Richard Dawson didn’t say it. He wasn’t in RoboCop. It was said by an actor named S. D. Nemeth playing a character named Bixby Snyder. And I don’t think it was a game show. It seemed to be some mindless sitcom.
Well thanks for taking the time to register and post this as your introductory post! Hope you stick around. Seriously.
“Plunk your magic twanger Froggy”
Im rubber and you’re glue,
Everything bounces off of me and sticks to you!
Ha!
It’s been a while since I had my ham ticket, but I seem to recall we used a 10/5 scale, and the best signal would be 10 by 5 (or was it 9 by 5?) But I don’t think it was 5 by 5. Maybe that is from some other radio dialect.
When your brain is gone, you’re even worse than dead.
‘Hey, monkey boy!’ – Dr. Emilio Lizardo (aka John Whorfin)
Not everyone but it is a particular of a general warp in the dialect. Just like the rolled “R” in Scots Highlander, the R/L ambiguity in Japanese and Chinese English speakers, and the inflection used by people from India and surrounding areas. And many others, including the earlier referenced quote about “steenkin’ badges” where the e for i substitution marks the speaker as having learned Spanish as their first language. (Not everyone in that case does it either.)
Closer to home, there’s the “Dixie Dipthong” warp in vowel sounds that localizes the speaker to south of Kentucky and east of New Mexico, the substitution of “f” for a terminal “th” that is most common along a line between Savannah and Mobile, and the pronunciation of the number 4 as two syllables that occurs in the Carolinas. :dubious:
Or, as Jimmy Buffett put it:
♫ … I can’t pronounce my R’s and G’s
When I’m speakin’ Southernese … ♫
I could go on about what various Northeasterners do with R’s and ER / OI combination transubstitutions, but the point is that I don’t confuse the way they learned to speak with stupidity. :mad:
Don’t Panic! Don’t Panic!
I went and audited one of the commercials, and, just as I expected, he pronounced it as “Seb’m Up” which is consistent with Caribbean dialects. (Trinidad, as it turns out, not Jamaica).
I think I heard this from Peewee Herman. But we were saying it to each other as kids long before him. I remember it in the 1960s.
Anyone remember “It’s Miller time”?
David Brin actually had this phrase surviving into the far future in The Uplift War, which I thought was pretty ambitious. 
“Sometimes you feel like a nut… sometimes you don’t!”
“Coooooooobbbbbbbbraaaaaaaaaa!”
“My buddy, my buddy, wherever i go, he goes, my buddy, my buddy, my buddy and me!”
But long live, “bite my shiny metal ass”
It’s been ages since I’ve heard any of the Valley Girl phrases - which needs to be said in a high-pitched, perky, vacuous voice for maximum effect:
“Like… Ohmygod!”
“Like, totally tubular!”
“Like, gag me with a spoon!”
And perfectly parodied by Shirley The Loon on Tony Toon Adventures, especially when doing transcendental meditation.
“Oooommmmm… whataloonthatIam.”
Exactly! When we were kids, we went around saying “no! Not now! Not Ever! NEVER!” about everything we could think of. 
Oh yes! And one my friends and I use all of the time “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this”.
I can’t remember anyone ever using “groovy” except in a smart-assed “ironic” way, at least not in my neck of the woods. (grew up mostly in Anchorage, but spent lots of the 60s and 70s in Washington and California).
I’ve been wondering how many people watching this recent Kraft commercialremember this PSA from the 1980s that it’s parodying.