This is inspired by the Winking Bellybuttons thread in GQ.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen on TV (Commercial/TV show/whatever)
The whole idea of Bellybuttons singing is bizarre, and if they do sing, they ought to sing respectable songs, navy songs, or something.
Other odd things I’ve seen:
[li]A talking sandwich (For this commercial on keeping your fridge fresh)[/li]
[li]On Animal Planet, I saw a dog who could sort of sing. And on Animal Planet’s Funniest Home Videos, I’ve seen a number of strange things, including dogs who can walk upstairs backwards.[/li]
I never saw this myself but on my school’s network, some of the janitors were messing around and put on some porno on our channel. That only lasted a little while, but it was very memorable all the same.
An elephant birth. At a local zoo. Caught live on tape in time for the the dinner hour.
Mommyphant is rocking back and forth, suddenly thousands of gallons of water gush out her hindend and BAM! this translucent pod lands on the ground behind her. The keepers finish ripping the placenta open and out pops this adorable but slimy babyphant.
Kinda cool actually, once you got past the torrent of water.
(BTW, the Florida Orange Juice Council also has a talking sandwich as their corporate shill.)
Well probably not so bizarre to some folks but to my puritanical American eyes, it was rather odd. I’m watching late night tv in Finland a couple weeks ago and up came an add for a chat line. Now, normally in N.America the add will be something like women traipsing around in bikinis on some tropical resort with a number flashing on the bottom and someone saying how exciting and interesting these women are to talk to. On this Finnish channel they didn’t beat around the bush, so to speak, and simply showed a naked woman masterbating and waiting for your call.
Backstory: when I moved into my current apartment in '93, my friends Joe and David helped me move in. We hooked up my tv and cable and plunked down on the sofa to see if it worked. First thing we saw was a large, gray-haired lady holding up an armadillo. A tiny, old grinning Asian man leaned over and, ummm . . . Well, you should have SEEN the look on the armadillo’s face, not to mention those of mine, Joe’s and David’s! To this day I have no idea what the hell station or show that was, but the three of us all remember it quite clearly. As does, I wager, the armadillo.
Two things. First, a Discovery Channel nature documentary, circa 1991, showing a bunch of turtles attacking and consuming a long-legged bird in a few inches of water in an African water hole.
Second, Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa and John Tesh (!) jamming on Black Sabbath’s “The Wizard.” This was on Conan O’Brien, round about 1994.
Well, Eve’s fellated armadillo beats anything I’ve ever seen or heard of, but here goes:
[li] The Prevacid commercial with the animated stomach lying in bed and spitting fire… actually more disgusting than bizarre.[/li]
[li] Talking toilet bowls. The one for a cleaning product with the lid flapping for the talking motions was bad enough, but the winner was for a toddler’s toilet training seat where the actual opening of the seat represented the character’s mouth, and the eyes were up near where the hinge attaches… sort of like it’s telling your kid “hey - you’re supposed to make wee wee in my mouth!”[/li]
[li] Camel Toe Annie, on Conan O’Brian. Brilliant. (Thanks minty for reminding me of Conan.)[/li]
[li] Drew Barrymore jumping up on David Letterman’s desk and displaying her braless titties for him.[/li]
[li] And to complete the late night talk show category, Jay Leno making rather explicit advances at Martha Stewart, as he helped her stuff Thanksgiving turkeys.[/li]
(And Balduran, in Manhattan, you used to get cable TV public access channels that were nothing but the same previews you see at the beginning of porno tapes. I don’t know if this still goes on… after the Guiliani Regime.)
REGIS WHAT’S HIS NAME DOING ANYTHING, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE!
Scene two: Local 6:00 P.M. news broadcast in the rural Midwest. Report on the use of cow manure for the production of heating gas at one of the land grant universities. File video: a close-up view of dairy cow defecating. Very close close-up. The cow had been eating lots of alfalfa and getting plenty of fluids.
One night on The Animal Channel, or Discovery, or one of those channels, there was this documentary of different mating cycles of various African animals. There was this one shot of a zebra. He was very… excited by the possibility of mating. For five minutes, they showed this zebra running around with what looked like a 5th leg, chasing the female zebras. That was freaking insanely bizzaar.
On a more lighthearted note…Debbie Gibson performing with the Circle Jerks at CBGB’s(saw it on TV, not in person)
On the not so lighthearted…
Me and my sister, as small children, sit down on Saturday morning to watch cartoons. Instead of Cartoons, we get some sort of documentary on what the Germans did to Jewish children, during the holocost. I dont remember much about it, but I remember seeing what appeared to be actual footage of a german soldier chasing down a child and killing him, on camera. I remember the child puking as the soldier killed him. Me and my sister sat there and watched, in horror, until the tv station came on with some sort of an apology message, and put on the show that was supposed to air. I mentioned this to my sister a year or so ago, and she got this horrified look on her face. She had forgotten it, and as soon as I started to coment on it, she got really creeped out and remebered it. I had nightmares about this show for a long time afterwords. I guess I must have been in first or second grade(about 1970 or so).
Oh yeah, I’ve seen a giraffe giving birth. It was many a year ago…but I know what I saw. You don’t imagine something like this. It was a regular sized, female (we HOPE) giraffe, and there was something wet sort of hanging out of her…and after awhile it just slid out. In a word: grody. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve seen your first birth. On another note, they showed a baby being born in school, so this wasn’t technically TV. And twice, once in health class for god knows what reason, and another when they were doing an internship thing. Either way, it always traumitizes me.
The hot armadillo sex clearly wins for this category.
Personally, the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen was the OJ car chase on every freaken’ channel. To add to the surreal nature of this, at the time my roommate and I were both addicted to Nintendo, so we had two TVs next to each other, one for watching and one for playing Super Mario World. We turned both of them on and each took a remote control, and surfed through the various network coverage of OJ.
We finally settled on Telemundo, although neither of us spoke Spanish. The newscaster was clearly freaked out by this turn of events, and we appreciated his enthusiasm for delivering the news. To us, it sounded like {spanish spanish spanish OJ SIMPSON!!! spanish spanish spanish BRONCO!!! spanish spanish spanish OJ SIMPSON Y EL BRONCO!!!}. And really, what did you need to know about the chase other than OJ Simpson and the Bronco?
It contains, amongst other things, a singing dog standing on it’s hind legs in a bikini, babies with mermaid tails doing synchronised swimming and more babies with giant coloured clown wigs with helicopter blades coming out of them.
It’s all set in a multi-coloured lake with coloured fountains and the like.
I seriously thought I was on hardcore hallucinogenic drugs.
"I saw that one night at a party and one of the guys watching said, swear to god…
“WTF? Is that Danny DeVito he’s dragging along?”"
—I am pleased as punch to note that your friend stole that line from a “Movieline” column I wrote about a video showing animal mating habits . . . Gee, now I know how Mrs. Parker felt!
Well, aside from that winking(singing?) belly button ad which really unnerves me. I think one of the oddest thing I’ve seen on tv in a while happened when I was staying in this cheap hotel, you know, the kind where you can only get two channels on tv and one is the all weather station.
So, anyway I’m watching the other channel which was broadcasting a volleyball tournament,I have no idea if the game was legit or a parody, though it seemed real. It had announcers, fans and such.
The thing that made it seem odd were the two teams playing each other;
Team one: A group of 20-something very blonde, VERY big-breasted,very scantily clad women.
Team two: A group of 60-70ish-something balding,pudgy men.
They’re playing the game,of course the women were creaming the guys (no pun intended) and every time the girl team scored a point they would start jumping up and down big boobs bouncing all in their faces they’d scream hug each other and such; while meanwhile the old farts team would stand on the other side frozen in one spot just STARING at the girls and licking their lips, and mopping their brows with their shirttails(guess they were thirsty and hot,hmmm) I thought the whole thing was such a hoot just watching the geezers watching those girls with those longing looks; I still laugh when I think about it.
On the Discovery channel they had that Walking With Dinosaurs special and there were two saurapods having sex. I know it was computer animated, but still.
