Learning Day: EiEi Yoga 1996🌭

EiEi Yoga is a 1996 yoga instructional video for children. Does it feel like a yoga class? No. It feels like a malevolent spirit tricking a limber Californian into preying on kids. Also, that malevolent spirit hates Jamaicans. The malevolent spirit’s twin passions are turning a decent man into a pedophile, and promoting Jamaican stereotypes.

EiEi Yoga shocked me. When our Hotdoggery comrade GnomePickles brought this up on the Discord, I expected Hee Haw-flavored framing for generic yoga content. I also worried the instructor would feel up little kids. Bad news: that’s all kind of happening here. Good news: I don’t think the main adult in this video is a predator. I think he’s opting into a scenario that makes him look like a predator. He micro-fondles throughout. He’s somehow oblivious to the ramifications. Did no one let him see the footage? If someone showed you tape of you doing this, you’d smash every appliance in that editing suite with your bare fists. “Push it back Kristin” he intones. “Kiss your tree trunks” he coos. “That’s a beautiful looking downward dog” he whispers, while touching a child in a way that would adjust posture if any adjustment were needed but hold on he made clear they did a beautiful looking downward dog so if he’s touching them while they need no adjustment he’s just touching them because he likes touching them I guess wow I forgot when I’m concerned about a guy doing you-know-what I lose the ability to end a sentence in a timely fashion looks like my hands will keep typing until I head-butt one finger into the period key.

Who is that? Also why does he have the exact bone structure of the guy who plays “Doctor Heiter” in Human Centipede? Ha. Human Centipede. Ha ha! Watching that was a silly little dare we all gave each other back when it seemed like the 2008 Presidential Election fixed everything forever. Forgot about that era. Now I’m remembering the name of the “Doctor Heiter” actor. His name is Klaus Dieter Laser. That’s fun. That should’ve been the movie. Some kind of Teutonic Little Miss Sunshine where KDL makes his kooky family road-trip in a too-small Panzer. But no. Instead, we got Human Centipede, which was a whole thing fifteen years ago. Meanwhile, thirty years ago, a fella called Max Thomas hosted this yoga video.

The tape begins with a production card for “Mystic Fire”, followed by several legal disclaimers warning you not to break your neck in your living room. Then we see Max Thomas do some getting-in-character actor stuff before the yoga. What stuff does he do? Max Thomas’s tight, lean body manipulates hay with a pitchfork, for two small scoops and no more. Max does this in the sinuous way a stripper does any clothed pretend job. It feels like a pornography preamble. Later, this choice becomes hilarious. It’s clear Max had no salacious reasons to fork that hay.

Max gave this video a Farm Theme to make yoga approachable. He’s trying to convince mainstream 1996 Americans to see yoga as more than a Frasier punchline. In pursuit of that positive goal, Max aims for a character of “Healthy Farmer”. Unfortunately, Max is bad at acting and good at evoking coastal elite lifestyles. Max ends up Leaves Of Grass-ing his way into a body-electric pansexual vibe. He looks like he’s gearing himself up to pleasure whichever organism next crosses his path. I didn’t want that. It was a huge relief when Max stopped flexing his groin at the horizon, and started flexing his groin in the context of yoga moves. By the time his second vinyasa starts, we’re in the clear. Until then, the vibe screams “Hot Twink-On-Twink Action As Soon As Second Twink Finds Parking.”

Vinyasas abound. Max continues doing yoga poses on that goofy sun mat. Max loves yoga! As the video goes on, we’ll learn Max also loves digressions. In between ham-fisting rustic metaphors and trading repartee with demonic puppets, Max wiggle-dances as often as possible. Max dances differently than you’re thinking he will. It’s not old fashioned, or new fashioned, or any other enjoyable style. It’s like Max’s body needs to make sine waves in every direction. Max thinks “dancing” is when you move, by yourself, with the affect of Voldo from SoulCalibur. Even stranger, he calls himself “Yogi Oki Doki.”

Pandering! How do you do, fellow Baseball And Apple Pie enjoyers? Yogi Oki Doki is as American as any horrifying space alien imitating our whole deal. He’s like if David Bowie got onto green juice, never got off cocaine, and devoted his next persona to humiliating Kansas. For example, I never knew you could do that corny/repulsive “sportsball” phrasing when discussing yoga. Did you know Yogi Oki Doki “plays yoga”? That’s the syntax he chooses every single time he needs a verb for doing yoga. Hey kids: do you play baseball, or play football? Yogi Oki Doki plays yoga. Wow: that’s normal! Your parents should leave you alone with this yoga player! Even the video’s legal disclaimers say it’s fine to let him PLAY YOGA with you!

The videotape’s legal disclaimers slip into suburban rumor. They lead with a bunch of normal advice about the neck and spine. By the end, they’re warning against playing yoga until a full hour after you’ve eaten. I love this advice because it’s a pretty good tip that’s also 100% based on a fear America’s moms told each other about swimming. When I was a kid, I was led to believe I’d die in a horrific [vague muttering] if I swam 59 minutes after consuming one fruit snack. This is not true. You don’t have to wait an hour after eating to swim. You can go swimming (or play yoga) as soon as you want, as long as you don’t mind risking an upset stomach and maybe even puking. I wish the 1990s warnings had a normal tone. Maybe wait an hour? It’s a normal good idea and not life or death. When I do yoga I follow this advice, for the same reason I don’t chase a meatball sub with a cartwheel. EiEi Yoga got to this same advice the dumbest way. It’s like if an urban legend accidentally helped everyone do their taxes on time.

Back to the farm: Yogi Oki Doki is our main character. Children are his students. Two horrific animal simulacra are his sidekicks.

“Rasta The Rooster” is what you hope he’s not. He is a man in a rooster costume…with dreadlocks and a Rastacap and a stereotypical accent.

With the caveat that you should never ever watch this video, watch this video. You’ll hear the voice you don’t want to hear. Rasta The Rooster is one spliff short of your worst and least creative expectations. It’s so racist, I found myself wondering if roosters can have dark brown feathers in real life. They can. I knew they can. But I lost track of that knowledge, because in this video the plumage feels less like a feather color and more like a Feather Tone.

Here is another question I ended up asking: does Jamaica have any relationship to yoga? Something to explain this characterization? In short, no. Also Max allegedly learned yoga from B.K.S. Iyengar himself. Exciting if true. But that has so little to do with Jamaica, I can’t even get Google’s A.I. bot to hallucinate a connection. So EiEi Yoga melds Indian hatha yoga with American rural stereotypes, while making sure Jamaica catches nonstop strays. It derails the whole video. Rasta The Rooster never explains his deal. Yogi Oki Doki chats him up without explaining it. They seem to be friends? Also it feels like the producers realized Rasta The Rooster has no reason to be in the video if he just preens racistly. So Rasta also encourages the kids to play yoga. Rasta even corrects a few yoga postures. I wish I made that up. This video lets a Jamaican caricature bird-furry adjust kids’ butts.

The other sidekick is a cow. “How Now The Moo Cow” turns out to be a boilerplate heifer character. She’s a head sticking out of a Dutch door, because they only bothered to provide one operator for that puppet.

How Now’s job is to say “moo”-based puns like “moognificent”, plus one “significant udders”. Her voice actor only slips into a little of Rasta’s Jamaican accent several times. Also her head stops moving or doing anything in between most of her lines. I wish it stopped between all of her lines. It’s so much creepier the few times she does background-act.

Our other other character is The Kids. They are unfortunately One Character. This educational video suffers from too many rehearsals before taping. The kids know how to do every yoga pose. This means Yogi Oki Doki never goes over any basics or tips for how to do this stuff. This video’s viewers must’ve had to hit “pause” and “play” on the physical front of their VCR so many times. Also you’d have to pause and play from the VCR box’s interface because the kids whose families can afford channel changers can also afford yoga classes. Meanwhile, on this hell farm taped for poors, our over-drilled Kids speak and behave in hive mind-esque unison. After I watched this video, I relaxed and dialed down the alienation by catching up on Plur1bus.

After the first few poses, Max sings a song about farming. Max’s voice sounds like George Strait, in a good way, because masculinity holds manifold mysteries. The Kids perform the classic yoga technique of abandoning The Breath so they can do a manic dance to the farm song. Then Max provides a framing device for the next several poses. He will describe “a day on the farm”, with each pose acting as a metaphor for a farming activity. Wipe transition to all the children imitating sleep. Therefore, is time for the children to wake up. Good thing this video features a character who is a rooster. Bad thing he will crow in the accent a white person chose for him.

As I understand it, farmers wake up like the rest of us. Maybe their alarm rings a bit earlier. Maybe the pants they put on one leg at a time are overalls. Still, they wake up and get on with the day. Yogi Oki Doki does things a little differently:

After that anodyne exchange with a False God, the kids get their flow on. Everyone does yoga. Yogi Oki Doki makes sure to describe the poses in a way that is not compatible with any other yoga class on Earth. Sometimes that’s only a little confusing, like when he calls the Lizard pose “Linguini The Lizard Pose”. Other times he makes the kids do an elaborate metaphor about bridges, and partner up to do a shape he says is a bridge, without clarifying that there’s a separate “Bridge pose” in every normal yoga class. He also calls Eagle pose “a twisting pea vine”, because he decided to do a vegetable theme for a while, and forgot eagles are compatible with the rest of the video’s American Animals theme. I disliked this choice. Then I despised it when Yogi Oki Doki kept the crop metaphors going, and compared a writhing mass of children’s bodies to a sensual cornfield.

As the tape winds down, the viewer thinks they’re safe. They think Yogi Ned-Flanders-Noise is bad at boundaries and taste, and otherwise harmless-ish. Then the foot stuff begins. The foot stuff’s theme is “flowers.”

Yoga classes usually end with a few minutes of what the experts call “lying down.” EiEi Yoga gives How Now The Moo Cow a prominent role in this chapter, because “Ask any cow / she’ll show you how / to lie down / on the ground.” This makes no sense because the children are on their backs. Meanwhile, Yogi Oki Doki touches The Kids’ necks and heads a lot. Meanwhile, How Now The Moo Cow tries to liven up the song by shifting into a guttural vocal style for no reason. The song ends with noises that are less like human vocal lyrics and more like a cow climaxing. “How Now” indeed! In hindsight, the cow character’s name is perfect, because the human voice actor for that stiff puppet always made me say the phrase “How? Now??”

Finally, the kids dance and hop around the “farm”. Yogi Oki Doki says “I hope you’ll come back and play yoga with us soon!” He probably says other things, but that’s all I could make out. At this late stage of the tape there’s sudden massive audio interference. Maybe the internal plastic ribbon decayed. Maybe the tape was fine and the digital transfer goofed? Or maybe, just maybe, that sonic torment was intended to drive me away. I now believe this tape’s end credits hold a secret none of us were supposed to know.

That’s not the secret part. As you can see, Yogi Oki Doki (Max Thomas) and How Now The Moo Cow (two talentless people) and every other person even tangentially involved in this production is thanked by name. But then, there’s this credit:

No! No!! I cannot accept this lie. Surely there was a human inside the Rasta suit.

There just had to be a human. Surely! Unless…

Perhaps this one inexplicable credit makes the entire rest of the video explicable. Despite everything I’ve shown you, I get the sense Max Thomas is a decent guy. Maybe even a guy trying to make American life better. When Max Thomas made this 1996 videotape, he was one of thousands of U.S. yogis. Not a big deal. But when he first got certified as a yogi in the 1970s, he was going against the grain of American culture. (Its 1970s “grain” was wood grain on the sides of station wagons, and straight grain alcohol in lieu of mental healthcare.)

Max Thomas teaches a good habit. Max Thomas takes pride in running restorative yoga programs for schizophrenia-suffering young people. And unlike basically every other subject of our Hotdoggeries, Max Thomas doesn’t seem profit-motivated. Max Thomas is alive. He teaches yoga to this day. And according to his website, Max Thomas charges shockingly reasonable rates for an all-weekend yoga retreat plus lodging plus home cooked meals with easy access to Joshua Tree. That seems good. I could be wrong. He might skin you after. But Max Thomas seems like yoga’s equivalent of the actor Dylan Baker. A good guy with a big heart, who only seems like a pedophile when the camera’s running. This dopey yogi didn’t know he’d end up doing that last bit. He thought he was just teaching yoga to a nation needing its benefits. So he was powerless to not clarify his personal goodness on camera, due to the baleful powers of the malevolent spirit named Rasta The Rooster.

In a just world, Max Thomas might’ve still failed at making a yoga-for-kids videotape. But he might’ve made the tape without a vile hell-fowl possessing him, puppeting him, and tricking him into looking like a pervert for the tape’s entire runtime. There is no earthly reason to not credit the guy in the rooster suit. There are only unearthly reasons. Rasta The Rooster plays himself because there is no “guy” in that “suit”. Only that nightmare could explain this tape’s curse. From its handsiness to its anti-Jamaicanness, Max Thomas must’ve signed off on the final edit under duress. Only by stamping out EiEi Yoga tapes for the unsuspecting public could Max free his loved ones from Rasta’s racist rapier talons. So I hope Max proceeded to find peace. Or at least find an escape. Perhaps Max Thomas does not just run desert yoga retreats. Perhaps he retreated to the desert to elude his tormentor. And if you’re reading this, Max Thomas, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about what you went through. I’m sorry yoga became huge in America thanks to basically everyone except you. And I’m sorry Rasta is also reading this, and learned your location, and is banshee-ing through Palm Springs to your doorstep. When you hear his demonic peck on your lintel, start stretching.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mercenary Sysadmin, the only one you can count on when there is a sentient rasta rooster on your tail and you have nowhere else to turn.