Once again a new year is upon us, and I for one am doing all I can to be optimistic about the new decade. Granted, I do think of myself as a natural optimist anyway, and I hope that those who know me would agree, but the suffering economy and soaring unemployment rate is enough to turn anyone cynical. Still, the spirit of the new year is to wipe the slate clean and start over anew.
As this year begins, so does another semester of school for me. As I continue on my trek to graduate I find myself enrolled in classes dealing with ethics, screenplay writing, intercultural communication, and a series of lectures from professionals in the field of digital media and computer science. At one end of the spectrum, I look at the work-load of these classes and feel overwhelmed by the semester before me; but on the other end I'm excited about these classes, as I think I'll really be able to do some cool things in them.
Everything else seems to be rather quiet around the Nutz household. Our Christmas decorations have come down, and we find our free evenings (which will inevitably come to a screeching halt once this semester goes underway... at least for me) are now filled with our favorite TV shows, and the newly acquired Wii.
We'd circled around the thought of getting a Wii for quite some time, and we thought that this past Christmas, the Wii would be a great present to each other. We started out with a standard assortment of games that we already knew from playing my parents Wii, but we decided to indulge and try the new Super Mario Brothers Wii game, and man is it fun! Extremely challenging, but fun. The funniest thing to me was how quickly this game sold out after Christmas. We bought our copy the day after Christmas at our local Target, and up until New Year's Eve we could walk into any Target, Wal-Mart, or Best Buy, and they had tons of copies. We introduced my Brother and his wife to the game at my parents one evening before New Year's, and when they went to look for it, it was nowhere to be found. Having found it all over the place in our neck of the woods, we checked for them, and were stunned that the supply in our area had been depleted as well.
One of the guys in my class works at a game store, and he informed me that Nintendo sent out a notice to all the distributors that they did not have enough supply to meet the demand of that game (which Nintendo is known for under-producing to create artificial demand anyway,) and that they would not be able to get more to the stores until sometime in late February/early March.
This was, however, a lie, because now you go through Target and Wal-Mart, and they once again have tons of copies. I guess Nintendo either ramped up the production, or they tried to create more artificial demand by creating a scarce supply in hopes that the game would continue to fly off the shelves when they brought the next batch out of the warehouse. With the economy as volatile as it, and considering that these games sell for $50 bucks a pop, I personally am inclined to believe the latter.
Other than that, our lives have pretty much simmered down to normal. Work continues, and we do our best to keep up with our lives. We should be done with our major expenditures for quite some time, though we do have to take our dog Iola into the vet for surgery. She has developed a tumor on her side that, from all accounts, is both common and benign for purebreds. The vets told us to keep an eye on it, and that as long as it didn't grow, and didn't bother the dog, we should be okay. That was 2 years ago, and while it doesn't seem to faze Iola at all, it has grown to be the size of a large rock over the past couple of years, so we decided that it would be good to have it removed altogether.
Speaking of dogs, I saw something in the grocery store a while ago, and I still find it both humorous, and oddly morbid:
The Walt Disney company is by no means a stranger to product licensing. The first piece of merchandise that was adorned with a Disney creation was a Mickey Mouse watch from the 1920's. Donald Duck orange juice has also been on the market for years, and even though it really doesn't taste any different from the pulp-free OJ that you can buy at any grocery store, I personally love getting a carton of it whenever I can find it.
Another thing that is no stranger to the Disney company is dogs. They have made countless stories about dogs over the years, with such memorable ones as Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmations, Oliver and Company, and Bolt. Even many of their live-action offerings included canines (The Ugly Dachsund, The Shaggy D.A., The Incredible Journey, and even the modern day Airbud and it's many sequels and knock-offs.) Heck, that's not even mentioning the 2 dogs that have been with Mickey and the gang the longest: Pluto and Goofy.
So when Kroger foods and Disney decided to market a dog food together, they had a pretty good list of potential mascots. Oddly enough, they decided to go with Old Yeller.
That's right, Old Yeller dog food. The first time we saw it in the store, Mrs. Nutz and I were speechless. Even now we don't walk by it without making some comment between ourselves. Don't get me wrong, Old Yeller was a classic Disney movie, but what do people remember the most about the movie? I'd say the same thing they remember when they watch the movie Bambi. People don't remember the heroics of the dog, the rousing theme song, and the charming aspects of the story as the boy Travis grows to love his dog; they remember when the dog gets rabies and Travis has to put him down with a shotgun.
It seems odd to me that a company would choose to market a movie based on a story that made countless generations of children cry. Death really isn't a positive marketing tool, unless you're selling pest control (though I think Disney legal would steer clear of marketing something ridiculous like Mickey Mouse rat poison, or mouse traps.)
A little Google searching revealed that the dog food was put on the market in 2005, and Kroger even put out a press release for it. Not surprisingly the press release neglects to mention the sad ending, but paints the movie to be all about frontier fun, and the bonding of the boy and his dog. That's not saying that they're lying about the contents of the film, they're just leaving out the part everyone remembers.
Of course, there's enough online, and in the media, to remind everyone of the sad ending to the film. My personal favorite joke comes from the show Friends when Phoebe see the ending of the movie for the first time and asks, "what kind of sick doggy snuff film is this?"
Well, I believe that I've rambled on for long enough. Until next time... whenever that is.
