Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Rock Lobster
The Tidal Wave of Bizarre Crap Must End

Hundreds of years of technological innovation have come and gone in the history of human beings. Naked, weak, and clawless, our superior brains allowed us to bend and shape the natural world to suit our needs. We have raised towers of glass and steel as monuments to human prosperity and ingenuity. We have spanned rivers with glittering webs of steel cable, and we have crossed those webs with computerized horseless carriages equipped with GPS, dual airbags, and mag wheels. We, the human race, have poured our time, our blood, and our minds into advancement after mind-numbing advancement, ultimately achieving the pinnacle of civilization, the personification of all for which we have struggled and for which we stand:

The Rocky Mountain Lobster.

And the Big Mouth Billy Bass. And some sort of catfish. And an even creepier skeleton of a fish. And some kind of duck. All of them motorized to twitch and jerk and sing. All of them rubberized and thoroughly disturbing. All of them metaphorically winking at you as they wail, because of course the songs they sing are all about water and fish, ha-ha-ha. Oh, the subtle irony.

The Rocky Mountain Lobster was the last straw. I was in the Family Dollar buying faux Tupperware the other day, and at the checkout counter they had a stack of them. It's a rubbery lobster that jerks and twitches and plays music, pretending to sing. I can only guess that the effect is less endearing than that of the Big Mouth Billy Bass, as lobsters have no appreciable mouth with which to animatedly belt out Ave Maria. Come to think of it, I'm not sure exactly which songs the Rocky Mountain Lobster is licensed to play. I don't suppose it really matters.

"It amazes me," I said to the minimum-wage-earning, middle-aged clerk who was struggling to count out my change, "that they keep producing more of these things."

"They all do the same thing," the clerk told me, his voice a hushed conspiratorial whisper. "I bet it's the same stuff underneath there. You seen Jaws? They're just like that, only smaller."

I spent the rest of the day trying to imagine the scene: a bikini-clad starlet goes for a moonlight swim, only for the ominous music to begin playing as a small fin breaks the water:

"Taaaake me to the riverrrrr..."

I have sat patiently by, if writhing a little, while Popular Culture inundates me with bizarre, worthless crap. I'm a capitalist, mind you, and commercialization doesn't really bother me. But I think the madly popular singing mounted fish and their similarly mechanized brethren toll the death knell for our brain-dead popular culture. The next step, logically, is a mounted deer head covered in acrylic fur that soulfully croons "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and spasmodically cranks its severed neck.

I was willing to sit idly by when I saw the Spice Girls Barbie dolls on the discount rack at the toy store. I wasn't going to say anything when they redesigned Barbie so she could bare her stomach in this season's latest slut clothes without that disturbing waist-joint seam running where her belly button should be. I held my peace when my wife pointed out the Rosie O'Donnell dolls lurking behind the licensed Elvis and NASCAR Barbie figures. I didn't even make too many remarks when I saw the commercial for the Fast Food Checkout playset that trains your children for their inevitable careers at McDonald's.

But I will not abide the Rocky Mountain Lobster.

Join with me. Go to your local retail outlet, find the large stack of Big Mouth Billy Basses, and take one to the store manager. Tell her or him, "This thing is just damned creepy, Sir or Madame, and I demand that this cultural blight end." And as the police haul you away, resist passively. In fact, you should sing as they club you, at the top of your lungs and in the grand tradition of civil rights protestors and hippie sit-in participants:

"Taaaake me to the riverrrrr..."