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Georgia to Revamp Unpopular State SloganNovember 15, 2004 |
Atlanta, GA Georgia Tourism Boar Posters bearing the state’s old slogan may now become even hotter commodities on eBay
After the Georgia Tourism Board changed its slogan from “Georgia: Wow!” to “Georgia: It’s Where They Filmed Deliverance,” in 1973, the state’s tourism dropped to virtually zero, except for the few stragglers who came looking for “hot, man-on-man action,” and who were mostly ...
fter years of stagnant tourism blamed by many on the state’s long-standing slogan of “Georgia: It’s Where They Filmed Deliverance,” tourism officials are convening this month to christen a new state slogan, in hopes of inspiring vacationers to contribute to Georgia’s beleaguered economy. Though officials have yet to decide on what the new slogan will be, one trait shared by all early candidates is a complete avoidance of the 1972 Burt Reynolds hillbilly rape film.
After the Georgia Tourism Board changed its slogan from “Georgia: Wow!” to “Georgia: It’s Where They Filmed Deliverance,” in 1973, the state’s tourism dropped to virtually zero, except for the few stragglers who came looking for “hot, man-on-man action,” and who were mostly disappointed by their visits to the Peach state. At the time, state tourism officials blamed the decline on poor marketing support, and redoubled their efforts to get the word out about the key role their state played in the John Boorman blockbuster.
“Come on down and learn to play the banjo,” intoned smiling spokesperson Walter Goering, plucking a homemade banjo in the first of a series of television ads shown nationwide in the mid-70’s.
As the state’s tourism gradually fell to negative levels, meaning that now even native Georgians were vacationing in South Carolina, tourism officials expressed bafflement at the public’s reaction to their foolproof campaign.
“Why wouldn’t people want to come visit the natural Georgian beauty what was captured in that movie?” questioned tourism director Samuel Chick in a 1978 interview. “There’s trees, rivers… and some trees. All the things you think of when you think about Georgia.”
Though the hit film Deliverance did feature a stunning panorama of Georgia’s natural beauty, in addition to healthy portions of the manly Burt Reynolds before he went all soft on us, many felt the infamous scene where actor Ned Beatty’s character is violently raped by inbred yokels may have dominated filmgoers’ memories, marking Georgia as a place they would never, ever want to go. Tourism officials, however, remained skeptical of this explanation.
“What don’t they like? That little retard kid with the banjo?” asked Chick in a 1983 interview. “They know he wasn’t real right? Just all foam rubber and airplane glue, like Yoda. We ain’t got none of them in Georgia. No Yodas neither. You find me a banjo-playin’ retard or a Yoda in the state of Georgia, anywhere, and I’ll give you a shiny new apple. That’s how confident I am in that statement.”
The Deliverance campaign continued in Georgia until 1998, when during a hypnotic regression treatment Chick uncovered repressed memories of the rape scene from the film. After attempting to convince the rest of the tourism board of his findings, Chick was fired for being queer. But the event did serve as a breakthrough for several Georgia state officials, who promptly ordered a new state slogan.
Weeks later, Georgia’s slogan was changed to “Georgia: They Actually Filmed Most of Deliverance in West Virginia.” This helped some, but a large part of the damage had already been done in the preceding 26 years. Over the next twelve months, several new slogans were attempted to minimize the damage further, including “Georgia: No Hillbillies Here!” and “Georgia: The Unrapingest Place on Earth.”
Now state officials believe the time has come for a complete break from their sloganing past, possibly with one involving puppy dogs. Early proposals include “Georgia: A Mouthful of the South” to appeal to food fans and “Georgia: It’s Saferific!” appealing to security-minded vacationers by highlighting Georgia’s appealing lack of New York and Oklahoma-style terrorist attacks. This reporter’s suggestion that the tourism board might look into signing Burt Reynolds to act as a pitchman for the new slogan was met with an initial flurry of enthusiasm, quickly followed by a very rude ending to the telephone call. the commune news knows the tourism board’s pain from when our proposed slogan of “New Jersey: Cows Gotta Shit Somewhere” proved even less popular than our used copy of the rare Will Smith country album Hill-Willie Style. Ramon Nootles insists rather desperately that he didn’t actually travel to the south to report this story, but we have the Krystal wrappers to prove it.
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 September 5, 2005
The New Anne Frank DiaryYou may be asking yourself what do I mean by my slightly smug title? Am I mocking the tragically short and tortured life of a little girl killed in a massive campaign of genocide? No. I embrace Anne Frank's courageous spirit and indomitable will more than ever, now that I have had to spend secretive nights with my own "family" here at the commune, hiding out from imaginary government ninjas, fabricated Al Qaeda terrorists, and any number of made-up enemies that forced us to take to the road in recent weeks.
As a fresh reminder (let's pretend we're on the second part of a two-part sitcom, and you need filling in), the commune staff, sans Ritalin poster child Omar Bricks, fled their home offices weeks ago under the presumed threat of international terrorists trying to kill us. Why? Who knows. Perhaps in Red Bagel's belabored mind, he pictured some insidious plot to turn the commune offices into a potent missile to strike at government and financial targets. But we overran our attackers, whom I personally witnessed were carrying weapons that looked remarkably like toys, including a lime-green Super Soaker, and took to the road.
This is a natural reaction to a possible terrorist attack, of course: Load all your staff and whatever equipment you can carry into a Partridge family-style bus and drive west as if you're following the Grateful Dead. Reporting the incident to the police, federal agents, or the Department of Homeland Security would only tip your...
º Last Column: Highway to Hell
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You may be asking yourself what do I mean by my slightly smug title? Am I mocking the tragically short and tortured life of a little girl killed in a massive campaign of genocide? No. I embrace Anne Frank's courageous spirit and indomitable will more than ever, now that I have had to spend secretive nights with my own "family" here at the commune, hiding out from imaginary government ninjas, fabricated Al Qaeda terrorists, and any number of made-up enemies that forced us to take to the road in recent weeks. As a fresh reminder (let's pretend we're on the second part of a two-part sitcom, and you need filling in), the commune staff, sans Ritalin poster child Omar Bricks, fled their home offices weeks ago under the presumed threat of international terrorists trying to kill us. Why? Who knows. Perhaps in Red Bagel's belabored mind, he pictured some insidious plot to turn the commune offices into a potent missile to strike at government and financial targets. But we overran our attackers, whom I personally witnessed were carrying weapons that looked remarkably like toys, including a lime-green Super Soaker, and took to the road. This is a natural reaction to a possible terrorist attack, of course: Load all your staff and whatever equipment you can carry into a Partridge family-style bus and drive west as if you're following the Grateful Dead. Reporting the incident to the police, federal agents, or the Department of Homeland Security would only tip your hand that you're important enough to be a terrorist target. And I'm sure a nasty new piece of paper is added to your FBI file, so it's best to avoid contacting the authorities at all costs. This is the rationalization of Red Bagel's mind, of course, and it's precisely why I've been writing angry letters to doctors to have the man committed for years now. Not that being on the run from international assassins with the commune staff was all bad. Some of it was very bad. Some of it was agonizingly bad. So I might draw a pie chart, if that were my forte, and split it roughly into equal parts about 33% bad, 33% very bad, and %34 agonizingly bad. With a potential margin of error that it might be 99% agonizingly bad. You try sharing the same bathroom that Stigmata Spent and Ramon Nootles are using. One day of that and you'll be ready to walk in downtown Falluja with a sign reading "Islam blows!" It was every bit as bad as I say. Boris Utzov doesn't speak a lick of decipherable English, of course, but it's impossible to understand him anyway since the man is always eating. I now know why all his columns are stained with ketchup, mustard, and French fry grease. But at least his broken English is a lot cleaner than anything coming out of Ivana Folger-Balzac's mouth; the woman could have made Sam Kinison blush. I've never heard such abundant use of the F-word just to ask a hitchhiker for directions. All his money and Bagel wouldn't even spring for a hotel room. Well, he did get a hotel room, but he wouldn't let any of us stay in it since he was using it for the "commune dummies" he built out of old mannequins. "Just a trap to catch the bad guys," Bagel told us, rubbing his hands together in his usual scheme-talking manner. So basically we all end up sleeping on the bus seats, some of us two to a seat. I'm not sure which was more disturbing, Shabozz Wertham's audible racist sleep-mumbling or Boner Cunningham's somnambulist groping. What am I saying? Of course Boner was the worst. Without a doubt. I'm just not cut out for this group. Believe me, if I was employable elsewhere, I would leave them all behind. When the most intellectual conversation you can get is with an 8-year-old mail clerk, you know you're in the wrong place. Come to think of it, why did I even follow them? It's not like anyone put a gun to my head. Well, not a real gun. º Last Column: Highway to Hellº more columns
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|  October 15, 2001
Lookin' a Gassed Horse in the MouseNedwrinkle Nedmiller has a dream, ladies and gentlementarians. It is a dream that one day a giant mouse will come to town driving a fire truck, and everyone will give that mouse money, but Nedmiller will be out of money. Ned spent all his money buying cream pies to throw at the governor on the Eve of Meringue, a holiday tradition that goes back as far as the settlin' days, when the wild coyotes played Frisbee in the prairies and them prairie dogs done pushed a couch into the river and nobody can get their undershorts washed for Sunday churchin' because of it. Goddamn them prairie dogs.
In this dream Nedmonkey's got no cash to be givin to the fire-truck driving mouse, and is feeling right ashamed because of it. The rest of the town is having a grand old time, giving the firetruck mouse their tens and twenties, their fives and their rare commemorative eight dollar bills that were minted so folks wouldn't have to break a twenty when they're renting rollerskates for the annual Holy Molar-Rink skating party to promote good teeth and God and all. Though Ned always had to break a 20 anyways since he liked to get his skates sharpened and his incisors capped on a yearly basis.
So every damned body is forking over their greenbacks to the fire-truck driving mouse, little kids be smashing open their pigglybanks with little newborn puppies and women older than Union Steel are prying open them change purses to fling their buffalo nickels at the mouse. And there's...
º Last Column: Rubber Ain't My Brother
º more columns
Nedwrinkle Nedmiller has a dream, ladies and gentlementarians. It is a dream that one day a giant mouse will come to town driving a fire truck, and everyone will give that mouse money, but Nedmiller will be out of money. Ned spent all his money buying cream pies to throw at the governor on the Eve of Meringue, a holiday tradition that goes back as far as the settlin' days, when the wild coyotes played Frisbee in the prairies and them prairie dogs done pushed a couch into the river and nobody can get their undershorts washed for Sunday churchin' because of it. Goddamn them prairie dogs.
In this dream Nedmonkey's got no cash to be givin to the fire-truck driving mouse, and is feeling right ashamed because of it. The rest of the town is having a grand old time, giving the firetruck mouse their tens and twenties, their fives and their rare commemorative eight dollar bills that were minted so folks wouldn't have to break a twenty when they're renting rollerskates for the annual Holy Molar-Rink skating party to promote good teeth and God and all. Though Ned always had to break a 20 anyways since he liked to get his skates sharpened and his incisors capped on a yearly basis.
So every damned body is forking over their greenbacks to the fire-truck driving mouse, little kids be smashing open their pigglybanks with little newborn puppies and women older than Union Steel are prying open them change purses to fling their buffalo nickels at the mouse. And there's Nedrumple, penniless and excluded, feelin' like a polo jockey on prom night.
So Ned hops on the back of a pair of safety scissors that're waltzin down the street, and rides them lefties to Giant Land, where things is bigger than average. Ned sneaks into a giant's house and steals himself a gigantic mousetrap from the giant's attic. On the way out, Ned hears a boomin' voice speak out "Feeb Flies Fort Fumes! I Smell the Cologne of an Old Spice Man!" but Nedrip is purely an ambergris kind of Nedmiller so the biggun must've been speaking to another tiny man come visiting from the Land of Average-Sized Things. Anyhow, t'was not Ned's concern so he made his way back home via a hole in the Time-Life Conundrum, picking up some butterfly milk on the way home.
Once back in the Land of Things Not So Large, Ned set up them giant mouse-trap in the middle of Rhubarb street, aimin' to teach that giant mouse a lesson about comin' to town and acceptin' money from everybody on days when Nedro was flush out of funds. Ned was about to think up a brilliant plan to lure them mouse into them hinged contraption of doom when out of nowhere the governor came running up to see if the mouse would take Mastercard. The gov'ner done stepped in one of Ned's cream pies, which stuck to his shoe and he stumbled right into the giant mouse trap, which cut him in half like a giant fellow bent on making a meal of governors.
It was as tragic a scene as Ned has been witness to in the last three-quarters of an hour, but when that trap came down on the governor, just before he was divided into two equal half-governors, he let out a squeak just like a giant mouse would be expected to do, resulting in such comedy that Ned and the giant mouse laughed themselves half silly. Having bonded so completely, Ned and the giant mouse went and sat on top of the great pyramid and ate giant flavored gumdrops, best friends from that day forward. Until moments later when Ned was woken up quite unexpectedly by crabs a-nibblin' on his toes and the dreamtime was done. Ned Nedmiller has this dream. º Last Column: Rubber Ain't My Brotherº more columns
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Quote of the Day“We'll meet again. You might say that's impossible, since people can only meet once, but they haven't factored in my patented time machine and early-onset Alzheimer's.”
-Capt. Don Spacegain, Year 3054Fortune 500 CookieNow's the perfect time to launch your alternative news website. Thursday's haul proves your friend's theory that the Halloween is really the only lucrative time for trick-or-treating. For your information, he's going to shoot his old woman down 'cause he caught her messing 'round with some other man; you don't need to know everything. Lucky son of a bitch.
Try again later.Top Cruel New Rumors| 1. | Gay people can't whistle | | 2. | Tennessee quarter shows state trooper harassing black motorist | | 3. | French Stewart not actually French | | 4. | Cats love vodka | | 5. | Donald Trump is secret owner of McDonald's chain | |
|   North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie BY Roland McShyster 7/21/2003 Glad you finally came around, America, welcome back to Entertainment Police. What have we got for you this week? Well, before we get to that, you ever notice how I always refer to the column by "this week" when we all damn well know it only runs once every two weeks? I'm sure you were wondering about that, unless you just take everything you read at face value and figured your brain was probably freaking out every other week and giving you a dĂ©jĂ vu of the previous week's column on a rhythmic schedule, which is pretty bizarre but people believe in Scientology, too. But anyway, yeah I know it only runs every two weeks, I'm not trying to fool anybody there. That's as often at the commune publishes, which is fine since they still pay us every week. Though come to think of it, paying us...
Glad you finally came around, America, welcome back to Entertainment Police. What have we got for you this week? Well, before we get to that, you ever notice how I always refer to the column by "this week" when we all damn well know it only runs once every two weeks? I'm sure you were wondering about that, unless you just take everything you read at face value and figured your brain was probably freaking out every other week and giving you a déjà vu of the previous week's column on a rhythmic schedule, which is pretty bizarre but people believe in Scientology, too. But anyway, yeah I know it only runs every two weeks, I'm not trying to fool anybody there. That's as often at the commune publishes, which is fine since they still pay us every week. Though come to think of it, paying us only on new-issue weeks sounds like exactly the kind of crap Red Bagel would try to pull, so don't anybody read this column to him lest he gets any ideas from it. But the real reason I say "this week" is that there's just no good way to refer to this two-week period without sounding like a complete nerd. You start messing around with terms like bi-weekly and that just sounds too much like a lesbian magazine title to me. So unless you want me to start saying "this half-month" like some kind of bed-wetting science fiction geek, I recommend you just take a chill pill over the whole thing.
So anyway, back to the original question: What have we got for you this week? What are you, slow to catch on? Movie reviews, dumbass!
In Theaters
Bed Boys II
It's nice to live in an age when big action stars aren't afraid to acknowledge the homoerotic undertones of the typical buddy action picture by ceasing to beat around the bush (the pun wasn't intended but I'll take it) and just doing a gay action flick every once in a while. For the longest time people acted like this was some huge deal, like you couldn't have a couple of gay guys running around, shooting people and spouting catchphrases. Kudos to Will Smith and funnyman Laurence Fishburne for taking that bold step in style. True, this way neither of them can win the girl in the end, but it's a nice change of pace when the filmmakers don't have to staple a pair of boobs to a flimsy sketch of a character to give the heroes motivation. After all, what could be more crowd-pleasing than having the two leads go home together at the end, without having to watch some girl pretend like she can shoot a gun? Kudos and other snack products to you, Hollyweird.
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Rock the Cradle of Love
Virtual sex bomb Angelina Jolie reprises her role from the popular Billy Joel video "Rock the Cradle of Love" in this feature-length shake of the moneymaker. Few thought she'd have much of a career after that video, unless Winger got really popular again, but she's done all right for herself. I guess it pays to be able to do a serviceable fake English accent; smart pinup girls should take note and work on that. Though that's kind of like saying fat Olympic divers shouldn't do the cannonball, probably doesn't come up much. This film another shameless example of the trend toward giving movies titles that are longer than Ron Jeremy's wang, but even at that it's still better than the original title: Lara Croft Who is the Tomb Raider Stars (and By Stars We Mean She Both Kicks and Shows Some Ass) in The Cradle of Love: A Rocking Titfest. The longer title might have brought more pasty teenagers into the theaters, but the trailer for this film (available now on DVD as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) has the same effect without using all those words.
Seabiscuit
As anyone who's seen Caddyshack knows, a "seabiscuit" is when you take a shit in a swimming pool, which obviously makes this a very bizarre name for a movie. It's even more bizarre that Tobey Macguire is starring in this one, though the make-up people did a pretty great job of giving him a dorky red wig that does make him look like a seabiscuit. It takes a brave actor to wear something like that. Kind of reminds me of when George Clooney dressed up as a Latino pimp for that goofy Yo Brother, Where's the Party? movie. This movie isn't nearly as fun as that one, though, despite the hilariously inappropriate title. Personally I found it hard to follow, in part because I kept wandering out of the theater to see if there was anything better going on outside.
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
After all these years, Hollywood finally gave me an excuse to drag my old 3-D glasses out of the bedroom closet, dust them off and cart them gingerly out to the metroplex for the first time since Jaws 3-D sucked all over the big screen. These actually aren't even the glasses they gave me for that one, I have a free promotional pair from 7-11 from when they inexplicably showed Terms of Endearment in 3-D on Fox a few years back. It sucked, too, but it was fun to wear the glasses. Actually, all 3-D movies ever have sucked, including this one, but really they've always been thinly disguised excuses for people to get to wear the fun glasses. You can try to just wear them out and about town, but after about 20 minutes if you haven't walked into a bus yet you'll have a headache the size of Chinatown and your rods and cones will be all mixed up like they were a crazy breakfast cereal.
That's all they paid me to write this week, America, so you'll have to turn elsewhere to quench your passion for numerous letters strung together into pretty words, if this wasn't enough to keep your boat floating. Until next time, America: Get out!    |
