'Tis the cheesiest: Shoddy Goods 024
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Hark! For this final Christmas edition of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell, I invite you to share one of my family’s holiday traditions. I’m Jason Toon and I hope you like Miracle Whip.
At my house, we screen a full slate of essential viewing every Christmas season. Silver-screen chestnuts like It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th St. Modern classics like Elf and A Christmas Story. Animated Christmas specials from the canonical Rudolph and Peanuts masterpieces to the should-be-a-classic Olive the Other Reindeer. And tongue-in-cheek cameo-ramas hosted by Pee-Wee Herman and Stephen Colbert that can still pack an emotional wallop amidst all the irony.
But there’s one side dish in this all-Yule-can-eat buffet that packs more flavor than all of them into six short minutes: a reel of Kraft Christmas commercials from 1986.
Season’s eatings that say “season’s greetings”
How many different ways can you make cheese that’s also not cheese? Click to watch.
We open on a toy train chugging past an array of indistinct baskets and platters under a Christmas tree. We soon find out that these gifts all happen to include ingredients from the Kraft product line. Good news for anyone whose Christmas list includes individually wrapped Velveeta slices, or weird savory cookies made from shredded cheddar and crushed potato chips.
That’s just an appetizer. Stick around as subsequent commercials whip up such stiff peaks as a zucchini casserole with Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and a chocolate “mousse” made with melted marshmallows. Along the way we meet a green can of cheese we’ve talked about before. And, um, an espresso (really instant coffee) cheesecake that I want to eat all of, right now. You win that one, Kraft.
Candles twinkle, trumpets tootle, and a quartet of besweatered revelers gathers around the piano to warble “Deck the Halls”. The camera swoops over it all like an Attenborough documentary chronicling the great herds of the Serengeti. A festive choral refrain worms a little deeper into your brain with each repetition: “Celebrate the season with Kraft.”
It should be obvious why I love it. For anyone sentient and living in America in 1986, this video is a concentrated dose of a certain kind of bygone atmosphere. I’d call it “boring '80s”: glossy and warm, but uptight and backward-looking. Right on the line between comforting and stifling. It’s a cozy but itchy sweater. And everything is so brown!
It’s not an aesthetic that has aged well or enjoyed any lasting influence. Like so many attempts to be timeless, Kraft’s take on a classic Christmas vibe is unmistakably of its time.
Yes, the “recipes” are funny, and historically accurate. Hey, we didn’t have the Internet. We lived in the Midwest. Trying new things meant finding daring ways to combine the same supermarket ingredients we always ate. I’ll always remember the first time anyone in my family hollowed out a loaf of bread and filled the hole with dip.
But I haven’t mentioned one of the best things about this video: the narrator. With the avuncular tone and crisp precision of a worldly grandpa - maybe some kind of retired professor? - he brings a tangy zip to his performance worthy of Miracle Whip. The relish in his voice makes you believe he really does think it’s a delightful culinary coup de grace to mix applesauce with Cheez Whiz. He’s a pro. But there’s also something unique about his timing, his cadences, his vowels… this guy’s got too much personality to be just a random anonymous announcer, right?
So this year, I finally looked into it. And not even I was ready for the answer.
“A voice of cheer and cheese”
His name is Ed Herlihy and he’s in one of my favorite movies of all time! He played Mr. Buxton, the jumpsuited father of spoiled rich brat Francis in Tim Burton’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. I’d watched Herlihy dozens of times. I even quoted one of his lines all the time, imitating his cheery, clipped delivery of “Uh, fruit please” (when Pee-Wee offers him some trick gum).
Ed Herlihy brokering the short-lived Stolen Bike Accord. Click to watch.
That’s not nearly all. Turns out Herlihy was one of the most well-known newsreel announcers during World War II. He’d had a long career in network radio. He was briefly the announcer on The Tonight Show in 1962. And he then played the announcer for Jerry Lewis’s Carsonesque talk show in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.
But Herlihy was best-known, by sound if not by name, as the voice of Kraft. The 1986 spots I’d stumbled on weren’t just one-offs. Kraft’s “TV special recipes” campaign ran for decades, with thematically linked spots like these running throughout whatever special they were sponsoring. They were well-known enough to be worth parodying on SCTV and Mystery Science Theater 3000, although honestly it’s hard to get more ridiculous than the real thing.
Before that, the company had sponsored their own TV series, most notably Kraft Television Theater, which Herlihy hosted from 1947 to 1955. This was a prestige drama anthology showcasing work by writers like Rod Serling, directors like Sidney Lumet and Robert Altman, and actors like Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, and James Dean. Interesting circles Ed moved in, huh?
By now I was deep into the Ed Herlihy rabbit hole. The guy’s all over YouTube. Ooh, he narrated a documentary about avant-garde composer Harry Partch! Aah, here he is reporting on redbaiting investigations in Hollywood! Through it all, he’s always smooth, always crisp, the kind of born-for-radio voice for which the term “dulcet tones” was invented.
But you know what? I like his later stuff. Dig into an '80s Herlihy joint like these Kraft “Disneyland-inspired” recipes (yeah, I don’t get it either) and you’ll find someone comfortable with his own idiosyncrasies, someone who sounds like nobody but his own weird self. Nobody could say “Mexicorn” like Ed Herlihy. When he died in 1999 at the age of 90, the New York Times eulogized Herlihy as “A voice of cheer and cheese.”
I know Christmas at our house wouldn’t be quite the same without Herlihy’s jovial cheese hustling, and those Kraft commercials conjuring the supermarket-fancy mundanity of a browncore 1980s Christmas. I’m glad I don’t live in that atmosphere anymore. But for six minutes at a time, it’s fun to visit.
Deck the tree with dollops of Miracle Whip!
It’s funny how simultaneously pleasant, and disgusting, it is to listen to Herlihy walk us through those recipes. What are the weirdest family recipes and food traditions you had growing up? Anything you thought was totally normal until you one day mentioned it with friends and saw everyone’s jaw drop? Let us know in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Slather your guests in holiday cheer with this festive smorgasbord of ultra-processed infotainment:
- 10 comments, 4 replies
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My mom was a charge nurse at a psych hospital and it wasn’t so much what we ate but what we talked about at dinner. And after working at that same hospital myself it’s pretty hard to get grossed out while eating.
One thing we did eat was nut pizza. My mom got the recipe while doing her rotation at a psych hospital and we called it nut pizza for the crazy people (we were little kids). It was just jiffy mix rolled out into a thin layer and then pizza sauce and toppings added. It was something that the patients could make with a recreational therapist and enjoy in under an hour.
Something my boyfriend would tell me about that his mom would make was warm boiled spinach mixed with mayo and warm hard boiled eggs. He said his mom would make that all the time
My family was French so we had LOTS of non-traditional (AKA abnormal) foods:
Escargot
Brains
Kidneys
Head Cheese
Sardines confit …to name a few.
@chienfou Can we please skip to dessert… ?
I always knew if my father made my school lunch because it would contain either peanut butter and celery sandwiches or peanut butter and onion sandwiches. Peanut-butter-and-onion-sandwich breath can be weaponized, which is great up to a certain age. Also, they have a nice crunch.
My mother was a boring cook. Like many back when mothers didn’t work, we ate meat, potatoes and canned veggies almost every night.
Things we ate that people would turn their noses down at today included:
Liver and onions - I actually liked it
Chicken livers - I still do
Rice pudding, not custard - It was really just boiled rice with sugar and an egg added, no raisins (yuck) and often with a bit of cinnamon sprinkled on top
Meatloaf - boring meatloaf by today’s standard
Macaroni and beef - not italian seasoned. Neither was the rare spaghetti.
Only seasonings I remember in the house were salt, pepper and oregano. Oh, well cinnamon and maybe nutmeg. Onions were used a lot, but only my dad used garlic to make garlic bread. Oh and sage for stuffing and when my dad made home made sausage.
I’m not as boring but I season lightly according to most I Know.
@Cerridwyn My dad liked liver and onions - mom did not, but would make it for him. So I ate (and liked) it from an early age. As unlikely as it may seem, my wife also likes liver and onions, so we have it occasionally. (Our kids did not care for it and we never forced it on them.)
Skim milk with cocoa powder that she tried to pass off as Yoohoo.
Vinegar Pie. It is made with apple cider vinegar, molasses, cream, eggs, and vanilla.
'Possum Pie. Chocolate, cream cheese, and pecan layers. I usually “forget” to tell people that it contains no 'possum.
@rockblossom Why is it named 'Possum? i know they’ll eat about anything, but those ingredients are too good for them.
@phendrick It’s a pie made in layers so that it appears to be one thing on top, but has other layers “playing 'possum” under it. The layers tend to get denser and more flavorful toward the bottom.
Possibly The Best 6 Minutes
And 40 Seconds On
YouTube
For our fancy hors dourves, we slathered cream cheese between 2 pieces of bologna and cut it into wedges. Heaven!!
I once heard someone credibly imitate Herlihy reading one of the infamous “recipes” for Thanksgiving turkey which goes progressively off the rails until it crashes into “order takeout”.
@dave The pop culture spoofs of the the Kraft guy’s recipe videos/voices reminded me of another spoofed campaign… Maxell’s Blown away Guy.
/youtube maxell tapes 500 plays
A certain 90s movie had a hilarious spoof of this (and many more such pop-culture campaigns, a few years before the likes of the Scream franchise) where the Maxell tape actually blew the guy’s head off. I had to do a little sleuthing, but the movie was none other than 1992’s “Stay Tuned” starring the late John Ritter (that I was probably too young to watch at the time).
Stay Tuned
I vaguely recall the movie making jokes of various ‘shoddy goods’ at the times, but mainly absurd parodies of popular TV from the prior decades.