Category Archives: Popular Culture

Barbie’s Final Joke

It may have spurred women to seek out gynecological health.

But I’m not sure I agree with this: “In the film’s final scene, after deciding to leave Barbieland for the real world, Barbie enthusiastically tells a receptionist, “I’m here to see my gynecologist,” a joke that could be based either on her supposed lack of genitals or her evident excitement for care many women find unpleasant.” Sénéchal and colleagues write in their paper.

I finally saw the flick on the plane to Miami last week, and that wasn’t my interpretation (spoiler alert). She had just talked to her creator, who told her that she could live in the real world if she wished to. I took her visit to the gyno to mean that, like Pinocchio, she had finally become a real woman. FWIW, I did find the movie an interesting commentary on gender and new-wave feminism and the modern relationship between American (or western) men and women.

Hisamitsu

For years, I’d been wondering what that little phrase was that you hear women sing at the end of commercials for Salonpas pain reliever. I did eventually manage to track it down. It sounds like “Sammy too,” but it’s actually the manufacturer with the name of the title of this post (obviously Japanese). I would have thought it was pronounced HIsaMITsu, but apparently it’s HiSAMItsu .

Anyway, they must have finally gotten the message from viewers that it was a head scratcher, so for the first time this morning, I saw an ad in which they actually showed the word at the end. It’s funny that they’d been singing it for all these years with complete ineffectiveness at conveying what it was.

[Update later afternoon]

Apparently I misspelled it: It’s Hisamitsu.

Bob Newhart

RIP. He was a very funny guy, with a deadpan delivery that couldn’t be beat. A great straight man as well. And not just visually. He was famous for his hilarious phone calls, in which you only heard his side. We had one of his albums when I was a kid in the 60s. It was called “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” Here’s an example:

It’s funny, but I recently saw a rerun of the 80s show, and I’ve had the theme song (which was by Henry Mancini!) getting stuck in my head periodically since. The last episode might have been one of the most brilliant endings of any television series, if you were a fan of the show in the seventies. It was part of one of the best Saturday-night prime-time comedy lineups in television history, with All in the Family, and Mary Tyler Moore. Oh, and Mash.