Wonderful! - Wonderful! 304: The FGWP

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Griffin's favorite toy for lonely little guys! Rachel's favorite marketing ploys for this time of the year!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya Harmony House: https://harmonyhousewv.com/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Thanks for listening to Wonderful, a show where we talk about things we like that's good that we're into. And right now, I'm going to say, for the past decade, I've been very into Rachel. And this is wonderful. Thanks for listening. Wonderful. The show, we talk about things we like that's good that we're into. And right now, I'm going to say, for the past decade, I've been very into Rachel McElroy. That's right.

Actually, one might say even more than that, because we did not get married immediately. We didn't get married immediately. I suggested it. You bulked at the idea. Yeah. You were like, Lifetime has this show. It's going to be a big hit. Yes.

It's called Married at First Sight. This is not usually how the matchmaking process works where you meet someone in public and then you just marry them right then and there.

But it is our 10-year wedding anniversary, December 7th, a day that shall live in infancy. But I feel like, I don't know, being married 10 years

to you, I feel like we have overtaken Pearl Harbor Day in terms of sort of importance to the landscape of the nation. I would like to think that if you look at December 7th on Wikipedia, our wedding is listed. Above Pearl Harbor Day. Above. Even though chronologically it would probably not be listed first. No, but it's like in order of importance. You know what I mean?

Griffin, I think our listeners are probably wondering, you've been married 10 years. What is your advice for a successful marriage? And what would you say to them? Marry the perfect person for you to get married to. I'll say this. If you can swing that, it's pretty fucking easy, man. True, true.

I will say, and this is advice I like to give everybody, compliments. Oh, yeah. Continue to compliment constantly. And not just one thing. Yeah. It's got to be across the board. I do have to remind Griffin that he has to move across multiple areas of myself and my body. Yes, yes.

I've gotten so much better at that, like talking about- I know, how soft my hair is. Your hair is so soft and it smells so good every day. Do you have any small wonders? I'm going to say, and this relates to our 10-year wedding anniversary, I'm going to say the destination, which is adults only. Yes. We went to a resort in celebration of our 10-year anniversary, and children were not allowed there. Yeah.

Which we picked specifically because we knew this would be the first time we had ever left our children for more than one night as a couple. For literally seven years. For seven years. And so we didn't want to see a child to remind us of our own regular life. Yes. Outside of the resort. Yeah, it it was huge big ups to peeps and cc uh for coming through the clutch watching the boys so we could get away for a couple nights it was very uh we were stressed about it until we got there and then it was totally chill it was

yeah it was like once we knew that our children would in fact go to bed without us present it was like okay the rest of this is going to be fine yeah um i'm going to say uh there's a company called teenage engineering that makes a bunch of sort of boutique synths and sequencers and old digi music devices uh they make the pocket operator series which i have a few of those little sort of uh calculator ones they've just come out with the ep133 the ko2 which is sitting on my desk right there. It's that giant sort of tablet-sized... Looks like a computer. It looks like a... I mean, it looks like an office calculator. Probably more like a calculator, yeah. But it's so fun. Their track record is kind of hit or miss. They make a lot of stuff that's way too expensive, like $2,000

portable synth, keyboard, workstations. And some of them aren't great. This one's like 3002,000 portable synth keyboard workstations. And some of them aren't great. This one's like 300 bucks and it's super powerful and super, super fun to mess around with and play around with. I think this is gonna become sort of my off-court buddy that I travel around with. And how great that you're supporting engineers that are teens.

Yes, these 13 to 19 year old teenagers. It's incredible. No, I'm pretty sure grownups did make these. Um, but I, I, I just like this company. They make a lot of stuff. They have sort of a bad reputation in the, in the space, uh, for people who are like, you know, you can get, uh, a more authentic experience for cheaper, but I feel like this is the best thing they've ever made. And it's, uh, at a price point that it makes a lot of sense. So that's the KO2 and it's super, super duper fun. I go first this week. Okay. My topic this week is, you will probably be surprised to hear, is Bop It. We did get on the topic of Bop It the other night for a kind of a gross reason.

Do you want to talk about it? Not particularly. I don't even remember how it came up. I remember what conversation transpired. The conversation became ranking the verbs featured on a bop it in order of which it would be sort of least disastrous to a human penis. And for those wondering, the order we settled on was best to worst, pull it, flick it, bop it, twist it, and then spin it.

We sort of disregarded because we couldn't figure out the physics of how one would spin. You are saying we. I think it is important to note. I spearheaded a lot of this conversation. This was pretty one-sided. It became kind of a monologue, I would say, on your part. Yeah, became kind of a monologue i would say on your part yeah a sort of penis monologue you provided me with a ranking and then repeated the ranking just to make sure that i learned what i was supposed to you were busting up though you're trying to make it sound

like i this was just some lunacy sort of uh uh rant that i went on i. I like how in your mind, if I am laughing, then this is a worthwhile conversation. Absolutely. I don't want to make light of the important place that Bop It has in my history though because, man, I used to play Bop It all the time in its many iterations.

I never owned a Bop It. I don't know that I've actually played Bop It. I have seen it for sale in stores. I know what it looks like. I remember theIt. I don't know that I've actually played Bop-It. I have seen it for sale in stores. I know what it looks like. I remember the commercials. I don't think I've ever had my hands on one. I considered buying a Bop-It for this segment, but did not have time to procure one before. Henry would probably like it.

Maybe we should put that on the old holiday list. That's a great idea. So Bop-It was a sort of toy game. It came out first in 1996 from Hasbro. It was designed by a toy engineer named Dan Klitzner, who made a few hits, but nothing quite on the scale of Bop-It. And the original version of Bop-It was a sort of stick-shaped device about the size of your forearm with three interactive elements on it. There was a yellow knob for twisting, a blue handle on one end of the stick for pulling, and then right at the center of the bop it was a big

button that you could bop. It was for bopping. It was the bopping and bopping. And the way it would work is that the game would sort of bark orders at you in time to music to either pull it, twist it, or bop it, and the music would ever increase in tempo. And so you would have to do the commands faster and faster and faster. There was a multiplayer mode where it would add a fourth command, which was pass it. So after doing a few of the other commands, it would say pass it, and then you'd have a few seconds to pass it to the other player, and the first one to mess up one of the inputs loses. That is literally it. Once it starts sort of trucking, once the tempo is going real fast and you are having to be very, very precise in your movements, it becomes kind of panicky to discern the difference between a pull it and a bop it, for example.

Yeah. It's kind of like the head shoulders knees and toes principle yes where at first it's like well of course i'm always going to remember where my head is and then the faster you go the more it's like wait not now i'm just confused do you have trouble with head shoulders knees and toes i personally don't but if you watch a bunch of children perform it the faster it gets the more they're like now i can't do anything right yeah i would say the difference here is that that song is uh commands in a provided unchanging order whereas bop it sometimes bop it'll give you twist it like six times in a row and you'll be like yeah that's true certainly it's not going to give me another twist it and then it hits you with another twist you start to get in your own

fucking head about it um for those who found bop-It's three commands too pedestrian, two years later, Hasbro would release the Bop-It Extreme, which was sort of a steering wheel shaped device that added two more inputs, a little green noodle for flicking, and then a little red wheel for spinning. I never owned a Bop-It Extreme. My friend Clint did. I had some trouble playing it because I built up so much muscle memory around the original Bop-It that any time a flick it or spin it would come up, my central nervous system would just like misfire and I would just freeze up. It filled a really interesting sort of space in the toy slash game arena, which was pretty like busy in the 90s and the early aughts. Yeah, right? You had a lot of sort of experimental, oftentimes pretty crummy stuff coming out from Tiger Electronics and Hasbro. And that tried to sort of blend the world of computer gaming and toys. Some were great. Like there was a little game called

Lights Out that was just a little grid of like five by five buttons that lit up. And as you pressed one, it activated or deactivated the adjacent ones. And so, you know, it give you like puzzles that you had to try and solve and turn off all the lights. That one was great. There were many others that were not as good. But for me, like Bop It is the most successful of those experiments. And the reason I think that is because it was so easy to just start playing it. Yeah. Like sometimes I have a lot of memories of having friends over or being over at a friend's house, like Clint's house with the Bop It Extreme, where we'd just be goofing around

and someone would just pick up the Bop It and then we'd just be goofing around and someone would just pick up the Bop It and then we'd be playing Bop It for like a half hour. Yeah, and you know what? Because I was thinking in my head like, oh, this kind of reminds me of Simon. But then I was like, Simon really requires memorization where this one it's random. So everybody's got kind of the same shot.

That's exactly it. Bop It is what I would consider to be a zero friction game in that you can pick it up and be playing it within seconds. And even if you've never played Bop It is what I would consider to be a zero friction game in that you can pick it up and be playing it within seconds. And even if you've never played Bop It before, I mean, you know the rules in an instant. Yeah, they tell you what to do. They tell you what to do. It's on the thing. It's written on the thing what you do.

And so you pick up the rules instantly. And I cannot think of like another game that I would consider to have such a low barrier of entry than Bop It. Now I will say that Hasbro has gone like absolutely batshit wild with power. And they've released like a dozen variations on Bop It at this point. There's Bop It Bounce, which apparently I've never – these I've never even seen before. I had to like research all of these. I'm kind of a Bop It purist. Bop It Bounce had a ball and a trampoline.

And so the trampoline would like tell you instructions on like how to bounce the ball on the trampoline. Whoa. There was Bop It Smash where you had to time inputs in sync with like this little line of lights, kind of like that arcade game where light goes around yeah in a circle and you have to press the button right when it hits like your target light um there was bop it tetris which had sort of two cylinders with different kind of uh grids of lights and one would appear that would be kind of like the tetromino that you had to drop into the other side so you'd have to twist it to make it line up and sort of compress it while the Tetris music played. That one actually looks pretty fun. I would get into Bop It Tetris.

There was like a Bop It Yo-Yo. There were like motion activated Bop Its where you could kind of customize like what commands it would say to you. Like brush it and then you'd have to like mind brushing your teeth with it. it would say to you like brush it and then you'd have to like mind brushing your teeth with it um i some of them look fun but for my money nothing beats the original bop it or perhaps bop it extreme um a game that in my childhood i i just accidentally picked up and played more times than i can count i would go years without playing bop it and then would be like cleaning my room and be like oh shit bop it well i may as well play Bop It for a little while. I think that's really special.

And I can't think of too many other things, you know, before or after that, that have come. Well, and there's so few games that you don't need several people to play. You know, I remember that as a kid, you know, I was an only child. So it was usually just me and my dad playing a board game. And a lot of times games aren't really designed even for two.

Usually you need like at least more than two. And so it's nice that this was out there for all of us lonely souls. Yeah, Hasbro and Tiger Electronics, I would say like most of the stuff they made kind of fit this category of like, hey, hey, lonely guy. Hey, lonely little guy, pick this up. You'll have some fun. That's Bop-It. We should get a Bop-It. We should. Yeah, I know. You sold me on it. Okay. We'll get a Bop It. I'll give you $500. Okay. That's a lot of money for a Bop It. You understand that, right? I know, but I'm so excited about it now. Okay. $500 could buy a lot of Bop It. Like we could each have several of our

own discreet Bop It. Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. Can I steal you away? Yes. Thanks. Hello, sleepyheads. Sleeping with Celebrities is your podcast pillow pal. We talk to remarkable people about unremarkable topics, all to help you slow down your brain and drift off to sleep. For instance, we have the remarkable Neil Gaiman. I'd always had a vague interest in life culture, food preparation. Sleeping with celebrities, hosted by me, John Moe, on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Night night.

And the Emmy nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series are Jet Pacula, Airport Marriott, Frepple, Dear America, We've Seen You Naked, and Allah in the Family. In our stupid universe, you can't see any of these shows, but you can listen to them on Dead Pilot Society, the podcast that brings you hilarious comedy pilots that the networks and streamers bought but never made. Journey to the alternate television universe of Dead Pilot Society on MaximumFun.org. Griffin, you want to hear about my thing? Desperately. griffin you want to hear about my thing desperately my thing is is uh just all over the place this time of year and it is the free gift with purchase oh i love a free gift with purchase as the insiders call it um this is something that I have noticed as we are kind of checking off our gift list. Yes.

One thing I like to do when it comes to your siblings and their spouses is to find a gift that would work for all of them. Yes. Like a nice gift. A nice practical gift. Not like a toaster, but like a thing that would be useful to all of them. And I did this recently, and it came with a little gift-o. Okay. And I thought like,

this is a great thing about this time of year where it's like, hey, are you gonna buy five? Maybe you'll get one for you. We got some stuff at the Lego store this past weekend. Yeah. And it came with free Lego Christmas ornaments. Yeah.

Which you built all of by yourself. I did. Sorry about that. Well, you do all the big sets all the time. I do 10% of the big sets. And then our children, I'll enter their field of vision. And they'll be like, stop that. Play with me with just the little mini figures.

Yeah. Which, by the way, Lego, and you probably know this already, but most of the time, the boys just want the little mini figures. Yeah, which by the way, Lego, and you probably know this already, but like most the time, the boys just want the little mini guys. Yeah. They don't actually really want the set. No. So we're paying a lot more for the set when really we just want the little guys. Just want the little guys. Why don't they just sell the little guys? I mean, they

do. I mean, they do. Not the licensed little guys. Yeah, I want like all the little guys. Yeah. Anyway. But they probably don't do that because it would be. They would not get as much money. Anyway, the big thing I noticed with this free gift with purchasing this time of year is that it is largely in the cosmetic space. Oh, interesting. So a lot of it is like spend $50 and you get this little makeup bag with all of our little trial size makeup things in it.

Okay, cool. Clinique is a big one with this. Clinique is kind of was my go-to company when I was a teen because they had a lot of like earth tone colors and they promised like it wouldn't make you break out, which as a teen was my number one concern. And they constantly have this going on of like buy a full-size thing and get seven tiny ones um and it still works for me yeah i'm still like well i was gonna buy the full-size thing anyway so now i get seven tiny ones uh and apparently this is something long time um the phenomena uh yeah so it started though not with like trial sizes but like with weird like things like lithographs i don't know what that is is it drugs it's like a poster but it's got kind of like a well now see now i have to look it up because i

don't want to tell you the wrong thing and everybody with google at their fingertips is like you didn't know what a lithograph was uh is it like a lie detector test it is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water the printing is from a stone or metal plate with a smooth surface so it gives you kind of like a shiny okay a shiny quality a shiny poster um yeah let me i now i want to show it to you see this has really gone off on a tangent here yeah sure um now here's here's what i'm thinking of this is probably actually what it looked like oh gorgeous you know gorgeous poster so so that was the thing back back in the day 1851 uh bt babbitt launched his best soap which was actually the name of the product the other soaps

i've made up to this point hi everyone it's me bt babbit i'll admit you know you knew good soap and adequate soap you thought how is bt gonna take it one level up again well i'm here with my best soap so best soap if you purchased it you received a full color high quality lithograph poster uh of various seeds landscapes romantic tableaus patriotic and religious imagery hell yeah uh so of course you want i got this picture of jesus with my soap it's awesome now i'm clean and devout yeah so of course you'd want to collect all of them too which was sure was the appeal like depression glass is something you've probably heard of too this idea okay you're making me google all these things that i thought i would just be able to say it's very collectible now like that you've probably seen it in antique stores and not

really knowing what you were so i thought i thought that this was sad glass glass that you got or made while you were quite sad uh it was it was distributed free or at low cost so if you bought for example quaker oats you could get depression glass okay cool and now everybody like tries to buy the whole set uh because it was so rare that anybody got the whole thing and yet when i get into pokemon cards people are like grow up but you're over there buying sad glass i don't understand it sad glass um so this this happened everywhere um and then of course also the the prize in the cereal box is another kind of example, although I don't think that's totally the same thing. And then there were companies like Ponds, which if you heard of their cold cream, this idea of you're removing makeup with this moisturizing cream.

No, but it sounds nice. Man, I feel like I'm just throwing up a lot of air balls. Is this like what I talk about like Japanese role-playing games to you? Yeah, or when I talk about poetry, I guess. Yeah. They gave away a free tube of their vanishing cream. And what they said was, quote, at our expense for over a decade. Wow, holy shit.

So they were very clear on like, no, it's not like we priced up the cost of this so that we could say we were giving it away. Yeah. This is actually, we are really suffering. They're saying, please don't buy our stuff. We are, please, you're breaking the bank. So I read this article from Racked that came out in 2017 that was called, quote, why makeup companies still give gifts with purchase. Because a lot of this stopped partially because of the whole coupon

crazy phenomenon of like you would either create fake coupons or you would give a bunch of different fake addresses email addresses set up post office boxes just so you could claim way too many of these yeah uh but as i mentioned cosmetic companies still do this. And I thought it was interesting. There was an interview in RACT with this professor of marketing at Columbia College in Chicago who said premiums are attractive because they change the value equation without changing the price of the product. Sure. Kind of suggesting that this is like a luxury item.

This is like an indulgence. But you're saving money or you're getting something free with it so you don't have to feel like you know you're making a poor financial decision i'm a huge sucker for this in a major i feel like clothes companies like independent clothes companies do this a lot and sometimes i will be shopping for lots of, let's say, for example, shorts, lots of pairs of shorts at, say, for example, Chubby's. And then Chubby's is like, hey, if you buy one more pair of shorts on top of this, I'm going to give you a travel mug and a hat. And it's like, yeah, man, fuck yeah. And you forget that you never needed five pairs of shorts. No, I really only need the two.

Yeah. But then you're like, well, if I well, if I do a little bit more. This happens to me a lot with Clinique. They will put the price point above one product, basically. Yeah. It'll be like, spend $50 and everything on their site is like $30 or less. So you inevitably buy more than you were planning to. Yeah.

We're basically just outing ourselves as the world's biggest suckers. I know. But I don't think we're alone. No. And what is this show if not about building community? Yeah. If we're going to get caught up in a grift, at least this grift gets us travel mugs and chubby hats. So, yeah.

So, largely, I'm doing this online. Stores will still sometimes do things in person. Like a lot of department stores, you'll go from counter to counter and they'll be offering things like this. Apparently, uh, when Estee Lauder bought Mac in 1998, they had a promotion on lipstick day where they offered a free lipstick to in-store customers and the lines like wrapped around the block just to get like a free item, which again is something as we've gotten older that we've learned a lot about of like how much is your time worth and how you're not actually saving money by investing hours and doing something like this. But it's

just that like free thing and i've talked before on the show about how i love to hear something is discounted really like activates like a pleasure center in my brain this is very similar yeah and and to the point where it's like i am not someone who really uses makeup but i have a lot of makeup bags that were given to me with purchase of like you know a face so you can put anything in there true some right granola bars this is what i think yeah uh yeah so that's so that's um and i and i love it and this time of year is like kind of the best time of year to do it yeah you you you too could have so many tote bags and makeup bags that you don't really need but are free if you spend $150. You want to know what our friends at home are talking about?

Yes. Arlo says, feeling nervous before a date. In this case, it's a first date, so extra nerves. I'm out of practice and coping with a lot of other genuine anxiety, but the simple, exciting nervousness feels so sweet and wholesome. It's like being 15 again, except we get to go to a bar and drink fancy drinks. Yeah. What do you consider our first date? I took you to Chez Z once.

Oh, well, we hadn't been together for a while then. Yeah, but that was like our first going out because you made a big deal out of the fact that you hadn't been on a date. I'd never been on a date. Which is wild. I'd just never been taken out in a like, I'm going to treat you to an exciting evening that you know nothing about. Yeah, and like Shay-Z was not the fanciest. No, no, not at all. It was a cute spot in Austin, but it was not the fanciest.

And I remember I had to stop for gas on the way there. I had gas on my jeans and so i smelled a lot like gasoline yeah so like all that now whenever i smell gasoline it takes me right back uh sarah says my small wonder is a microwavable heat pack that i put under the covers on chilly nights keeps my feet toasty and i get to feel like a colonial woman with a hot brick plus i can sleep sound knowing i won't light my bed on fire. That's really nice. I keep getting like, this is a popular gift,

those like little bags of rice that you like put in the microwave. And I never really know what to do with them. Yeah. But that sounds like a nice idea. We had one growing up that was filled with like buckwheat or something like that. And you would microwave it for a bit

and I would put it on my neck and it felt so good. And the smell of that thing is like washed in my memory. We should get a stinky rice bag. I think we have one. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for these for a theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description.

And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great stuff that they have there. You're going to like all the shows that you find there. MaximumFun.org is the website. I don't know why I decided to say that again. Max M Fun. Max M Fun. Candle Nights is coming up. Yes. Very, very soon. December 16th, 9 p.m. Join us. Go to bit.ly slash Candlenights2023 and you can

watch along. It's our virtual spectacular. It's got guest stars. It's got bits and skits. These things, like, if you are somebody who does not listen to multiple McElroy products, you will not be lost during this episode. It is very charming

and fun and bite-sized and really gets me in the spirit. We have a lot be lost during this episode. It is very charming and fun and bite-sized and really gets me in the spirit. We have a lot of new stuff this year, sort of representing the branching pathways in which our sort of video efforts have gone in 2023, which is fun. So again, bit.ly slash candlelights 2023. All proceeds go to Benefit Harmony House, which is a great organization in our hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. So check it out. Come join us. It'll be a lot of fun. Let's stop because I don't want to talk anymore. Yeah. What a sad condition for you to have as somebody who talks. A professional talker. All the time. I know. But I'm going to communicate. And when I say condition,

I mean, you just have a cold. Yeah. This is, this hopefully will not last for much longer. So I'm going to whistle my sign off like a dolphin. Nope. Bye. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.