If you're looking for some of the best unintentional comedy on a daily basis, I highly recommend picking up the 2005 Care Bears calendar. Seriously.
I purchased this quality item for my friend Drew, largely on the basis of an inside joke we won't let go -- one time last summer, he RSVP'd "no" to a party, and signed his name Sad Bear. Since then, the Care Bears thing with Sad Bear has been a big joke. So when I saw the Care Bears calendar for $3, in which Sad Bear is Mr. May (or is it Ms. May? What gender are the Care Bears? Are they hermaphrodites? I need to know these things.) -- well, I just had to buy it.
If I had any idea of the comedy that lay inside, I would have bought six of them.
For instance, its advertised as a 16-month calendar. What this means the inside cover has September-December '04 in four quadrants. That's the extra four months. Not on their own pages, just plain jane and slapped together on one page. False advertising, almost. We got twenty seconds of comedic material out of this. I'm not even kidding.
Then we noticed they have a calendar synopsis -- one of those little mini calendars like you often find in a checkbook -- on the first page. So its actually a 24 month calendar!! Oooh!
Guess what else was there. A list of the proper gifts for various milestone anniversaries, and a table listing birthstones for each month. Now, lets think about this for a second. What would you suppose is the target market for Care Bears? I'm thinking children ages 4-9. And they need to know that their mother's birthstone is a freakin' topaz? Right. And if a guy has this calendar hanging up in his cubicle, I'm thinking he's not of the marriage persuasion, at least not to a woman. So again, no need to know that the gift for a 20th anniversary is, well, whatever it is...
Once we turned the page to the first month, it became graphic designers taking a verbal machete to someone else'e work. And it was a bloodbath.
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One of the months features Bedtime Bear. They make liberal use of House Industries' "House-A-Rama" font package of bowling fonts. I'm talking everything in the freaking package, even the clip art! "Nite Time is Bed Time" is in Strike. Something about dreams is in League Night. And they have a bunch of the bowling dingbats screened back on the background. No particular reason, other than that the designer probably thought it was funny to have bowling pins, ball bags, shoes, and other bowling stuff on a kids calendar with the theme "Bedtime". This is the funniest thing I've ever seen.
March features Lucky Bear, and it says "Get Lucky! Every day from March 1st-31st!". Wow. Shouldn't this month feature Jacko Bear?
The Sad Bear month features the Drew in his alter-ego majesty, standing in front of a hallucinogenic Paris wearing a beret -- there is no less than six Eiffel Towers behind him, all in different pastel colors. And the tagline is "Tres Grumpy". Ooh, I'm French and I'm Sad! Shed a tear for me! Vive le France!
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I cannot even believe I wrote 1000 words on a Care Bears calendar. My creative writing professor in college WAS right. I CAN write 1000 words on anything. I'm going to puke now.
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