels.  But they’re already in the Photoshopped image, so nyah.

To having your voice over dubbed (or playing a voice actor’s body) in this TurboTax commercial:

Just Shitty, I’d imagine.  But compared to these other shittier commercials, this one is The Shit.

DUMB AS SHIT

Airborne Effervescent Tablets not only rip-off an old special effect from a 1992 movie, it contains one of the dumbest looking and sounding animated spokescharacters I’ve ever seen.  Mix that with the lawsuit Airborne faced a couple years ago regarding misleading advertising, and it wins being Dumb as Shit.  (I was going to make an inappropriate comment about the tablets not giving the woman her boobs back, but I opted not to.)

ANNOYING AS SHIT

I like the J. Geils Band, and I’m sure that Energizer Lithium Batteries work great, but the version of the music used in this ad drives me up the wall.  It butchers the hook, and keeps going and going and going…

CRAPPY AS SHIT

Happy’s Pizza is a local pizzeria (natch), and this is the commercial they ran around Halloween last year.  I’ve written about how poor their ad department is before, but this one takes the cake pizza pie.

The HeartMark™ is trademarked?!

Trends.

They’re always stupid.  Pet rocks, sequenced gloves, pogs… and now this.  The inescapable heart hand gesture.  It’s everywhere.

Aeroswift™

But would you believe some lady “claims” to have the trademark on it?

This lady looks like she makes many "claims"...

She even licenses it out allegedly (although it just looks like she just made a list of places she’s seen it used and retroactively authorized it).

(SIDENOTE: Did she donate the gesture to Show Your Hearts?  It could be a tax write-off.)

My hope is that it actually is trademarked, and that she’s making bank on its pervasiveness.

I mean, what she claims is not impossible.  She could figured it out during a round of This is the church and this is the steeple gone bad.  I haven’t seen it in use until recent years, and it seems like a simple gesture to devise.

But was she the one who told Taylor Swift about it?  Because Swift claims she invented it, and her fans claim that Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, et. al. stole it from her.

All that matters is did this woman really trademark what she calls The HeartMark™?  Because I have an idea of my own:

My trademark... Deez Nuts™.

Seriously.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Click this picture to read the Amazon reviews.

I’m not about to jump on the bandwagon of slamming some misguided, self-righteous kid, but boy… do I want to.  This is one of those situations best illustrated by illustrations I made to defend Justin Bieber:

By hating on McKay Hatch and his No Cussing Club, you only make his message stronger.  But then he goes and makes videos like this, and it takes you somewhere completely different:

The only reason I know about him and his fruitless endeavor is because he came out against an episode of Modern Family in which the toddler Lily says:

Fudge.

That’s really what she said in real life.  Fudge.  They just bleeped it out like Jimmy Kimmel does in his Unnecessary Censorship:

And he wonders why he’s “the most cyberbullied kid in the world”?

Here are rational reasons why; here’s the irrational; and here’s one more.

And the Masters of the Microwave

I watched the original version in Italian on their website, and it confounded me.  I hoped the subtitled version would help… and… well… check it out for yourself:

'Nuff Said.

The People Meter, a.k.a. The Grating Ratings Box

When I was a kid, it was my dream to be a Nielsen Family.  In my mind, the concept was simple: we must watch TV.  (Or if NBC still had their druthers, we Must See TV.)

In reality, though, it’s not that simple (here’s the simpler explanation).  Nielsen is a monopoly (TiVo is a distant second in terms of tracking viewership).  And mostly families considered “less-well-off” (TRANSLATION: anyone that can’t afford to time shift the shows they watch or skip commercials) are the sample public.  What this means to TV fans is if you can skip past the commercials, that show will get cancelled.

So shows like Firefly and Arrested Development, and more recently, possibly NBC’s Community, suffer because their fans don’t watch commercials (“commercial-watcher” could become a fairly cruel epithet… at least as cruel as “mouth-breather”).

So where’s The Silver Lining?

In a nutshell, the Nielsen Ratings are a good indicator if the show I’m watching is actually good or not.  It didn’t used to be that way when we only had three channels to watch, but in these days of cable and the TripleDoubleU, the converse is true.

Don’t believe me?

American Idol gets high-ratings every year, and for most seasons, I’ve watched it.  I know it’s brain garbage, but the Nielsen Ratings prove that it is gray fecal matter.  Need another example?  American Horror Story’s season finale drew the highest numbers for FX ever, and that show sucked.

That’s really what this post is about… how much American Horror Story sucked.  And LOST, too.  Remember when that had high ratings?

So in closing, I must stick to my guns and not waste my time on any “popular” shows.  If a program makes it to a second season and the ratings were decent, that series just might be my cup of T… V.