EPISODE 928: WE'RE GONNA MAKE IT
Carol Burnett, Tim Walz, and a Godzilla that Cares About You
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the Substack that loves a life affirming Godzilla meme. It’s been a wild week. Let’s get into it!
THE WOWND UP
This week the Republican nominee for President was refused landing at the airport nearest a campaign stop because he still owed tens of thousands of dollars for gas from his last presidential run. He also received a cease and desist order from singer Celine Dion after he used one of her songs at a rally. Bizarrely, the song was written for a movie about a ship whose creators bragged could never be sunk that then sank on its maiden voyage. And his running mate tweeted that daylight savings time diminishes fertility by 10%. You cannot make this stuff up.
Meanwhile, in the weirdest story of the week, Christian TikTokers have begun posting videos “discovering” an artist’s rendition of a Minion that has been crucified.
Yes, it is very, very weird. What the TikTokers say in the videos is also identical, which has led people to wonder what the hell is going on. I’m going to do a deep dive into it all for subscribers later this week. Suffice to say, it is a rabbit hole of wacky.
Elsewhere, at Disney’s annual D23 convention, Lucasfilm’s chief creative officer Dave Filoni announced that the Millennium Falcon ride at Disney theme parks will now include the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda (aka Grogu) flying by outside the Falcon. Disney also released the first footage of the new Jude Law Star Wars show, Skeleton Crew, which seems to imagine kids from our world-ish (but with hammerheads for neighbors) who end up thrust into a wild Star Wars adventure.
To me it feels like Goonies set in the world of Star Wars. Interesting.
TIM WALZ IS
It has been an insane week for anyone paying attention to American politics. On Tuesday morning, news broke that Vice President Kamala Harris had chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her partner on the Democratic ticket. And almost immediately, pretty much everyone rooting for Harris lost their minds (myself included). He’s a schoolteacher, he’s a veteran, he was the moderator of the gay straight alliance at the school he worked at while also helping the state football team win state; as governor he renamed a section of highway for Minneapolis native Prince, and signed the decree in purple ink; his daughter was conceived through IVF—and he and his wife named her Hope—I’m not crying you are.
Even though the vice presidential candidate’s job is often to be the attack dog, and he has definitely filled that role this week, throwing some pretty hard elbows at his opponents, the thing that seems to be most resonating with people about Walz is their perception of him as a likable, generous, hopeful figure. Already there’s a website, Tim Walz Fixed Your Bicycle, where every time you click on the screen, you get a different kind-hearted or Big Dad Energy thing that Tim Walz supposed said or did.
There’s actually some really poignant ones, too. This one really got me right there.
That site—and by the way, a number of those lines can be turned into T-shirts—points to a more specific vision of Walz, which is that Tim Walz is a good neighbor.
But in a sense I think the point is not fundamentally that Walz himself is special, but that his way of proceeding points to something that we all experience and want to see embraced and raised up—a sense of ordinary care for one another. We all know how it feels to have a neighbor pulling out of their driveways stop to say hello and ask about our parents; to have a teacher take the time to call us on a weekend to touch base about our kid, the local librarian stop us to let us know there’s a new book in by our favorite author, the nurse hold our hand when the procedure we’re having is frightening us, or the bartender at our watering hole buy us a drink. They’re the smallest of moments offered by people who are part of the broader fabric of our existence. But as it turns out a lot of the connections of our lives, the strength we find in hard times is built out of these kinds of ordinary gestures.
Part of me wants to feel bad for Walz because so much is being projected onto him. No one can be as perfect as we seem to be trying to make him. But then I think of people I know who are actually fit this description, like my own dad, who regularly dropped everything to go help our neighbors whenever they had trouble with their air conditioning, or the guys I’m staying with this weekend, who are constantly inviting neighbors and friends into their lives and doing nice things for them.
And so maybe this image of Walz is not naïve, in a way. Because the world and the country is filled with people like him. And to celebrate him as a kind-hearted Big Dad Energy neighbor is to name something pretty important that people want to see supported and encouraged in our country.
Brave to anyone who had Mary Tyler Moore memes on their bingo card for 2024.
HAPPILY HAPPILY HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Carol Burnett’s Broadway debut was as local yokel princess in a musical retelling of the Princess and the Pea story called Once Upon a Mattress, and won a Tony Award. The show established her as a comedic phenomenon.
Mattress has just come back to Broadway with Sutton Foster in the lead role; I saw it last winter at City Center’s Encores! Foster absolutely destroyed audiences. People always want to put her in the role of Star, because she’s so damn talented. But she is always at her best when she can take that expectation and undermine it. No one is better at making themselves look foolish in a hilarious way than Sutton Foster.
CBS Sunday Morning this week did a wonderful profile of Carol Burnett and Sutton Foster. It’s an eye-opening (and in some ways heart-breaking) look at Burnett’s early life. (There’s a moment where the reporter asks Burnett what she did when she finally started making money, having grown up very poor. At first Burnett kids, “I spent it.” But then she admits: “Actually I bought the first pair of shoes that actually fit me.”)
Seriously, my friends, this interview is everything. Bring Kleenex.
THE MOST INTENSE NEW TRAILER IS ABOUT…SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE?
Speaking of SNL, there’s a docudrama coming in October about the making of the show. And rather than leaning to the laughs, the trailer suggests a taut Lorne Michaels coming of age story set in a TV studio filled with sharks.
MOMENT OF WOW
I’ve posted this before, but it’s really speaking to me these days.
Have a great week!
To the friend who combs the interweb for the gems so we don't have to. Wonderful post today with its meaningful bits and pieces.
David Roth, at Defector, wrote this, which captures perfectly both Walz and the GOP:
"This is the conflict that Trumpism can't resolve, the thing that makes even the most gently lobbed of softball questions impossible to handle and what makes an assertion like Walz's—other people are just as real as you, and they deserve respect—not just unanswerable, but incomprehensible. It's not just the idea that Walz is expressing but the very idea of someone like Walz expressing it that is so fundamentally confounding to operators like Rufo; the concept of a normal, empathetic, passably happy heterosexual white man who is not constantly afraid and angry and arguing with everyone around him simply does not compute."