Sit On This, Lincoln!

Everyone loves a good statue, but who says they all have to be dead presidents or civil war soldiers!?! Here's a handful of kooky, crazy statues around the country that you might want to visit on your next road trip!

Bob Newhart - Chicago, Il Cable outfit TV Land installed this "interactive" statue of Bob Newhart as his character Dr. Bob Hartley from the 1972 - 1978 sitcom "The Bob Newhart Show." Dr. Hartley was a Chicago psychologist so here you can lay down and tell your problems to Dr. Bob - even though he won't really help you out...because he's a statue! They originally installed this statue in front of the actual building that was used as Dr. Bob's office exterior on the show. Later, they moved to piece to Navy Pier - a major tourist attraction a mile away.

Popeye - Crystal City, TX This fine country of ours actually hosts four different Popeye statues. This one here was erected in the small Texas town that claims to be the Spinach capital of the world. I think what makes this statue extra special is the fact that it sits smack dab in front of City Hall. There's another Popeye statue in Chester, Il - the home of Popeye creator E.C. Segar. There are two more in Arkansas. But Crystal City IS the spinach capital of the world and to prove it they hold an annual Spinach Festival...which just happens to be this weekend! Get your airline tickets!

World's Largest Catsup Bottle - Collinsville, Il Another score for the great state of Illinois. The problem with any "World's Largest" is that it's not really what ever it's supposed to be the "world's largest" of...I mean, that's not a real catsup bottle - it's a water tower. Which I guess also makes it not a statue...but a water tower, so why did I even bring it up? Either way, that's a 100,000 gallon water tower which I assume means it could also hold 100,000 gallons of catsup. The way my kids use catsup on everything, we'd need one of these giant bottles of the red stuff to get us through a month! The World's Largest Catsup Bottle even has it's own website!

Superman - Metropolis, Il Clark Kent's hometown might be Smallville, but Superman belongs to Metropolis. The current version of this super structure is 15 feet tall and weighs two tons! There was an earlier version of this tribute, but everyone wanted to see if he really was the Man of Steel and destroyed the statue by throwing stuff at it. Now Superman stands tall in Metropolis' town square which they call Superman Square. The town is home to a Superman Museum, a Harrah's casino, a Huddle House (good eats!) and of course the Annual Superman Celebration.

Classic Commercial Sunday - Coffee Break

They used to do these commercials all the time where they would go to some fancy restaurant and switch out the fancy coffee with some grocery store brand and then everybody would be impressed that they didn't know the difference. Look at the beginning of this ad, it says that everyone involved received a free meal...suggesting that things might have gone different if these were actual paying customers drinking down instant coffee...


Here's a coffee ad from the days when commercials were like little movies:


and from Jim Henson:

See A Free Movie Tonight

The only thing better than a good movie is a free good movie! That's why we're pretty excited to partner up with General Mills Cereal to give you a chance to see a movie...in the theater...for free! Actually, there's two ways you can catch a movie for free. Inside specially marked packages of General Mills’ Cereals you'll find a code. When you enter two codes into the General Mills website, you'll be able to print a free movie certificate good for admission to any movie. Pretty sweet, eh!? You know General Mills cereals...Honey Nut Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms, Trix and my personal favorite Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs.

Here's another way you can get your mitts on some free movie tix. To get the word out about their new See A Free Movie Tonight! promotion, General Mills is giving one lucky WWoB reader a Movie Moments prize package featuring Four Free Movie Tickets and a Free Coupon for a General Mills Cereal! (The movie tickets are good at almost any theatre in the country.) All you have to do is leave a comment (or send an e-mail) telling us about the first time your parents took you to the movies or the first time you took your kids to the movies. You don't have to get real creative, just a sentence or two will do. We'll pick a winner at random from all the entries received before 11:59pm Friday, November 13, 20009.

This isn't me sending you something I got out of a cereal box, folks! This is a real prize package provided by the good folks at General Mills. We're your favorite website for stuff about movies and breakfast cereals, now the two worlds are colliding. WWoB is taking a little step up in the Internet universe, how do ya like that!? Maybe now someone will listen to my idea for a Count Chocula movie!

The Juice of Miley

First it was a breakfast cereal and then it was her muffins and now Miley Cyrus takes over another portion of your balanced breakfast with her very own juice! Hannah Montana Juice is 100% juice because Miley wouldn't just lend her name to any ol' product! It has to be only the finest 100% juice for Miley Cyrus to slap her face on the bottle. This beverage comes to us from the folks at Langers, the #9 name in bottled juice!

I don't post these pictures because of some crush on Hannah Montana, I just think it's hilarious how much stuff they'll plaster her face on. Every once in a while a property will come down the pike that gets merchandised to death...I don't think New Kids on the Block, Pokemon, or Britney Spears ever had their own line of juice. Miley Cyrus is a trailblazer, folks!

Classic Commercial Sunday - Drink Up!

Here's a remarkably sexist ad from the early 70's....

My Week In Movies - Rainy Weekend = More Movies

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982) In my high school days I was an avid Python fan. I couldn't get my hands on enough Monty Python material. In later years, I felt I had kind of burned out the fun of the group. I had heard and seen everything a million times that they just weren't that funny to me anymore. I've more or less given them a rest for the last 8 or 9 years. Last week, the Independent Film Channel ran a brand new 6-part documentary about Monty Python that covered the members lives before they met all the way up to present day. Not only was it a fantastic program, but it made me yearn for all my favorite Python bits that I hadn't seen in so long. In addition to the new doc, IFC also aired 4 of Python's 5 feature films. Hollywood Bowl captures a live stage show the Monty Python gang toured with in Canada and the States in the early 90's. A large arena like the Hollywood Bowl doesn't seem like the best venue to get your Python on, but everyone in the audience seems to be having so much fun. This movie gives you a front row seat to 75 minutes of Python songs and sketches and plays as sort of a "greatest hits" of Monty Python. (I TiVo'ed all their other movies too, and hope to watch them in the new few weeks.)


Astro Boy (2009) Based on one of the first anime series, this American update of the tale of a robotic boy is pretty standard kiddie fare. Fairly bland with too many characters, too much fighting and generic story points. This might have been the first time I took the kids to the movie theatre and didn't hear a peep out of them the entire time, but then again I was asleep for a good portion of the second act...so who knows what happened!


Casper (1995) I remember thinking this was a really great movie when it first came out. The first part of the film is filled with some really great cameos but it turns out there really wasn't much to it after that. It's an enjoyable film but 14 years later, and oh so more mature, it just wasn't that great! My kids loved it.

Back to the Beach (1987) Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello made a large number of Beach Party movies in the 1960's. These silly movies were nothing more than flimsy plotlines to string an endless number of musical performances by some of the up-and-coming singers of the day. The "Beach" films are made up mostly of silly dialogue, rock n' roll, and sustained shots of girls in bikinis wiggling their rear ends. Back to the Beach revisits the spirit of those films twenty years later with Frankie and Annette all grown and with kids of their own. This movie is the very definition of wacky and tacky, and of course, I love it. This is one of my personal "oft-quoted" movies.

Land of the Lost (2009) Why would they take a beloved children's television show and turn it into a movie filled to the rims with vulgarity? Sex, drugs, nudity and wall-to-wall profanity, I'm surprised Sid and Marty Krofft (the creators of the original show) had anything to do with this. Not only did they approve it, they produced it! There's some funny moments tucked here and there, but most of the time I was shuddering at the thought of kids watching this. Seriously, if you put a dinosaur on your movie poster - you've gotta expect that kids are going to want to watch it. I don't care what the rating is, kids will want to watch it. Jurassic Park might have also been rated PG-13, but it was just a bit intense. It didn't have boob jokes and foul language in it. As a fan of the original television series, Land of the Lost 2009 is a real disappointment.

Here He Comes to DVD!

I've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Mighty Mouse on DVD. The classic Terrytoons shorts that were produced in the 1950's and 60's were a major staple of my cartoon diet growing up and I've always loved the little guy. There were a few hard to find releases of the original shorts on VHS, but all-in-all just a handful of the library was ever made available. There were also two other series where Mighty Mouse appeared; The New Adventrues of Mighty Mouse & Heckle and Jeckle produced by Filmation ran for two seasons beginning in 1979, and there was Mighty Mouse The New Adventures which was produced by legendary adult animator Ralph Bakshi which popped up near the end of the 1980's. I love all three versions of the show, none of which have been on television in quite a while. I do have a few segments of each in the ol' VHS collection, however!

It's been reported that a nice deluxe DVD set of the original Mighty Mouse cartoons is scheduled to be released with a brand new CGI-movie that Nickelodeon is producing. In the meantime, in between time, it's just been announced that Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures! is going to show up on shelves on January 5, 2010. My least favorite of the three different shows, it's still a great show with a really warped sense of humor and plenty of jokes thrown at adults to make it even more fun. It will be a welcome addition to my DVD library.

When the show originally aired, some people were uneasy that a Saturday morning cartoon for kids was being produced by a studio that formerly turned out X-rated cartoons. Some media watchdog group accused the show of featuring a scene where Mighty Mouse snorted cocaine even though it was clear he was just smelling a flower. (I've seen the clip, he's smelling a flower!) Besides, why would Mighty Mouse need to do cocaine!? He doesn't need any drugs to beat up cats! He's Mighty Mouse!? Duh!