I love these goddamn rabbits more than just about anything I’ve ever seen before, ever.

God bless the Internets sometimes, right? What did we do before the days when someone could post a list of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time complete with links to the cartoons themselves? Answer: we socialized with one another.

(Thanks, Boingboing!)

Mark and Mandy sent me this hysterically disturbing video of the new Elmo toy. It takes awhile to load, but it’s worth it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to see that Freedom Rock ad again.

(Thanks, Neatorama!)

Update: Watching these commercials has reminded me of how much I was obsessed with Max Headroom at a certain point. We children of the 80s (actually 70s, but who’s counting?) sure grew up in strange times. I was really into Max Headroom and Spuds Mackenzie. Let me repeat that: I was into Max Headroom and Spuds Mackenzie (the Budweiser pitch dog). I bought books and t-shirts (or probably more accurately, whined until my parents bought them) featuring these characters who were designed to promote products, and I didn’t think twice about it. And my parents, who I would say overall did an exceptional job of raising me, probably didn’t think twice about it, either. I wore my Spuds Mackenzie t-shirt to school all the time and my teachers didn’t say boo. It was a t-shirt promoting a mascot who promoted beer. That was the 80s, I suppose.

That being said, here’s an amazingly creepy video by the Art of Noise featuring Max Headroom. If I remember correctly, this song came out when the Max Headroom craze was on the wane. Matt Frewer (the actor who played Max Headroom) really phoned this performance in. He must’ve been getting tired of playing a head in a box.

Update Update: This sequel to the 80s commercial collection is much better than the first collection. One gets the feeling that the first list was put together by some dude clicking on random links on YouTube who then got schooled by the readers, because the second list is the one that actually contains the memorable commercials.

If you can make it to the end of this SNL skit, you are a far stronger person than me. I can guarantee with 100% certainty that this would not be the slightest bit funnier if I had ever seen Lost and/or had any idea what they were talking about. I have put this video in the “entertainment” category for lack of a more accurate term.

In 1985, Burger King spent $40 million dollars on a campaign known as “Where’s Herb?” Herb was supposedly the only man in America who had never eaten a Whopper. The campaign was universally lauded as the “most elaborate advertising flop of the decade.” I’ve taken a totally informal survey of my friends and almost no one remembers the Herb campaign. I remember, Burger King. You might not have captured the world’s attention, but you touched the life of one very special little boy, and because of that, your campaign can never be considered a total flop.

First, the commercial that started it all:

Note the total absence of any kind of humor in this commercial. This is in the wake of the “Where’s the Beef” ads, and suddenly commercials had to be quirky to get noticed. So we have all the staples of the “quirky” ad … the dead-pan dialogue, the over-enthusiastic narrator, the hokey music … but there isn’t a single joke anywhere to be found. It’s very disconcerting to watch something that presumes itself humorous without making a single stab at humor.

I’m not sure if this was planned from the beginning, but Herb’s identity was eventually revealed, to little fanfare. The poor sod who played Herb was sent to Burger King restaurants around the country to hang out until someone recognized him, sort of like a real life “Where’s Waldo?” The first person to spot Herb in each restaurant won $5,000. I would love to know how this contest worked in real life. Did they send Herb into restaurants unattended? And was it his job to determine who first spotted him? I could see this getting really ugly–patrons breaking into fistfights over who saw Herb first while the sorry bastard in the Herb costume is forced to referee. In the end, it’s not so much a campaign for Burger King as it is for violence and loitering.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this yet, but Michael Richards, a/k/a Kramer from Seinfeld, totally flipped out on a heckler and went on a racist tirade at a comedy club last Friday. It’s pretty freaking insane. The saddest part is that I can sense him trying to do this for shock value, in that way that funny comics are allowed to be racist because really, they’re poking fun at racists. Unfortunately, he forgot the cardinal rule of shocking humor: it should have an element of humor to it.

This reminds me of a really hilarious episode of This American Life from ‘97 that they recently repeated. It was called Fiasco! and it examined experiences that went beyond the level of mistake or screw-up into a very special realm from whence there was no return. The first story, about a college production of Peter Pan, should be listened to immediately.

I heard some people talking about the Michael Richards incident on the radio yesterday, and some guy said it was a real tragedy, because as a jew, Richards should be able to identify with other minorities. I swear to God, that was this guy’s reasoning. In this guy’s world, the only people who have any prejudices in America are white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual Christian males. Everyone else gets along.

(Thanks, Cass!)

This video is pretty dope. I love that they’re all, “dudes, you know we’re lip synching. Let’s call a spade a spade.”

(Thanks, Boingboing!)

This is the first time I have ever actually seen the infamous Crispin Glover appearance on David Letterman. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what went wrong. First of all, I have never heard anyone else mention this before, but his outfit isn’t just random - it’s the costume from Rubin and Ed, one of the finest movies ever made. It’s clear to me that Glover is just doing shtick … but this appearance allegedly upset Letterman so much that he refused to ever book Glover again. Is he really upset, or is it some conceptual Andy Kaufman-esque piece? You be the judge.

Sarah, my girlfriend, produces motion graphics. When I started dating her, I didn’t know what that meant, either. Basically, “motion graphics” is a fancy way of saying “computer animation,” in the same way that “graphic novel” is a fancy way of saying “comic book.” If you say you work in computer animation, people think you make movies about animals who wear sunglasses. Sarah does not produce movies about animals who wear sunglasses. Motion graphics are much more than just cartoons. If a graphic element is moving, it is a motion graphic, and motion graphics, I have learned to recognize, are everywhere.

Anyhoo, her friend Alex recently started a company called either “network” or “this is network;” I can’t really tell by the website. The idea is that it is a collaborative shop between producers and designers, where they can work together on both corporate and artistic projects. Apparently it is a new model that may very well change the way we work. I don’t really understand it. But any company that hosts a video of people giving one another the ol’ purple nerple is ok by me.