Podcast: The Ride - UNLOCKED: Joe Camel

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Enjoy this sample of P:TR-The Second Gate.  Available at Patreon.com/PodcastTheRide Joe Camel was Camel Cigarette's cartoon mascot in the 80s and 90s. We take a look at his merchandise, short-lived cast of friends, and his downfall. Listen to Podcast: The Ride Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: http://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus FOLLOW PODCAST: THE RIDE: https://twitter.com/PodcastTheRide https://www.instagram.com/podcasttheride BUY PODCAST: THE RIDE MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/podcast-the-ride PODCAST THE RIDE IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/podcast-the-ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Welcome to Podcast The Ride, The Second Gate, the theme park podcast where a couple of smooth characters kick back and have a conversation that's quite simply smoking. I'm Scott Gairdner, equally smooth as Mike Carlson. Hi. I'm so relaxed today. I'm feeling good. Damn, nice exhale, my brother. Jason Sheridan, hi. Wow, that's real American tobacco. Our finest export.

Yeah, the way they used to do it. And as always, anytime we talk about a topic on an episode, we endorse it full throat endorsement. Yeah, that's right. It's literally, it's, it's covering our throat. It's smothering our throat. The T-Zone. The T-Zone, as they used to say in all the old 50s ads where like four out of five doctors tell you to smoke Luckies.

Yeah, let's get that out of the way we are you know you might like does this episode is it an endorsement of the product and yes 100 fully yes we love cigarettes we love well and well you know not all of them let's let's be you know yeah because it says other brands that cause cancer and then the impotence and some of the bad. But Camels, nothing but... Nothing but goodness. Nothing but good times. Nothing but solid smoothness.

Lots of good times. That's why we're so excited to talk about... But it won't be mainly about the product, I would say. I think largely we will focus on the character that this wonderful brand was forced to retire yeah yeah because the the marketing memos behind behind it that came out it turned out to be like 10 times more ghoulish than i thought oh really i i i think inadvertently they picked up youth smokers with this cool, fun character. On the other hand, they also- You said inadvertently? Inadvertently, they picked up very young ones, I mean.

But then there were memos saying, like, we need to hit the youth market. It's more sustainable because if you pander to the older smoker market, eventually they go away. But the youth market stays around for a while until they die of lung cancer nothing was accidental about this nothing was accidental but they like were winking like in testimonies like oh i don't know they wanted to have their own ronald mcdonald's and it worked and it worked it's so fucked up it's crazy Well yes Yes But I'm gonna I'm gonna throw a premise Into the mix here

And we're talking about Joe Camel The Spokes Camel The smokes Camel Of Camel Cigarettes Which was Heavily around

In America From 88 to 97 Our sweet spot Our childhood sweet spot Yeah It was right there with all the with everybody we love with uh with mcdonald land and chuck and the in the disney gang yeah he was he was right in there i think probably a lot of people listening he he was part of our childhoods yes he was in a way he was he was very around the forbidden character like i knew him and i liked

all the bright colors in the ads but i knew like this is naughty yeah i'm not supposed to know too much about well which this is my okay because you guys we're talking about before we started that we you know you uh we're watching youtube videos we're reading articles about this phenomenon and this character. And a lot of it is very hard stridently. This was the character designed to make children smoke cigarettes. Sure. Sure. And I think there's some truth to that,

but here, just keep that in mind as we talk about what these ads are, because I maybe take a little bit of umbrage with the idea that like, how do we nail kids? A pool playing camel? Yeah. Well, what are kids like? Okay.

Well, for sure, billiards. Definitely billiards. I'll say this though. I liked billiards as a kid. Yeah, I liked billiards too. Billiards looked like a cool adult thing to do. Sure. But you're both like, you're, you're both like,

uh, you know, you're from the nineties by way of the thirties. Cause we watched the hustler when we were little. The Paul Newman movie, the hustler. Jason probably did. Great movie.

One of my dad's favorite movies. Uh, no, I didn't see that until a few years ago. Actually. I've never seen the color of money. The pseudo sequel that Scorsese directed with Tom Cruise. I haven't either, yeah.

I've been meaning to do that, digging into the full Tom Cruise filmography. But like, that's what I, yeah, you hear what I'm saying, that like some of the things that we'll get to that Joe Camel is associated with, I am a little bit, yeah, you know, kids, you know how kids love...

Well, teens, though. Like fedoras and swing music. Yeah. Like, Gen X maybe more was being marketed to than us who were littler. Yes, I think that it's more... That's still 12, 13, 14-year-olds. Yeah, I think it's more... Like, teens, acceptable for sure.

And I think there was... I think, sure, the idea that a cartoon character will be used for this cigarette brand is going to end up netting kids i'm not saying it's a good thing i just think that there is some real stridency in what's been written about it and i'm and again just keep in mind as we go as we look at some of these ads go yeah you know what a kid would like this some of the ads are really funny uh well yeah and look that's why you know i don't think we're here to moralize at least i'm not i think that we it's we need to separate the art from the bad company with the bad intentions that produce the art well yeah i swear i growing up i got it from every direction that like this

is no good this is bad this might have been the the main chunk of media literacy education i got was teachers going like we're gonna do something different today we're gonna talk about subliminal messages and advertising and i i this being like a big example well but the subliminal part of this is that it's explicitly said at the time yes that for sure is the yeah it's impossible to unsee that's weird that's weirder but like the stuff of like yeah cool parties and like motorcycles like he's riding a motorcycle and like. He's got a cool bomber jacket on. He's got a cool bomber jacket on.

Or his jeans are so tight. Joe Camel's jeans are just so tight. He looks like Bruce Springsteen on the cover of Born in the USA. Wow. Look at this man, this Camel man. I want to be a ripped hunk like this guy look i know that i'm a i'm a quiet seven-year-old who reads basketball stats and disney annual reports but i think boy that's who i want to be vroom vroom rev rev he did catch my eye though i was like low-key interested in him yes i knew i knew i was i was told smoking was bad so yes he was a forbidden character

but it did not inspire me to ever smoke a camel cigarette no i don't believe in the brief period where i would smoke one cigarette like every several weeks and make a big show of it i'm stressed jason does that too or he did that huh that's what i've sensed yeah like you had a dark backstage shows that people were smoking i would walk yeah every two years i'd walk outside at a party and jason was just smoking on the porch and i go what are you doing what is this it was that class it was Joe. The teacher made him want to do it. Yeah. It was Marissa's smoking theory.

It's here and there. Sure. Well, that camel. And Jason was like, well, you know, it was the camel with the dick nose. It was the camel with the dick nose. It was cool. If it's good enough. For the camel with the dick nose.

If it's good enough for this dick face. The way. Here, wait. I need to look at a picture and just see where the cigarette Kind of comes out of Because really it's as if If you wanted to recreate this I know where you're going with this

You would have to like put the cigarette Under your right ball Yeah yeah Yeah go take a look Pause this podcast if you don't know what Joe Camel looks like And it does look like he has He's a two balls are his, like, snoot. And his cigarette is hanging out of his right underball. Yeah.

Well, and it's a flaccid penis. That's an interesting, if we're talking about, like, because it's the ultimate badass and who you want to be, rev room room you know how you i want a product that makes my face feel like a not hard dick like a drew look i don't want to get too weird though but it does look it has a good size is what i'm saying even not oh that's true you're right you're right let's be fair there's an implied that when it's brought to full steam there's a virility that's implied there's a not virility did everyone watch the tv fun house like re-watch the tv fun house i remember that from the segment where it's like joe camille it's like yeah pokemon was pretty new at the time and yeah joe camille had a big uh penis and then team rockets guys had like we're clearly breasts

and the vagina and a butt and then they would show you all the products and then as the one as it went on it would start showing montage of real quick shots of products and there were very clearly cigarette packs every third image yeah the pokemon parody and like tackling that collect them all and with some truth to the fact that there are the joe camel products were oh my god unreal this there's so many there's unlimited there's no way that we got them all there's no way that we saw pictures of all of them no no and i didn't dig super hard into the products but some of them yeah like if you take just his face and make it and i know i can't picture is it like a there might be a mug or something anything where it is just primarily the the nose and the face droops it does like if you

if you walked into a room and didn't get up close to it you would just go why does this person have a novelty mug of a penis yeah and the the tone doesn't help the skin tone doesn't help no it's absolutely what they were the artist was going for should we do some his jason you have the history law uh brought up of of joe camel well i have something about the art. Did you come across the art of Jerry LaFaro? Some of the art. It was like drawn in 19, what 74? Drawn by a French designer for like French marketing stuff. And around for a while before it came to America.

I didn't realize that that the American run was only 88 to 97. That's like, that doesn't feel right to me. The way that he looms large, you're like, he had to have been around for more than nine years,

but apparently not. It feels like there should have been like 1960s like camel ads because we feel like we, you know, it feels like he was with us forever. Yeah. I mean,

the camel on the cigarette pack has been around since the beginning and that camel's name is old joe old yes old joe which is just a regular camel yeah essentially um yeah it's kind of insane that the first american use of him i believe was in the the 75th anniversary campaign that's pretty late like with it we're we're that deep into this product which i guess speaks to the like old tiny nature of cigarettes a little bit um and they they are they thrive for a long time with this very like a kind of line drawn camel that could have been on a product in

uh 1802 sure but then you know but now it's the 80s it's a different world we got to get cool we got to get like airbrushed and that's i think what i did again if i'm just purely the the art of it because in the recently i've been seeing some of this stuff and in and if you can see it in the highest quality you can it like it rules honestly just pure like however they painted it whatever the i don't know if we're getting into early digital yet or maybe not maybe i'm reacting to the uh an older school style of i think color and illustration well i i came across um the the guy jerry lafarro who drew some of this stuff also drew like the t-shirts with animals on it and if you were in the 90s you what you're imagining

is what i'm talking about save the rainforest like say the rainforest like really digital art dolphins and stuff sometimes sold at aquariums and zoos sometimes sold as fundraisers i feel like we have them at school jerry lafar i don't look Jerry Lafarro. Jason, if you look up some of those pictures, if there's a picture of a dolphin, does the dolphin's beak look like a giant penis? I mean, it could be argued that this is a little phallic. Yeah, but they naturally are a little phallic. Yeah, yeah. The camel is less so.

So, I mean, this was a more unnerving discovery that I didn't know. That like, oh, the same guy drawing Joe Camel sometimes was also drawing all those animals. So there is like a connection with a thing that I knew and liked. The funniest story a few years ago, he was quoted in, I think, Yahoo News. There's an article, Joe Camel camel illustrator e-sig maker jewels marketing seems more egregious where it's because there is like there were jewel ads a few years ago i i know they're like in trouble now but there is like hipster jewel ads yeah yeah like basically saying hipster yeah smokes uh vapes jewel it's been a rough time for for jewel we've gotten some concern about the sector keeper's well-being yeah

anybody talk to him lately or he might be is he maybe he's not really reaching out just given that he's he's so bummed about it yeah i don't know he hasn't been around i feel like he's so bummed about it. Yeah, I don't know. He hasn't been around. I feel like he's been really depressed. Yeah. He's probably, what I would imagine is he's going everywhere that jewels are. Oh, yeah. He has ghostly powers. He'd rather collect as many as he can and hoard them than hang out with us. It's like Elaine with the sponge episode of Seinfeld.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Just a lot, but no laughs laughs just one very sad ghost no laughs so legit artists uh part of this yeah cool art that definitely as a kid i liked and was fascinated by it but it did give me a feel like a lascivious feeling i feel felt inappropriate looking at it i don't think it had to do just with the cigarettes i think he was exuding something sleet yeah it's a little sleazy this is one of our sleaziest topics i think we've ever covered one of the sleaziest like i i just feel like i just feel like it's all very sleazy like cigarette advertised i but i'm saying if you if we do what

scott was saying and separate the yeah the if it's just the image itself is that what it is is it sleazy is it because like joe is so confident and like he's exuding a camel sexuality that is making us like a hedonism sort of thing well but he's not like in the middle of a giant orgy or anything no but he's in the middle pool hall you don't really see joe camel at work you don't see him with a protestant work ethic you only see joe camel at play and only at play yes well here let's try to let's analyze some photos here let's uh this one's like a classic one to me i think if you look up joe camel hot tub you'll see it um so he i mean all right is this one sleazy to us he's he's in a

jacuzzi he's looking over a beautiful purple 90s dusk uh pinks and purples which i'm a sucker for yeah of course um the with the with the pack next to him in the smoking in the hot tub empty beer empty sleazy kind of bit he's he He's ripped. If you look at those they are fully human. He's jacked. I kept coming across that his hands would only be showed when necessary. It's kind of necessary

the way this image is composed. They are weird. He's got three big dick fingers on the one hand. They're real sausage-y, I was going to say. I mean, there's other moments. There's one image where he's wearing an elaborate coat, and on the cuff is the camel image from the cigarette pack,

like really small. I think it's one of the 75 years and still smoking, which is such a grim that's so funny yeah that's something if you take the cool n apostrophe out of it it's a statement that you could say about a an old relative you're concerned about 75 years and still smoking still smoking and you're like is it is it killing them or is it keeping them alive you know at this point yeah pickled as they say like yeah like you guys and lucky charms and coke starlight if you stopping would be the issue is is their pack a day and their daily seven and seven keeping them keeping

them going you know um here's another one uh this is kind of outside of the style it's a little bit of a 60s throwback a little bit in fact i think they're clearly uh edging him over to connery bond yeah era he's in front of a a surfacing submarine or a sinking submarine did he do something to destroy an enemy submarine but yet remained in a tux, hot lady behind him in a fuchsia one-piece, kind of a Daryl Hannah thing going on? That's one thing about Joe.

He, I think, primarily is into human women. Yeah. And human women are very into him. Well, of course. There is a big party scene. Yes. There's a big party scene with a lot of lady camels in there too. They introduce some ladies. Yeah. When you get into his night

club. Well, then there's his friends that come up. Yes. Well, let's focus on Joe. Let's focus on Joe right now. I do want to say, I'm going to shout out this YouTube video by a user named alissa erin the history of cartoon cigarette advertising because uh cool has uh cool cigarettes for a long time had willie the penguin okay and they say willie was the he looks like a penguin in a tuxedo and his role his introduction kind of lines up with like oh he also inspired the batman penguin in the 30s you know in the late 30s early cigarette

inspired the yeah and i think when you if you see like this kind of tim burton's movie penguins kind of look like willie the cool cigarette right really um and uh his girlfriend i forget her name uh but they they were on like you know ceramic stuff they were on you know ashtrays and all wow oh yeah geez i didn't realize this was around so so early yeah and and she she played a clip in the video they commissioned fleischer studios to make a short fleischer studios who did popeye and by the betty boop they did a short of the penguins in a factory making the cigarettes they make them it's what mike loves with the disney characters yeah clean disneyland so but

probably the most alarming thing was this year i learned was a series of comic strips uh from dural cigarettes where the pack keeps saying taste me taste me but most alarming was learning that i am apparently in one of these cigarettes oh my god oh oh uh i can kind of see it's oh wow yeah wow here what's what's happening here what are you doing and groom um the bride uh appears to be like six or eight inches taller than the groom that's story of my life um uh and uh they are getting married. They're cutting the cake. And the cigarette box just keeps floating through the air saying, taste me, taste me. And then at the end, they're in their car driving away.

How do you feel about it? I mean, I'm more confused or your life. I'm more confused that they're just keep, they have like four nicknames for each other. Like one of your friends, lamb chop, no honey bun. That's Doral. Doral. Who invited Doral?

How can a low tar and nicotine, low tar and nicotine cigarette talk taste? Try one, my pigeon. That unfortunately does seem like something i would say uh yeah yeah oh okay wow wow um but are you smiling in there are you happy to see doral yeah everyone's happy well yeah he's yeah he seems close with doral and then she smokes do you like the taste schnookums i do and. And that's the conclusion.

Driving away, just got married, and she learned about a new cigarette. That's what would have been the scenario if you and Jane had had that weed in New York. Oh, yeah. What do you think, darling? Do you like this street weed sold from a car table? This three-card Monty table do you like this very legitimate weed sold next to the police car that they are paying no mind to um well so a rich history evidently of cartoon yeah joe's part of a part of a proud history um i'm gonna bring into things uh my

main piece of of research which is uh so i was uh i've been uh working with this this very funny guy joe carnegie and he was i know that he has given some office gifts out in the recent past that are Joe Camel oriented. Here's a little notebook that has that Joe in the hot tub image on it. So he is, and he's spoken of, they're actually legitimately liking it from that artistic angle, that airbrushy angle that I dig as well. And so I said, okay okay we're doing a we're doing a podcast to write about joe camel what can you point me to and he said oh you gotta borrow this book i have oh interesting there is a book there is a coffee table book and that is this book is called a camel named joe the illustrated story of an american pop icon wow and this book is pretty phenomenal uh i'm i was

into this thing um when barred it a lot of funny stuff about it um first thing is like leafing through the entire thing where you get to see a ton of the art and a ton of backstory uh and say even information about secret Joe campaigns that didn't come out. Wow. This is really the mother load here. But one thing is every page that I turned, I started realizing, oh, this book reeks of smoke.

There are pages that have not been like, okay, so no one, wherever this book has been, whoever, dad, this, who sold it on eBay, nobody has opened pages 87 to 88 because of the smoke has stuck them together yeah maybe yeah yeah but some of them i mean i hate to be vulgar but was it come i don't think a pre i found no evidence that a previous owner came all over the book well they were sampling the product. What were you going to say, Michael? I'm afraid.

No, I was just going to say, Jason was saying it was like a lascivious ad, so maybe somebody was really into the book. Unless it was pages that I missed or just could not. They were so sealed together, so coated. Oh, God. I'm sorry, everyone. No, the pages opened fine. Stickiness was not the issue okay i would just

turn and then go like ah just get the most steel smell um but uh mike it is not the uh pages of the book the physical book that were ever soaking wet it is the copy the copy in this book is just dripping dripping with desire for joe camel it is crazy it is like so from the pov of people who want to fuck joe camel it's wild can i ask does it seem like the book was written five or ten years later of a look back or does it seem like a book that you would cash in camel cash and receive the coffee table book you are right on both counts in a way i believe this was done a year or two after the campaign had been retired but it was a book that you could purchase you like we can't use it we can't use joe in the ads anymore but i don't think anyone you know uh bill clinton

has not told us that we have to stop that we can't sell a coffee table book and sell it with our camel money c notes is that correct notes yes they were called c notes so what you're saying is this is like a eulogy this is a celebration of life yeah yeah absolutely at the very beginning the the book is very solemnly dedicated to for for joe camel wherever he is and then he started going okay so this this is so crazy the love of this character that this must be from the company and sure enough at the beginning you can look up okay it's from rj reynolds it's from the company and then there is a foreword by somebody who is an upper level executive i think in that enterprise which uh let me let me read okay so he you know because this is this comes right after joe has been banned essentially and you might be wondering is it going to go over that

stuff are we going to go over that stuff are we going to hear their side of that story no no no it's a celebration this book isn't about politics this is quite simply a book about joe a charismatic camel who became nothing less than an american pop phenomenon and then the foreword goes on. Okay, buckle up for this. So they're talking about how crazy the popularity of the character was. He got mail, lots of mail, even got a wedding invitation. Somebody invited just like Doral there. What was the name?

Yeah, Doral, the cigarettes. Somebody tried to have Joe come to their real wedding. And then in a particularly telling example of just how real he became in the american popular imagination a new york city focus group of racially diverse 20-somethings spontaneously got into a heated debate about whether joe was black or white joe struck a chord for racial harmony that day when they finally agreed that he was after all just a very cool camel and consequently belonged to everybody what is this what a moving what is true story what a great real story yeah that really happened and uh so insane i you missed outICEF. You could have had a perfect ambassador who belonged to everybody. You know, as my son gets older and I have to answer some of the more difficult questions about our world,

and if he asks, what is with the racial strife in this country? And I'll say, well, i'm not sure where it began i think it had something to do with all of the races fighting over who could claim ownership over this sexy camel and then all this yeah all his questions will be answered in that moment oh i see i understand i would fight very hard to claim joe for my race as well of course we all would we can't blame anybody for that right penis face camel in a pool no we want the penis face camel we want we are all smooth characters that's what joe taught us yeah i mean you know yeah and and look i i think yeah i think it's beautiful this is a this is a beautiful tale I would just like when I'm reading sometimes about masked spokes characters the people who

create them and the people of the ad companies develop a either love or like incredible like connection to these characters too like the guy who was mcgruff with like was doing the voice until he died and like not in like late his early 90s maybe somebody died he was an older dude and i said i listened to youtube maybe we played it on the first episode was like yeah we got every cat like you're like oh god somebody maybe new voice time yeah but i mean i think he had a lot of like he created this character and it was like, it was everything. So obviously this lustful, these crazy stories in this lustful copy. Well, and that's just the foreword, by the way.

Right. Because then the actual book is written by David DeSmith. Who is David DeSmith? Okay, he wrote copy for Joe Cammy. He was part of the campaign so that's where it just made the tone of what i'm reading make a lot of sense because it just started to feel to me like the mad men don draper monologues like when he comes into the meetings and just perfectly summarizes not just what the product is all about but what this

country is all about and as i started reading it in that voice let me just here's some of the better little snippets wherever joe went a part of each of us went with him when he was sitting six feet offshore in a lounge chair tickling his toes in the warm turquoise water he was just sitting in for us yeah you know it's just really assuming i think even like what is the the average camel customer think of joe cam they're like hey look that camel he looks funny or he looks cool yeah that's the end of it i don't think a lot of even the even people, well, because it's an addiction at a point. People who spent the most money on camel cigarettes are not like, and there he was, both father and brother. Father, son, and the Holy Ghost. All one.

How many kinds of embrace can one character give? The answer is all. You smoke a camel when you're happy. You smoke it when you're sad. They're always there for you. it's like a carousel jesus has returned and he has a dick face camel man there's water and there's camels everything else we can figure it out as we go along if i got those two i'm fine i'm alive even guys with like a camel joe camel beach towel i don't think we're like pouring over this copy

and being like look at this man this is the ultimate man this is who i this is my god now like i don't think who i want to be who i want to be with right never had feelings for a man before but is that even what's happening he's beyond man he's beyond human there has to be beyond camel he doesn't even have a hump our if i've listened if listeners are our age reach out to us if like your dad had our thing for joe camel because i wonder if there were a couple stray people like yeah dad really liked joe camel yeah i mean people definitely have allegiance to a cigarette brand like i smoke parliaments i smoke luckies you know but i wonder if it was like yeah he had a lot of joe merchandise and ads like i wonder if there was there were particular enthusiasts of joe himself

was there a man cave was there a garage that was particularly yeah did you would you go into your dad's garage and it's full of weird joe camel stuff not like a normal garage that was particularly yeah did you would you go into your dad's garage and it's full of weird joe camel stuff not like a normal garage that's full of fries electronics liquidation sale inspirational posters yeah and old epcot signs my my big memory of friends parents who would smoke in their house growing up was just that there were ashtrays everywhere and an abundance of blueberry candles that that was what uh that's what we're gonna cover up the smell of cigarettes with you know yankee candle blueberry candles but then what happens is that you just smell blueberry candles and secondhand smoke like and that caked in smoke smell yeah uh and that is

nasty like the i can even like i could still feel i haven't smoked in a long time but i could feel the appeal of somebody's spoken next to me in the smoke itself like oh that's a little yeah that smells okay but it's but that caked in that just like tar ashen what i was getting out of this book with each page turn it's so nasty it's so gross like i remember going to like yeah sleep over at a friend's house and the parents smoked inside the house and it was just crazy you look a little your little boy clothes smell like smoke yeah yeah absolutely yeah and like yeah you're on like a lot like sleeping on their couch or something and it's like you're rolling in their fucking like secondhand smoke that's like settled down on this couch yeah it is crazy that in our life i always forget that in our lifetime is when like

smoking bans started and bars and stuff oh yeah when we went to college like you smoke i remember being a kid the first thing they'd say at the host stage, like, smoking or not. Yeah. And oftentimes, it didn't matter because everywhere- No, it didn't matter. It didn't matter. You'd get put, like, right next to the smoking section,

which had no, like, hard divider or air filtration system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just getting smoke. My dad smoked a pipe on and off when I was younger, but always smoked it outdoors. So, didn't would smell like how often was he smoking that pipe uh a few times a day when he was smoking it but like he would take a few years he would stop for a few years he actually got off it uh in the last 10 years by smoking e-cigarettes and then jewel so but he's had to change a couple times wow my dad's a cool millennial my dad's a jeweling cool millennial wow how was the pipe can i ask it was

the pipe like what did it look like was it a corn cob no it was just like there's just like a regular kind of like pipe you can get it's very labor intensive it takes a while you have to pack it and then you have to get it going and stuff like i'm trying to think it's yeah corncob pipes with pop i had yeah just like brown like just a regular like curled up pipe no you're never gonna get what you want out of i know what you want to hear is that the pipe was like you know 30 bigger than j Jason's dad's face. It was small enough he could fit in a pocket. Yeah.

And the smoke made sounds as it came out. They didn't make a toot-toot. The smoke was silent, unfortunately. I know what you're after. I am after a toot-toot. I think that's absolutely right. But I'm trying to imagine it because my grandfather smoked cigarettes,

but I don't remember what the brand was, but he did not have a pipe. You're really, you're pissing off the listeners. They got to know what your grandpa smoked. I'll have to ask questions. Write them all a letter after this episode's out. I'll have to ask my mom if she remembers. Yeah, that was like just a few weeks ago. That was the big news story one day. It's like the fda is going

to ban jewel and it was kind of like oh god why is every democrat just michael bloomberg now banning the big so like who cares like you've already taken most of the flavors of like all i can't think of any bigger issues that need to be solved right now but that was like oh this is uh this is stupid news story of the week and then the next day rover suede was appealed like it's like what the fuck what i thought this was a stupid news week not a horrific news week well you will do what we they'll do what we voted them in there to do they're to get rid of those those robot cigarettes yeah uh are the big sodas still banned in New York? I don't know. I haven't heard about the big sodas in a while.

They might have scaled that back. You got to go to a weird table. You got to go to a little table. You got to go to a little table next to the cop car. A former three-card Monty table. A former three-card Monty. You can tell. You see the card stains. It's by the knockoff designer bags and scarves and stuff.

In Japan, you couldn't get a large you couldn't get a big one in japan yeah well big what like a big drink you made sure to get a big drink in japan you can't see if oh you can't you weren't allowed yeah didn't hit that t that's why look mike that's the importance of little that's why we hit those t's right i yeah i think most countries don't serve uh i think our small is upsetting in most countries i think that's right yeah mike's fighting for the right to drink full fat spray um so in the the in the the narrative like the writerly voice of David DeSmith, I think informs some of the character

because like, okay, there's only so much you can glean from the ads, from silent ads, because as far as I can tell, unless you guys hit some mother load, there is not some secret Joe Camel animated series that was made that we dug up. So there's not a lot of places to like hear the voice of the character

no i think nixon banned cigarette ads on television there i did find there is a marlboro ad without joe camel but scott i thought you would would think this was interesting maybe this is from another country it's like a jeep going through jungle. And it features, maybe you know this man, Rushton Rocky Pamplin. No. A former college football player and model who was employed as a bodyguard for the American rock band, The Beach Boys,

in the late 1970s. Wow. Oh, a piece of Beach Boys mythology. I don't know about Rocky Pamplin. I got work to do. He's a hunk. He's a all-american guy smoking a camel jeez i can't believe they didn't get that guy up on stage like stamos that's the whole thing with stamos is like we maybe we're losing our hunkiness we need a we

need a we need a ringer hunk uh i'm gonna to learn all about Rocky Pamplin now. Thank you for that. No, so there's not a lot where we get a sense of the character, how he speaks or whatever. But this is where the book comes in handy. And with some of it probably written by this guy himself. There were odd bits and pieces where we get a sense of what's going on in Joe's brain. Such as on matchbook covers i think they put out one issue of a magazine called smooth magazine and i think all of these things wouldn't like i'm seeing it on matchbooks but then i think this was in this was

a feature in uh smooth magazine as well something called joe's smooth philosophy so if we're trying to tackle the character this might help us get into his head right right here is joe's smooth philosophy on movie rentals the reason that it's so popular these days is that you can do things at home that you can't do in the theater like smoke camels so we know this about him he likes movie rentals i bet he's uh he's a guy i'd tell you to be kind rewind and smoke smooth for a second i thought he was talking about a guy who'd tell you to be kind, rewind, and smoke smooth. For a second, I thought he was talking about, and again, I hate to be vulgar, but jerking off at home.

Not in the theater. I think that's the implication. You think it's jerking off not having sex with? You think that specifically, you know, because what a smooth character would do is pull out his watch. Plunging yourself alone in a theater joe camel went to the went to the local video store went to uh blockbuster went to west coast

video got a copy of hudson hawk went home pulled out the gold bond and just was like well it's joe's evening this is just for me pulled out the gold i want to go on a camel riff but i'd love to talk about gold man's best friend if you know what i mean if you're trying if you're looking at uh non-nude scenes with who's in hudson andy mcdowell or hey teach his own frank stallone uh sometimes i just a big lot of admire old frank i've got a big tub of gold bond i've got a double date tonight i'm watching ghosts i'm joined by patrick swayze and Whoopi Goldberg. Who's the love interest in Ghost? Fuck. Demi Moore. Yeah.

Demi Moore and, of course, my friend Nivea. The finest moisturizer a man can buy. A big problem is they make these porno theaters for you to go watch, but they don't let you jerk off in them. There's always a cop there for an undercover sting. That's why I like to rent the movie and go home and get a big tub of gold bond powder have i gone through a tub in a night try to gold bond powder i don't know what like you have a full range of products i mean when i google gold bond i find powder yeah it's powder yeah but they

also sell like moisturize like lotion and moisturizer gold bond okay so when you were talking about you're talking about i was talking about using gold bond medicated powder look you made an old-timey reference and i assumed you were talking about masturbating with powder. Okay. Tear it up. Hey, look, Joe Camel. Hey, what can I say? I know billiards, and what do you do when you... Hey, this looks like I was just doing a bunch of cocaine, but I assure you I was not. I was masturbating.

That's what... That's why I made it sound... No, and we're just masturbating with a bunch of powder. You chuck up your pool cue, and you chuck up your camel cue. That's why men were so irritable in the past. Why they smoked and drank so much. They were so irritated. And then one of them happened to try their wife's night cream.

And we're like, this is miles better. Like their face cream? Yeah. Better than powder, you know? Like, what is this weird What's this pie filling That Mother puts on her face Ooh

Are there other uses Look at all this Look at this child's play sand I wonder what else You could do with this Oh weird It's just like It's like setting up

For an Olympic Setting up for the pole vault, different kind of pole vault, if you know what I mean. Just toss a bunch of powder in the air, clap it against your hands, and you're good to go. But I'm no sprinting involved. I'm taking my time. I do think we are missing an important piece

of Joe Camel's vibe, and that is he kind of fits into the uh he's kind of a blank slate he can kind of do any like relaxing vacation cool guy stuff he falls into like the big dog here he is like fishing he's in a full fishing attire that's true and he has a little of the margaritaville thing too he'll be in the keys and the capes and what have you. I was going to say he fits into the mold of 90s T-shirts of Big Dog and Big Johnson, where they can kind of do anything. I think he rode a little of that wave. A little bit of it.

A little bit. Some of the vibe. Nothing Joe does in any of the images, I think, would be out of character for him. It's not like he's I mean I guess he's James Bond but he's also Jimmy Buffett yeah which I think honestly kind of lends it's like Tully Mars is sort of that way Jimmy Buffett's character

a lot of times there's like a Miami Vice Don Johnson kind of like he's got a suit with the sleeves rolled up at like a nightclub sure sort of thing I'm trying to think if there's anything that would be like too much. Like, oh, this guy can do. He's too much of a jack of all trades.

Well. Was there like him in space or anything? Is there him with like a shotgun? Like shooting skeet? Taking care of the city. Particking matters into my own hands. Is Joe Camel a one man militia? Maybe.

Joe Camel is the substitute joe camel in death proof five let me um let me read a little bit of uh let me go back into draper mode here's here's something asserted by this author um joe was nothing if not optimistic he didn't sit down at the craps table or the blackjack table or the high-stakes poker table expecting to lose his shirt. Joe was a winner. Whether he was shooting pool and clearing the table in one turn, playing golf and scoring in the mid-20s for 18 holes. I'll stop it there. Things just went his way.

And that was one of the reasons he was so well-liked. So here are some new facts about choke camel uh first one uh typically we see him shooting pool in a lot of the ads what we don't realize maybe is that he sets up all of the balls one shot and most of them go in he's probably a shot guy he's a trick shot guy yeah yeah um so he's yeah he's perfection and that's it now you you use the word trick so it is possible to like oh i just know the mechanics of the pool table i can figure that out but it's really logic defying gravity defy every everything laws of space and time defying that he can play

golf and score in the mid-20s just to remind everyone of golf, like the par in golf typically 72. You gotta have like a lot of holes in one. It is, yeah. We're talking primarily holes in one. We're talking that like a two, that a double eagle would make Joe go, ah, damn, I'll get him next time. It's kind of in my head that, you know,

I think Tiger at one point got a 59 yeah shit a 59 but that's camel scoffs at tiger yeah there's one king of this jungle that's camel this is like uh kim jong-un propaganda this is like other other countries dictator propaganda where you're like he's's never scored over a 30 in golf. And everyone's like, wow, he's amazing. It's so kind of him to be our leader rather than to use his God-given gift as the greatest golfer who's ever walked the earth. That's similar with Jet. Like it's, boy, he could could be he'd be cleaning up he'd be the

great like by leaps and by like times three the greatest golfer ever to pick up a club yeah for sure but that's just you know that's one of the many facets of joe i'd rather spend my time getting the word out about a fantastic product yeah joe is essentially like the same gimmick is used uh by alcohol company like joe is essentially the most interesting man in the world gimmick yeah sure yes but he's a cartoon camel and he's selling cigarettes that's true he's a precursor to that everything that like cigarette companies they had to crack down on in advertising alcohol companies never stop doing they still do who is the most prominent character?

Yeah, is it the most interesting man in the world? That's like the most popular alcohol character? Well, obviously it's Clooney and Gerber on the bikes now. But at one point in a less enlightened time. The Bugweiser Frogs. Yeah. Spuds McKenzie. Of course, yes.

Spuds goes right with Joe. You know they partied. Yeah. Yeah. Spuds doesn't have Joe. Spuds and Joe. You know they partied. Yeah. Yeah. Spuds doesn't have the, he isn't as lascivious. He's like sleazy a little bit, but he doesn't make me feel all the feelings I feel. What is that kind of dog called? Oh, let me look.

I forget what. Badass. Spuds Mackenzie is a, oh yeah oh yeah oh a bull terrier it's a bull terrier yeah i mean he was uh there are cartoon well you know what look at this look at this ad with spuds is that there's sort of a kim basinger-esque woman oh top dog i went to the image and not to the top gun logo yeah so this is a very fairly like like she's hitting on this okay this is a real life woman uh with with her arm around a dog in a bomber jacket and there's a beer two beers the dog is drinking a beer and she's

drinking a beer spuds made all of the other dogs go into actual flight training they they vomited at 12 g's of course they did but you know what great performances can't argue with that um but you know what this is obviously just this is still a little cuter and more innocent than the joe camel stuff even though that's just a pure that is a an actual woman yeah with her arm but he's just a dog it's a real dog yeah so he's not making like a goo goo eyes at her or anything you're more creeped out by the like the ability of the art style to kind of merge man and camel yeah into one sexualized being yes there's a here's a dog in hawaii here's spuds in hawaiian shirt like pouring a tap it's like this is weird i'm not just i'm not denying that i'm

just saying this is not quite as uh doesn't feel as evil well okay where things start to get really creepy for me is you know all right so i'm with him for the first little bit and here is this one one cool camel character but as time goes on we start expanding joe's world yeah and we start going places with him where there are other man camels and here's one that i'll show you guys this is a nightclub scenario where a bunch of uh just just a smoking bar if they were drinking anything i don't know because the glasses are empty but mainly they got together to smoke and smoke so this implies a world where it is primarily upright camels there is a woman working there they do allow a human woman to serve them uh but we got little scenarios here we got two like arm wrestling ones

we got one with extra extra limp face balls who's kind of like a 40s gangster in a white suit whispering a secret to one who looks like he's got those like severe glasses like slugworth in willy wonka uh they're like they're from all different eras this is like modern construction worker it's a real village people scene here right and then one detail at the top this bar is in demand everybody everybody wants to be but hey one rule only camels allowed and there is a detail at the top that a cowboy possibly presumably the marlboro man yes is in it has tried to get into the bar wearing a camel mask and he is being booted by a camel bouncer camel bouncer dressed like one of the blues brothers yes yes Hold on to that thought. Oh, boy.

More to come. The Marlboro Man, of course, the Marlboro Man used by Marlboro for decades. Much longer run than Joe Camel. Yeah, and he's a fucking loser. And all that time, he did nothing noteworthy. He just dreams of the day that he can poke around a kid. He's like, if they'll just let me into their world their wonderful world for 20 minutes i know i'm gonna get caught but if i could just experience

what it's like to not be this this loser cowboy that i am take your ass back to flavor country bud it's just a name we know it's a lie all the flavors here in club camel club camel so this is where we start getting into that there are other characters right but mainly it's just all right here's a bunch of like generic extras we don't we there's we don't know details about them um they're you know they're not personified in any particular way and as the book put it things were actually getting a little even for joe even even camels can cry a big pull quote in the book joe was in danger of becoming the world's loneliest camel the hard pack changed all that do we come do we come across the hard pack uh yeah yeah i believe so i always forget that's

their name that's his friends that's that's his friends and they were that's how they existed for a little while but after not too long they became more they did what all the best friends ultimately do which is start a band yeah so joe camel was in a band the hard pack um and here's all right then i don't have these guys you couldn't give me flash cards but listeners you could try to you can run your own drills at home um here's what i like about okay the hard pack four unique individuals each with his own style his own, and his own preferred kind of camel cigarettes. By the way, hard pack refers to this weird, that's like a functional term. A lot of the new campaigns were always about, okay, how do we push this thing? And that's like a type of box.

I don't quite understand. It's not a soft, it's like a soft pack you can kind of smush. Okay. Hard pack is, I think, most modern cigarettes. It's a fixer. Yeah, it's like a cardboard a thin cardboard box okay wait i can't even picture what a non would just come in a bag what's a not hard pack seen it like in old movies where a character like gives someone a cigarette but they're like squeezing like a really soft like it looks like it comes like pre-crunched it's just like a flimsy paper plastic kind of

okay okay i don't know if i've ever seen one in the wild but like in move in like old movies characters will like hand someone a cigarette from a soft pack okay as opposed to the hard packed in where you gotta like pound them against your hand which might be the beat of a song by the hard pack why there's buster on guitar and hard pack lights eddie on drums and hard pack 99s floyd on sax and hard pack ultralights and max on harmonica and hard pack filters maybe not a great idea to have two uh instruments in your band that require uh dexterous lung abilities like ultimately the the shelf life of the hard packs music is going to be limited uh perhaps a piano you might consider uh i'm not sure what joe himself played but he but he was in there i mean i'm i'm assuming he

was harmonica um well but maxwell i mean they probably look they probably did double duty we know he could Play everything He's like Prince He's a virtuoso Of every instrument But he has to have Other people

Because he can't Play all at once At least not yet They'll figure out a way An image of All of them On a series of packs Oh they all got

A custom pack So there's There's Busta And there's Floyd This was a giveaway This was in a ranker article had some a little information about them but they also in the list of friends they include a josephine i didn't come across a picture of just josephine there was a picture

okay they also had their own lighters did you see those of hard pack yeah they had their own like each character was on a lighter Oh cool But then I saw Josephine listed as well And then I also saw them In the background And I should

I'm not being able To find the photo There was a Club Camel Photo with them In the background But they look different Than their like Blues Brothers look

That they were in In most of the ads That's largely How you find them It's sunglasses And it's cool hats And again This Think about Kid I mean the way That they're marketing To kids of the ads that's largely how you find them it's sunglasses and it's cool hats and again this it think about kid i mean the way that they're marketing to kids and how much kids love the

blues brothers and smoky clubs and harmonicas where they are weaponizing our kids interests um but there's another mode and you'll like this mode mike everyone will like it it's the uh tropical hard pack they went they got into that that buffett that coral reefer territory you know what actually joe probably plays piano because there's that he is here yeah that actually now that i'm thinking about it he's got a very like uh gold bloom at the piano look in some of these ads so i guess maybe it was canon that he played the piano before before the hard pack came along yeah yeah i think so oh goldblum is a perfect because they you know it's not just about the music he's telling stories too it's the charm it's it's grabbing the hands

and what can i tell about the hands and ah jeff goldblum as joe camel is a good idea for a movie oh man like a mocap yeah you can really tell it's zemeckis the zemeckis joe camel movie starring jeff goldblum well well i have i have a band i have a band you should come see the band you must you oh you must you simply must see the band the hard. The hard pack. The hard pack. Josephine. The longest two-handed handshake you've ever seen. Have you met him ever? Huh?

No. Have you? Yeah, Funny or Die. Oh, you had to kick him out of Funny or Die. You had to pull a fire alarm to keep him out of Funny or Die. He is exactly. We saw him twice when Rockwell was still around. Rock uh when rockwell yeah oh you went to the show we were in we were in line and he just walked down the line talked to everybody and touched everybody everybody did not spend a ton of time on you and me

talk to lindsey and the women around us a lot longer certainly was a little more interested in women that's for sure you guys are very interesting people pay to hear what you talk about do you have any stories any cronenberg stories from the set of the fly mr goldberg later perhaps later ah yes oh what are those lines what are the lines i mean he was doing here's what i remember from that he was like he there were two ladies next to us maybe like a mother and daughter and he's and he i'm trying to remember how he got to this, but I will get there just by making it up. He's like, ah, yes, hello. What is your name? Ah, yes.

Ah, Elson. Oh, and what's this? And what's the family lineage? Oh, yes. Oh, your father. What is your father's name? Ah, Herman. Herman.

It's Herman. Herman's Herman. It's Mrs. Brown. You've got a lovely daughter. And I know he for sure got there by the end of it and i was like playing a game it's a game show yes yeah i i took i'm doing a live six degrees of kevin bacon yes i took my friend to see him too when he was in town and we went up to him afterward right after uh grand budapest hotel came out and he was my friend might have when we were talking to him he's like

oh you're the movie was great that's right he's in budapest right yeah and he's like oh yes isn't it one it's a wonderful film isn't it isn't it great oh isn't it it's just so great great to be in that film or whatever but there were no women around so he did yes yes great west the great west so wesley mr belvedere uh streets in China Never met her before But he's Vodka He is He's that way all the time Is there still

Is my video Still I pulled a video An early post On YouTube for me Oh it's Oh here it is Okay

This is a seven second clip That I put on YouTube Forever ago Here's just It's a little flavor of This is Jeff Goldblum doing some scat jazz piano on the Howie Mandel

show. I think we remember the Howie's been coming up on this show lately. Thank God. We're only heading into good territory. Alright, Jeff Goldblum scatting. I like it. I like it I like it Have I brought up the Aerosmith Goldblum clip?

I have, right? You have brought it up, I believe Yes, yes On the show Yeah, I think like two weeks ago Jurassic Blues What is it? I forget if it's like really that

Oh, we got an ad here Jurassic Blues What is it? I forget if it's like really that. Oh, we got an ad here. Jurassic Blues. There's a 42 second clip on the YouTube channel Jurassic Finds. I mean, we'll play a clip of this. Jeff is just jamming on the piano next to Steven Tyler. They're playing Big Ten Inch. I don't know why it's called.

I think there's a better clip. I'll edit that in. He's just jamming with him? He's up. He's up. He's wearing his, like, Lost World era outfit with the leather jacket and the white shirt. Cool. And Steven is shirtless. And they're just. He's at the He's up. He's wearing his like lost world era outfit with the leather jacket and the white shirt. Cool. And Steven is shirtless.

And they're just, he's at the front of the, I don't know how this came about, but he's at the front of the stage with an electric piano and they're jamming out. And, uh, and that's just what, that's what American badassery looks like. Decapsulated. There it is. Tyler Goldblum together. That's man American badassery looks like. Decapsulated. There it is. Tyler Goldblum together. That's man and man. Wait a minute. Why are we playing Jeff Goldblum?

Guys, guys. The Hard Pack was not just a band in pictures. The Hard Pack put their money where their penis mouths are, and they made an album. The album Meet the Hard Pack. Do you want to hear a little clip of Meet the Hard Pack? I do want to hear a little clip. Go ahead.

All of them available exclusively via C-Notes, Camel Cash. By the way, you can buy on eBay like 300 C-notes for five bucks right now. So I don't think they have any legal. The conversion rate is getting better. Yeah, there's no conversion rate. It's like Confederate money. Like you can't really do anything with it. No, it's actually crazy.

No, like all the headlines are about crypto crash and everything. But what you don't realize is the next thing is going to be Camel Cash. Camel Cash from the 90s. That's the new. I knew crypto was going to go away. But C- the 90s that's the new that's like we i knew i knew crypto was going to go away it's just it's but c that's the new c just add the customer service desk at a cole's begging like please convert my c notes to cole's cash please help me um so here's a little Eat the hard pack. FD Light or Blues, I have no butane.

Oh, wait. Uh-oh. Well, it hit an ad, and that might be for the best. Believe me when I say that doesn't go anywhere. This is just in case. Like, I was very excited to discover there was this album. However, in case you were thinking there was a spiritual heir to the McGruff album,

that's the most interesting song by far. There's a couple of tracks that somebody's pulled on SoundCloud, which is a flagrant violation of the seed, the Camel Cash system. The only way that you were able to access this incredible music joe camel and metallica teamed up in the early 2000s to try to get rid of streaming got a shared interest here man uh broken lighter blues uh uh i'm gonna gonna get myself

some striking matches before this lighter drives me insane. One of the interesting things, though, is that that might be Joe's voice. That might be the only time. That was my question. Yeah, it doesn't say. Although, do we know, were there like liner notes on the actual album, maybe, that would say specifically who sung what? I don't believe so.

I did check Discogs.com. I think nobody has archived this i think you're in a different world when it's when you're mainly exchanging camel bucks for camel albums right so i would have loved to have known although this uh still from this book has let me know that max's last name the harmonica player his name is max match books that's good i'm not sure if they all got last names yeah it's possible it's possible they did um did we all come across the kind of exhausting ad busters riff does everyone remember ad busters they were like they were magazine is a magazine and they were kind of you know photoshop ads you know because advertising was just, like, it seems charming in the 90s,

like what they considered, like, this is so insidious. Advertising is so insidious. They kind of went with the low-hanging fruit with Joe Kimo for this. It's pretty lazy. Meanwhile, in 2022, this just came out a few hours ago, a Vice article that says leaked videos show disney is the biggest ad tech giant you've never heard of with a bunch of internal disney videos featuring baymax and bunsen honeydew telling you about what a great product their ad buying network is oh boy yeah internal videos starring bait and

blunting edna mode edna what edna mo yeah no mode yeah mode okay yeah here she is talking about planning activation reach and frequency management i'm still gonna say that cigarette ads are worse they're pretty bad but these are like weirdly more invasive in your daily life like the the way ads just play on the internet or before videos and stuff i guess we found the answer of what disney will do with the muppets yeah eternal corporate Internal corporate Yeah By Hey he ran for President Sure He With the camel

Party The party that knows How to party Hey I'd vote for him At this point Let's Let's take his wing Let's get a smoker

In the white house Although I guess Obama was a smoker Secretly so It wasn't long ago And that was a thing like oh we'll be will he be able to win he smokes a cigarette once in the blue moon right now everything has really changed in a few years yeah really fast yeah look look the but the you know we know this other guy. It's part of his brand that he casually commits five crimes a day without realizing it. Obama knows better than to smoke and to wear a kind of suit we don't like for some reason.

That's right, yeah. Your C-notes will go to good use as we take our message to the people. It's going to be a tough race, but I'm sure with a little luck, the best party will win. Joe. the people it's gonna be a tough race but i'm sure with a little luck the best party will win joe and then his signature which also appears in the book has it that's the j is smoking it's like it's like a it's like a ball jowl within the j i mean it's just you can't write it's so funny like so much it's just so funny so i'm saying i'm the more i'm reading it like hey i love i love everything i can tell why this guy's so in love with his own work um uh and then we get to a chapter first okay let me go back to something i read earlier joe was in danger of becoming the world's loneliest camel

the heart pack changed all that the lone loneliness uh as with any if you're a good man your loneliness is cured by getting a blues band together not by having a life partner that's that wasn't the concern no no that's not gonna help loneliness who cares i got my gold bond i'm sick yeah you got your blues brand you play your songs about like how prilosec helps your heart burn but he you know there was maybe desire for a little bit more in his life and that's why we get then we get to this chapter an idea whose time hadn't come big capital letters okay and this is the chapter that addresses why is there not a female joe camel okay so josephine was brought up i did not come across josephine i don't think josephine was even in the book josephine thrown under the bus not part of history what i learned about in the book was a character by the name of tj

here's tj um that's if you want if anybody has a descriptor you want to throw in i mean it's like here well here's what very airbrushy drawing and if i covered up the head you'd go oh hello 90s cocktail i kind of like sharon stone dress uh with a pool cue uh well and then you keep then i remove my hand to reveal the big-eyed camel face this is what do we think of tj tj is i'm trying to think she looks almost like a planet of the apes ape oh yeah like helena bonham carter yeah yeah she's got her arms are very long yeah normally long which i guess is because of the camel uh half being half camel she's got kind of yeah yeah or just like statuesque like a kate

upton or something just like a tall woman certainly but like she almost looks like she has like navi length arms she looks maybe like a navi in the size oh and by the way if you couldn't tell from the ads because i'm only with other camels i'm 14 feet tall we all are uh she's she's she um doing the thing with the pool cue at the top oh Oh, she's, she's chalking. You know, Joe likes that. Yeah. Yeah. And she's giving like sort of a little bit of a flirty look at the camera.

Mm. Big hoop earrings. TJ, does TJ stand for something? I don't know. That I couldn't figure out. Yeah. I, I, I don't know. Um.

The joy of smoking. Um, TJ, the chapter about TJ is just like, Hey like hey look we tried and it didn't work out they tried one ad with tj there was you know we know joe likes motorcycles right so they had her riding behind him arms around him and a lot of the the copy a lot of what they were saying is they there was a bunch of like pseudo feminists but not really jargon about like and she's no fool and she doesn't take no crap from anybody so when she was behind him on the motorcycle that's that doesn't work that's not the character that's not the 90s woman that we're painting with tj so they switched it and they put

her in front of the motorcycle with joe behind and everybody at camel was like no that's worse that's weirder kill the campaign it's not happening so this one image never mind no women this is a stupid idea to begin with can i so then the next week joe is wearing a shirt that says if you can read this, TJ fell off. TJ in this photo looks like a different vibe, though. She's going to... Kind of messy hair. Yeah, yeah.

Kind of like Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease when they drive off to heaven. Oh, yeah. Stud. Yeah, so... Yeah, they never figured this out. No.

Why weren't they just riding bikes next to each other then? Yeah, I guess that would be the equal. Wait, yeah. I don't know. Seems like an easy fix. Well, and as we know, Pete's two greats riding motorcycles next to each other is the most compelling advertising campaign there could ever be for an adult substance. That's right.

So, yeah, they really screwed up i feel like they were i feel like they sabotaged tj poor tj yeah yeah she got an unfair i think i think maybe there'd be some i think now if they came back especially to like a future whatever future great administration we're gonna have and said you know hey we know we made that rule way back when but like come on we didn't what about tj tj never got her chance you want to stay in the graces of female voters that's right tj and then we roll back the cartoons can't be in cigarette ads thing well and then when tj comes in then uh finally joe camel has a bunch of kids. That's what we're missing. The Joe Camel kids. Camel babies.

What do those look like? The Shrek babies? The Farkle of Camel World. The Supreme Court will rule that you are allowed to market children's Camel-based characters to kids to make them smoke, to allow them to be interested in smoking. It is unusual looking at all this now like yeah this is all stuff we liked lots of characters yeah that's what i think that's why it's a worthy topic to bring up cheese tickets you know that's a big argument yeah for the marketing because when

you look through the merch it is great the amount of merch and the way you get the merch is fun that it's with yeah do we even really we were talking about their specific money but we didn't It is crazy. The amount of merch and the way you get the merch is fun. That it's with, yeah. Do we even really, we were talking about their specific money, but we didn't discuss that. It's Disney dollars. It for sure is their version of Disney dollars. And it's bright, vibrant, colorful money. Much cooler than our American, our regular stupid green money uh and it's joe as george washington and um max his harmonica

player friend as lincoln yes in the five on the five yes yeah yeah yeah and then there's a 50 that just stops looking like money now it's that on the 50c note it's jo's Joe as George Washington, but back in a leather jacket and just tossing money in the air. These are good. I mean, I would love to have a pack of C-Notes. Well, a lot of this stuff is not so expensive. Yeah. Because I was on eBay, and I think you can get, here, you can get a vintage lot of 310 Camel Cash C-Note, C-Note, Joeel Cigarette 1990s, $5, $5 shipping. And that's a buy it now price.

Wow. So you could make it rain in C-Notes whenever you want for like 10 bucks. Yeah, you can get like a $10 Zippo lighter with Joe on it for $10 or $11. Yeah, Camel Cash. You could use his own lighter to burn up a bunch of camel cash and then just buy more yes camel cash is cheap right now the value can only go up as far as i'm concerned it's the next wave yeah you're right everybody that's what you pay for the second gate for get in on the next financial big thing camel yes where this um tj thing went is that they said all right never all right it's not gonna be a

his consistent girlfriend or nothing because we can't tie him down yeah yeah so that's not he's rebellious spirit flag flying free ball face flapping in the breeze so then it became all right well he's got his nightclub joe Place, and that will just be full of women. Women, female, creepy female camels are now just all over the Joe-iverse. And this, I mean, there's too many details, and this is a veritable Where's Waldo, where here's a camel with a broken leg, and another camel is signing the cast. There's a bunch of like flat top ones and some are dancing to a band and one uh one guy is handing a rose up to a female camel on the second level um i just seeing them seeing them be like anatomically correct is really... I think the women are somehow creepier than the...

That's probably right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So now there are just women in his world. Great. Things just keep getting better. And now I'm going to move to one... It's sort of the final big topic on my end,

which is that Joe, all right, we know he likes pool and billiards. We know he likes nightclubs. So what place would he love more than Las Vegas? Of course. Sure. Hand in glove. Let me go back into the copy. If there's one place Joe Campbell belonged,

if there's one city that he should have had all the keys to it's without a doubt las vegas new york may be the city that doesn't sleep but vegas is the town that doesn't even nap which i say talk to jason sharon a lot of naps in vegas it's the only way you can keep going especially in that summer 100 degree heat it'll take it out of you you gotta stay hydrated got to have some naps. That's the only way you can keep going. Huh? Take cocaine or something.

Oh, yeah. I could take cocaine. I could do that. Joe wouldn't. He would smoke. Or just crank camels. Yeah. Then you're good to go.

Mm-hmm. So, anyways, you know, fully associated with this. Here's a cool image of he's at the poker table, and he is flicking an ace at you. A custom ace with a camel on it, flying right at you. You know that game in Vegas where you're flicking cards around? Yeah, the Ricky, what's his name? The guy in the Mammoth movies who can throw cards.

The magician. Oh, Ricky Jay. Ricky Jay, yeah. Ricky. Yeah, I'm playing a Ricky Jay's table. And you turn cards into weapons like Ricky Jay can. Just Ricky Jay in it. You know me.

We're thick as thieves, Ricky and me. All right, the dealer's bleeding. Sorry. thick as thieves ricky me all right the dealer's bleeding sorry lesser thrower it would just bounce off his neck as opposed to mine which sliced it wait yeah how many c notes can i give you to make this right so um so so let me get to this okay we we've talked about how joe and the joe-a-verse has so much that we like it's the it's custom money and a big universe of friends that expands and expands but there was no cartoon there's an album that's good that's good there's one thing that we are missing and especially with the premise of our podcast that joe did not have a physical place that you could go there was no joe camel

themed experience or so you would think i take you now to november 22nd to 24th 1997 to a little event called camel's big vegas groove blender what what you were looking at okay what uh joe camel is on a big video wall and on one uh tv is caesar's palace must be the location hell of a place to party and then another thing says ready to party with my recipe and joe is just stuck on the monitors 2d he's just there and he's got nowhere to go no wrong false he is reaching out of the video wall and he's pouring a bucket of psychedelic fluid all over you this must be concentrated liquid groove i love to have a little nip of absinthe with my camel lights that's what you could have gotten at hollow at the moon though in a big bucket yeah that's true yeah yeah yeah uh-huh yeah no no blue curacao but every other

color of curacao um this is trippy this is going to be a non-stop over the top weekend in the party capital of the universe and everything's on the house so what this was was a willie wonka style golden ticket situation where keep buying those camels keep buying those hard packs because you might just get an invite to the groove blender and 500 lucky smokers did along with their guests and this is a private party weekend that was only for camel smokers uh let me let me get to my info on this uh okay so here we go this is i I'll be honest. I'm just going to read a lot of this book about this event. A futuristic neon-powered look into the world of Joe and the culture of Camel. If you weren't one of the lucky 500 smokers and their guests who won a trip to the blender,

it went something like this. You entered through a circular-shaped entrance swirling with lights and color. A video column projected your image between several huge video screens before swirling it around into a quickly dissipating vortex. Watch out, Hunter S. Thompson. This is if you and Benicio are tripped out by just the carpet, you ain't taking a trip into the groove blender. Buy the ticket ticket take the ride buy the c-dode the floor below spun with neon blades the fuck that can't be true and also if you're i don't think you would even have to be tripping to be scared of blades on the ground

that doesn't just mean a design shut up There were no neon blades. Then, suddenly, you were inside. I mean, probably because there wasn't that much space to work with. Yeah, then imagine a door, and you're in it. The main room, where you encountered two giant lava lamps. Holy shit. Whoa. Whoa. Dance cages, and a lot more.

You saw a swami booth, a pyramid-shaped structure with four live swamis, weird lighting. We're giving up on the copywriting now. Weird lighting and sky beams. You said, what? You stopped to check out the interactive swami and came away enlightened. Huh? This doesn't sound like the Joe Camel voice. I'm confused here because there's something yeah

there's something classic all-american swing a ding ding about this guy he's not about you know this he's not an electric daisy carnival guy yeah that's not even i don't think who they're marketing to because these cigarettes specifically are like this is salt of the earth denim this is a jay leno type of kind of guy american car guy yes traditionally masculine yeah a bunch of jay leno viewing yeah i love the monologue right jay i assume jay had ads for camels yeah in the early days of this night show. Joe Camel says, I try to turn in early, but sometimes I watch Leno's monologue and then drift off. Joe Camel will. I know he left before the end of the day. I wish Joe was on in the early days, too.

I guess fully animated. Yeah. Where they have to keep the camera still. Yes. It says here you're a smooth character. Isn't that true? From there, you went on to the virtual reality room and played some head games you even went for the ride of your life on a smoke and joe's racing simulator what

the fuck are we are we getting into that there was a joe camel ride that was only available for three days in las vegas this is huge news sounds like it and yet no information fully about it what i did find was a big crazy like press junket style video about the groove blender which before i i continue the description of the Groove Blender. The laziest name, too. Groove Blender? Groove Blender. That's okay. That name's okay. I don't know. It doesn't fit the Joe Campbell aesthetic.

I do that. Maybe that's what's rubbing me wrong. But I think the Groove Blender is groovy. I think it's cool. Yeah, baby. I say to the Groove Blender. How do we imply that just, we're going to take everything that's groovy in this world and mix it up in one room and by that i mean cigarettes

swamis neon blades swamis are religious teachers hey come on in explore some new was this what year what month did austin powers come out in 1997 and that wasn't 87 wasn't it that was early in the year I think that was March or so It might have been May It might have been May Okay I was wondering if Austin Powers influenced Joe Camel

Yeah maybe Yeah yeah There's this new The swinging 60s are back There wasn't a phenomenon yet There was a big 60s comeback In the 90s in general

All the smiley faces And inflatable furniture And bell bottoms All that garbage That is true They tried to get them. Can we just, Mike, can you just send a video of saying, of you saying, this blender is very groovy, baby.

They didn't get that, but they got a bunch of people who clearly from looking at them are hardcore smokers. And they got everyone to, well, here's just some thoughts, first of all about like why the groove blender why now i think it's amazing i think it's exactly what needed to happen say for christ's sakes people the tv's boring on them we want the cigarette kind of some dennis leary style not just thoughts but camera work it's all spinning and then kind of like a grunge bass player with beard braids and yeah i think it's great i think it's all spinning and then kind of like a grunge bass player with beard braids

yeah i think it's great i think it's exactly what needs to happen right now you know with night everything 97 has been a tough year right with the they're cloning the sheeps and what have you we got uh i think what do we need we need a groove blender now more than ever and then there's clips of guy a guy like unloading a bunch of boxes like yeah we're gonna have uh 5 000 packs of camels we're giving away c notes the groove blender montage of people just saying it it's pretty clear to me that no one had anything of substance to say so they're like well let's just get them to repeat the name like oh yeah that seemed like the excitement level is at an all-time high just a handler walking around to like 30 people. Hi, hi, could you say Groove Blender into the camera real quick?

And when you see the light come on, that means it's on. Groove Blaster. No, no. Let's take that again. Back to one. Back to one. Like your energy, though. Thank you so much again for doing this.

We'll let you into the Groove Blender in a second, we swear. By then you were hungry and thirsty so you sashayed over to the oasis and grabbed a cold one and a bite to eat under a neon palm tree you sat on the biggest pillow you've ever seen are you sure the biggest pillow in the world is it group blender yeah what is this change of scenery for joe i love trying to navigate a plate of sloppy buffalo wings on the biggest pillow i've ever seen with my camel long burning for a while this is like a tim burton alice in wonderland style like a copy here you're well you're exactly right because well because next is uh you satiated you decided to decide to saunter over to the turkish bazaar and yeah now we're in sort of like groovy who could

what joe not joe's vibe there wait what year was this the year that that it was over wait a minute right 97 i think it was over is there no joe at did they change the vibe because they couldn't have joe there well is that what we're figuring out their excuse i mean their their justifications were always very funny uh for all these years but uh when they discontinued joe camel they were like well it's just uh you know the way marketing goes you just change it up sometimes and we just want to change it up a little what's so yeah wait what was uh the president and congressman no we haven't been paying attention no we're just we're already

thinking like probably not gonna do it anymore at rj reynolds we're concerned about your health and quality of life so i wonder yeah were they like we have to get rid of joe so we're gonna make it like sick the sick groovy 60s, but he's in the promotional image. Yeah. Well, and it was explained in the book as if this was like the ultimate trip into Joe's mind. What? This might have been one last go for Joe. Yeah, maybe. There's, yeah, one crazy blowout and then he's done being alive.

Wow. Then they, yeah, at the end of the. He knew he was going to croak. They took him out back. You have three days to live. Perhaps you should spend them quietly and reflectively. Or I could invite 500 of my closest buddies to Vegas. And then they can all go out in the desert and watch as they bury me alive. Don't worry, everyone.

One thing's for certain. I've learned nothing. Keep smoking, folks. Load more sand into my lungs. I can still feel something. Hey, you there, come on. Take a shovel. Everybody gets a turn.

Hey, 500 of you, it'll be done in no time. Hey, if you hit a body, that was the mafia. Don't worry about it steve went threatened to kill me and put me on the desert yeah i've had so i've run afoul of some interesting characters as you do joe camel joe camel was uh like well just leave my body in the dunes before the implosion, and then I'll go to heaven. I'm going to ride that wave of smoke up, up, up to the top. I just realized we're doing the Odin Kirk impression of Robert Evans. It's kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's right in there. Because Odin Kirk, he didn't get it quite as deep, I feel like. But it's the this and the this. And here we go. Which is also great yeah you do uh uh and then we end up with like now we got belly dancers snake charmers sword swallowers flame swallower you know flame uh breathers right that's the ultimate cigarette right yeah right oh if only oh boy if i can get it all done with just one big stick

when's camel gonna start offering torches oh man then you go play roulette and craps and stuff but with c notes so you're one wall away from a real casino but then you're at you're playing with fake money with like with a camel and a wig and then is there a photo of the camel with a wig what's that was there a picture of the camel with a wig i mean just on the c notes yeah yeah you know that's what they were i mean george watching it oh what now one thing i haven't said uh oh here you go um after you had a chance to kick back and watch a live camel do some laps around the room. So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to pack a bunch of smokers into a room, pass out a bunch of cigarettes, and just crank music, and then have a camel walking around, just farting it up, breathing secondhand. Look, wildlife love two things. They love cool camel, secondhand smoke, and wildlife love two things. They love cool camel, secondhand

smoke, and they love being indoors. Don't worry. He won't freak out, kick all the roulette tables down, chips go flying into your drinks and eyes. Was there a camel in Siegfried and Roy's show

ever? Not sure. Was there already a camel easily accessible in Vegas is what I'm asking. Or did they have to bring one in? Because I feel like there is a good chance, like the Sahara or something. It was just like a camel. It was on loan now. There's a couple menageries or zoo kind of things, I feel like. I'm sure it was not hard.

There's probably some sad thing where two camels were in a space where people could get drunk and bang on the glass. That's what I'm saying. Like, it maybe wasn't much of a stretch to get the camel over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, very possibly. They might have had to stretch a little more to get the bands. Big Head Todd and the Monsters. The Smithereens and Southern Culture on the skids.

Rocked the palace with their own special brands of alternative sound. And then right after that, it was the kind of party that only Joe could have dreamed up. Yeah, you know, Joe, we know what Joe loves. Swamis, the smithereens. Yeah. Camels who are not walk-around upright camels like him, but regular ones who are forced to breathe a lot of smoke in. That doesn't

sound like the music joe likes no i don't think so no he like we heard the music he makes he likes he likes public domain blues yeah that is amended to be about lighter shortages right he would like a south side johnny maybe he would like a kind of bluesy uh something that swings daddy oh yeah no this is all completely confusing uh uh what you're saying about the food and like barbecue on the pillows there's a shot i will i want to do a cut down of this video because i can't i boy i love this this uh groove letter video there it does involve well let me uh okay first of all it it goes from a shot of like three people all doing what i can only describe as like a a cigarette threesome like they're all lighting up from one center point all getting uncomfortably close to each other for like breathing in one big

flame and then it cuts straight from that to like a tilty shot going, going over like a really pale taco salad, just a big open container of sour cream. Look, Ash is going to get in there and maybe the camel spit in it. That's what everything's getting blended up. You knew what you were getting into. It's group blender,

baby. Group blender. What a terrible event i mean there's just no way it wasn't no everyone was so hard on the gathering of the juggalos yeah that looks like a group blender just passed with no comment that looks like some decadent, ancient Roman party or something versus this shitty Joe Camel event. Put live camels in a room with swamis and all the cigarettes we can find. And let the record show that Mike said it's the worst event he's ever heard of before I introduced this element. All I've got to say is that when Camel throws a party, they do it upright. Did you see it? Did you see it?

Wait, first of all. That guy's got a VR helmet. So there's 94 or 97 era VR. But that music you were hearing was coming courtesy of some Blues Brothers impersonators. All that plus fake Blues Brothers. Oh, my God. What? The worst fucking party I've ever heard of. Look, this cunt, R.J. Reynolds, they are preying on our children

and putting everything they like in front of them. Sword swallowers. The Blues Brothers. Cocktail lounges. Taco salad. Open containers of sour cream getting dusted with ash and camel spit. What hope does my six-year-old have?

The six-year-old, though, to be fair, wasn't going to the party. I don't think he knew about the party in Vegas for 500 of the closest smokers. I'm just saying, if this is the Joe vibe, I've somehow failed to see how this is hooking someone who's otherwise watching teletubbies if you're saying that they didn't always do a good job of marketing to children i would agree with you that might be right i would agree i would agree with that that once in a while they weren't hitting the spot as far as uh making kids go mommy i want to go to vegas and eat barbecue on a pillow and i want to see uh fake elwood mommy mommy can we go see fake elwood i want lunch pool trick shots there was a speaking of odin kirk there was a van hammersley walking That's a race. What's one? This party. Holy shit.

This isn't one, but I was imagining like, then further satiated, then step into the next room and watch a live camel birth. What? Joe's offspring is coming right at you and you can catch it and you can keep the camel in your hands while you do it. They won't mind. He's a born smoker.

Maybe try to wash some of the camel fluid off your hands before you dig back into that taco salad. But if you don't, we ain't watching. Would the listeners come to a live show that was our own version of this party? Groove Blender. Podcast that rides Groove Blender. A tribute to the Classic Joe Camel Party of 1997 Oh man

We found I think the answer is yes We got catering For the place called The worst restaurant In Los Angeles In the last live show I said we need to

Come out as the Blues Brothers One of these days Oh yeah Free Blues Brothers And we haven't even Talked about Blues Brothers Con

Oh yes You were saying the event This is in August at the retired prison August 19th in Joliet Two day event Only one day does Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd appear The best day Of your god damn lives

They will perform I hear the train a coming Coming around the bend They don't they do they don't do that they don't do that so i know it's a prison association with a prison music but then also on the blues brothers website they are auditioning for elwood and jakes huh you didn't see that i sent that to i said jason you and i have to audition oh that was a real oh that was based on that there were auditions there are auditions to be a new blues brothers for what and where for if there's ever a group blender again it doesn't specify but

i think we are lobbying congress jim is working on uh making sure that cannabis farms stay unrestricted meanwhile we're also trying to roll back the cartoon cigarette legislation so that we can have another groove plunder. And licensed Blues Brothers can be there. We need to. Jason and I need to put ourselves on tape for this. To be Jake and Elwood on the road.

As long as you're willing to show our listeners that tape. Yeah. And you do that thing where like like these guys are just standing there they're just standing i paid to see dancers and they're only standing and looking grim but then when the song kicks in you shuffle all around like no white person has ever done the one yeah the one dance which is to say just like the random nonsense shaking i'm looking i have the copy here um i just want to make sure we i get it right in case any listener also wants to and i say do if you want to do it a little joe or if you want to do it a little draper because i think you're going to read some beautiful copy here.

Let's see what it comes to me. I can't remember. What do the Blues Brothers sound like? Well, they're sort of like clipped and kind of where you got to do it. Looking for young, talented Blues Brothers performers. Blues Brothers approved Ventures in association with Legends and Concerts is searching for a young

fresh Blues Brothers tribute act. We only approve the finest ventures to potentially use at several of legends and concerts locations we are looking for well that's an established brand legends and concerts yeah we are looking for a dynamic duo that can portray jake and elwood during the saturday night live era well so not like wait a minute not the current one for some reason not the one where it's uh 70 somethings who need to hold hands to walk down a small set of stairs as they did on the fucking snl anniversary they have to let your tick by hand like trump strong familiarity with the blues brothers characters are essential in order to accurately replicate their voices, moves, dance, skits, and comedic flair live on stage.

The Tribute Act must have experience performing in front of live audiences and developing good rapport and timing with them. Guys, years of Podcast of the guys uh years of podcast the right years of herald team candidates to consider must sing live and the elwood character must be able to play the harmonica this is your opportunity to help us continue to celebrate the comedic legacy of these beloved iconic iconic characters. Please send all submissions for consideration to Legends in Concert, 4570 West Post Road, Suite 100, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89118. Or info at Legends. There's a phone number here, too.

The Blues Brothers is a registered trademark of Daniel E. Aykroyd and Judith Belushi Pisano. All rights reserved. Yikes wow yes um well guy i mean extensive knowledge of the i mean you could point to lots of podcast material about them too much most people might say uh but the to manifest the physicality just really quick both of you just move your arms and let me see if I think that it's like the Blues Brothers just okay go for the oh my god it's perfect whatever you just did

have you been in a dance school for five years because that looked exactly like the Blues Brothers no you know what we just some big Blues Brothers fans so we watched a lot of their old stuff and we picked it up yeah I did one or two coaching sessions With Judith Belushi Pisano

John had an energy John He was a maniac What can I say Jason are you Belushi Or am I Belushi in this scenario You think I'm acroid I might be acroid but wasn't Belushi shorter Belushi was shorter I. You think I'm acroid? I might be acroid, but wasn't Belushi shorter? Belushi

was shorter. Basically, I think you're acroid. I think? What? Now I'm doubting if you can do it. You were just asking who's who? It's obvious who's who. I mean, I guess height-wise it's obvious. Yes. I mean, height-wise it could be the other way around. I understand why I was asking.

Look, when you're trying to be a tribute act, you gotta look at it from all angles you know bring that belushi energy and i was wondering yeah i don't know if that's coming yeah i don't know although if he gets uh he gets a little rammy maybe oh yeah he could get that belushi vibe going we're gonna have enough gold bond in the pocket sure um scott here i found a picture there's a video on youtube called uh the joe camel collection and a woman and it explains that um i think her grandmother moved in with her family and they had to clean out the house and there's just dozens and dozens of camel things

they found joe and old joe but here's some soft packs of cigarettes you can tell they look like they're already crunched up like they already look like shit oh i see okay okay so i think the innovation of the hard pack was the cigarettes will stay in good shape in your pocket it'll inspire some of this like they just a montage of like thing after thing of joe camel stuff oh that's an example yeah cue ball cue ball plates and forks and and of course there are in a clock a cool clock about pool and ashtrays and hats and shades and this is the lifestyle this is i guess it goes like hand in hand if like you were a guy in the 90s like you were a dad in the 90s who had a lot of like playboy stuff you're like like this is sort of my like aspirational yeah or like any shots are like i i'm oh yeah my relatives really

into elvis they're really into betty boop like then they just have walls of this stuff yeah i mean look i know about having walls of stuff of a certain sure characters yeah yeah well and why not joe maybe it's time to introduce joe and you know maybe let me to summarize how the how the book brings things to a close it's pretty much what jason was saying like like yeah and then his his days were numbered it just you know felt like felt like time maybe the world would no longer accepted this rebel and he had to ride off into the sunset. Certainly we were not forced to stop

doing this. But, you know, then they bring things to a close with this statement. Any way you look at him, Joe Camel was one of a kind. And even though he stayed around for less than a decade, he made his mark in ways that few advertising characters ever have or ever will.

Joe's style, his attitude, his joie de vivre made his mythological world seem more magical. And it made our world seem a little bit more magical, too. He will be missed. The eulogy. And then a 21 gun salute happens after that. 21 puff salute. Fire. Pull.

Pull. But how do we feel? Do we love him more? Do we get him more? Having taken a trip, now that we know about his world and the hard pack and his music and TJ and a miraculous weekend called the groove blender you know i i my feelings as a kid was i was fascinated with him but i was put off a little bit by it and but though that being said i was like there were certain ads in the magazines

that i knew were adult ads so so that's part of it part of it's his penis head um but when we look in there's a pretty rich mythology here yeah when we talk about all of it so yeah if if and if we look what we love is we we know we admit to the shortcomings and the evils of the disney corporation but if some magical ip and storytelling comes out of this bad organization isn't that what everything we're obsessed with yes isn't that the same that's happening here i know being opened up to a magical world of joie de vivre i didn't realize i was going to be opened up to a magical world of joie de vivre so i am i have been taken on a journey in that way

so yes i mean joe himself i like him a lot i do i i his mission you know joe wasn't born in joe wasn't born into the world of cigarettes joe just existed so that's the way you have to examine joe himself the people that were pulling the strings on jo, that's a different story. But Joe himself was just a cool, confident, smoking man camel who loved to play pool. He lived a leisure life. He lived a leisure life. And here's the thing. He wasn't like a leisure suit Larry character who was like really like out there probably being gross and saying inappropriate things to women. Joe was a classy guy.

That's right. Joe was someone who wasn't like Duke Nukem. The 90s characters who we think of who were Duke Nukem characters who were, you know, they would be put in jail now. They would have been Me Too'd. That's not necessarily Joe. I don't think it's Joe. I don't get that vibe from Joe.

I just wanted a good time. Hey, I tried having a lady camel on my motorcycle once. We tried two positions, didn't like it. I drove off, left her in the dust, but I gave her a chance, and that's the Joe way. I think there's also a chance Joe was either bisexual, asexual. When you're reading all of this, there could be any number of scenarios uh for joe as far as what his actual sexuality was and i'm not gonna out him on this podcast i don't know but i think that there's a lot of different things under the surface there that could make joe even more

interesting or unique so yes once we go through all of this uh i do have a lot of affection for joe yeah and i'm more comfortable with him now than when we started so what's what some of these episodes are about is tackling something that made us feel uneasy as a kid we talk about it for a while and where do we land sure i love where we landed i think we've gone on a lot of adventures the ult with the ultimate dick-faced easy rider oh man places where you could have the worst caesar salad man has ever imagined and just we haven't even i mean we're wrapping up but we haven't even like touched like there's a joe camel plush like the merchandise is out of control yeah truly out of

control and if i learned anything from looking at this book and leafing through this book if we were to buy it all on ebay oh, the smells we could smell. Well, that's the problem. Yeah. There's some plush, and Jason brought it up, that there's plush you can get, but the chances of that not smelling like awful smoke. There's two specifically here. I don't know. Jason, this is the one you were talking about.

It has, like, big sunglasses and a leather jacket horrifying looking it's real bad i found a camel camel the game yes i found camel the game as well two to six players 21 and older what do you what do you mean what is it i think it's just playing i think it's just a deck of playing cards oh okay here's a blues brothers uh whoa blues brothers plush blues brothers plush doll nice of joe camel which is 100 this is expense 120 and i believe it's got someone's phone number written down or it's like some sort of a product thing written in sharpie on his feet or maybe just maybe a lady eager to get with jo. Writing it where he could see it. Yeah, he writes the lady's number down on his foot. On the bottom of his bare feet.

But we'll post some of this stuff. But it's just, it's overwhelming how much stuff there was. And it probably all smells like dirty smoke. Don't bring us, by the way, don't bring us a live show with any dirty smoke Joe Cam a live show any dirty smoke joe camel stuff if it's newer and it doesn't smell like smoke okay i may be interested but and honestly take that sell that stuff on like those t-shirts probably cost a fortune at vintage shops oh yeah like there's a lot of really cheap groove blender shirts which those were we're a little interested in that. Groove Blender shirts, I could maybe go for it.

But you're talking about a massive body of work and a lot of art and a lot of great music packed in by a pop culture icon that really only, where it all came and went within nine years. Remind you of anybody? Maybe like the fab four beetles this this is our beetles the beetles of cigarette mascots the beetles of scrotum faces the beetles were their own cigarette mascots though if you have ever i i can't find it now, but I did see, Kool did attempt to make Willie the penguin. There was like an extreme roided out version of Willie

for a short period of time in the 90s. And they were like, we don't see any resemblance to Joe Cow. I don't know what you're talking about. And I don't think it really lasted. But that looked more like a kid's fruit snack mascot. Yeah. I'll say this real quick, just about the kids thing. There are some ads, though, about the advertising to kids like this one, where this is clearly

three smoking camels offering cigarettes to a child. Oh, yes. There's no child in the frame, but they're all pointed down. It's like a POV, a point of view of like a child you're looking up hang on what couldn't that be the point of view of somebody who passed out on the floor at the group well okay that's possible just no they just socked a guy and he's like lying on the ground going oh and they're like here smoke a camel you pathetic piece of shit look that's possible i know you uh get this into your mouth before you we knock you down one more time i know you don't want to think bad but there are a couple of those where you're like that is

definitely juice camels offering it to a child no way man a little child by the way the point of view is so low there's only one uh one scenario what's lower than a little child somebody who's lying down on the world's biggest pillow who got a little too groovy in the blender that it was a what really got them in trouble was like you know smoking gun uh stuff would be like well you know we're going after younger markets you know ages 14 to 24 and it's like hold on hold on that's four years four years too early even eight to 18 would be legal a lot of places you'd be 21 now to buy cigarettes i learned could you take the cigarettes i mean would we like joeel without the cigarette? Could you?

A thousand percent. Yeah. Absolutely. Hold on. Hold on. Let me think this through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Okay. Camel comes back without the cigarette, but with all the iconography of the old Joe Camel. What are they now? It's just a cool cat. It's like BoJack Horsemanman but without any of the sad stuff it's just joe camel there's no conflict he just goes around doing cool stuff jumping in jacuzzis nailing it at golf all in one all day and then he leaves yeah yeah so so he could survive without cigarettes i don't yeah i think we've proven there's enough to him and to his

friends to max and bust uh this but that's the cigarettes is where it started but it isn't where it ended here and he is jason was pointing out he's flexible here's an ad where he's like kind of dressed like tucker carlson is on that fake show that he does when like a log cabin to pretend he's like a man of the people again mike you're watching the worst shit i've ever seen you know what i'm talking about well yeah because he does this thing where he goes fly fishing a few times a year and someone always confronts him at the tackle shop no but he no i know but he has his own he has like his own like it looks like he's in santa's workshop and he wears like a fucking flannel shirt to pretend he's like a man of the people and not some rich asshole who's lying to a bunch of rich asshole swanson tv dinners or something going around where his mom didn't his mom left him a dollar

she hated him yeah um so so anyway i'm saying joe is kind of dressed like that like man of salt of the earth guy uh here so yeah like you can see even just joe going out to the baseball game here with his camel friends and like there's one camel wearing like funny like dame edna glasses in the top left there uh the answer is yes i think and i think the way to bring i a conflict free animated series about just a guy who kicks ass, uh, who happens to be a man camel with a scrotum face, uh,

is something I would like to make and I'm going to do it. I called it. Nobody else can do it. And, uh, happy to do not putting cigarettes in it. It's about the character and, uh,

you can pay me in camel bucks. Is this TJ? That might be TJ. She's in like one of the ads, like kind of toward the right, but she's not being featured. They hit her. They showed.

Yeah. You're, you're, you're background now. We're trying to feature extra, but back to background, please. Never Joe though.

Joe's in the forefront of our minds of the culture as he always has been. And always will be. You survived podcast the ride Thank you for your subscription To the second gate And if you want to dig even deeper Join us in our exclusive club Even more exclusive than Joe's Place

Club 3 Where you get one more bonus episode every month Our regular episodes ad free And maybe there's a couple of Cool human camels Wandering around sure you don't know who we don't know who's in that uh that listener base some of them might be camel freaks of nature i hope they are i hope that's most of them