Author: Lydia Bugg
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Upsetting Day: Dead Pet
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Fucking Day: Dial A Date🌭
If you were awake at 3 a.m. in Canada in 1995 at any point in your life, then you probably know who David Bronstein, The Prince Of Love is. If you don’t know who David Bronstein, The Prince of Love, is, go ahead and picture him. You don’t need a description; you know he looks like this, complete with the woman struggling to lean away from him as he holds her in place deceptively tightly.
David Bronstein, The Prince Of Love, hosts the Dial-A-Date infomercial. He’s also the person you see most on the Dial-A-Date infomercial. Sometimes, he’s struggling with a beautiful young woman like he’s trying to reel in a catfish, but mostly, it’s just him screaming at you to “CALL NOW! It’s discreet, it’s discreet, it’s discreet! You can say whatever you want! You will never get rejected when you call the number on the screen!”
Apparently, you couldn’t just straight up explain to the camera that these women are hostages. The video has a lot of winking, hand gestures, and dirty jokes to convey the fact that this is a commercial for a phone sex line. Although, you might be able to get it simply by noting the enthusiasm of some of the actresses who weren’t being paid enough for this shit.
Dial-a-Date was one of the most popular phone sex lines in Canada at one point due to these infomercials, which truly capture a manic vibe of loneliness. The setup is that all hot women have gathered at one location, and you are not there. The party you are not at has everything: gorgeous women looking for love, the Dial-A-Date bikini girls, and even Linda Hamilton. Yes, The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton somehow makes an appearance in this 1995 infomercial for a Canadian phone sex line. She doesn’t speak and barely seems to enjoy herself, but she’s at the hot girl party, and that’s all that matters.
Don’t worry, even though you absolutely cannot attend the hot girl party, you can call and speak to the women there, and they can’t escape! They’re trapped at the party forever, perpetually forced to let you say whatever they want to them without hanging up the phone. This commercial is my personal hell. It was written as a horror story to frighten me, Lydia Bugg, specifically.
After we’re promised Linda Hamilton and Dial-A-Date bikini girls, most of what we get is The Prince Of Love begging us to call. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?” My last shred of dignity to dissolve, The Prince of Love. Then there’s an interview with a woman, always in her 20s, usually saying some variations of, “I like long walks on the beach and being outdoors,” which is a lie. If all of these women were out beachcombing constantly, America’s beaches would be filled with lonely, attractive women wandering like the ghost wives of fishermen lost at sea.
Not all of the women have a generic list of man requests, though. Some of them appear to be real women being interviewed. For those, the camera always lingers far too long after the question of “What are you looking for in a man?” has been answered. With this cameraman looming over them and breathing like a pervert, the women panic, and their list of desires gets weirder.
It starts with, “I want a guy who’s sweet, charming, and will take me dancing!” slight pause, blank stare of fear. “Um, and I’d also like him to be tall.” More starring, fear growing. “Also, haha, also I have a circus performer fetish, so if he’s willing to get shot out of a cannon totally naked, that would be great.”
The camera really does pull some dark secret out of these women. One wants a guy that can “eat more than her,” pretty sure she’s the witch from Hansel and Gretel in disguise, nice try, not falling for that again. One woman admits that she wants a man with a tight ass. Love that for her. Then there’s a girl who seems especially hypnotized by the camera and says, “Exciting things like dancing or travel…they’re very good.” Not really specifying that’s what she’s looking for in a partner, just a general enthusiasm for exciting things. She tried.
Some of them want to make their expectations seem low to get men to call. “Hi, I’m Kelsey, I’m 21, and I want a man who…just exists, doesn’t…doesn’t really have to do much else. My prince charming would play a lot of Call Of Duty. If I’m lucky, maybe he’ll explain the sports game football to me because I just don’t understand it. I hope he can play one song on guitar and I’ll get to hear it, like, 72 times. That would be amazing. If it’s part of “Wonderwall” but not the whole thing, even better!”
I’ve written a lot about the women of Dial-A-Date, but Dial-A-Date is not just for women. The issue is the women they got for the commercial are gorgeous, shampoo commercial hair-having models, and the guys look like they were recruited from David Bronstein’s neighborhood BBQ. They’re fine, but they’re wearing vests and turtlenecks. I know it’s the ’90s, but is this really the ideal man? Is this going to put anyone into such a sexual frenzy they will spend something like $3.99 a minute to talk to this man? I’m sorry, but this guy looks like the Mario brother who lives in Mario’s basement and is too unreliable to be trusted with real plumbing, so they only let him do sinks.
At least some of the men are bringing a sexy character to the table, like Sergio. His line is, “Hi, I’m Sergio. I love women. Hard. Soft. Full of mystique. I’m eager to find a woman like this. If you have these qualities, I’m waiting.” This is a lot. I don’t think straight women and gay men’s options should be vest, turtleneck, and Sergio, but that’s what we’re given.
The Prince of Love tells some dirty jokes while he wrestles his female employees like he’s wrangling an escaped calf. I hesitate to tell you the jokes because they may make you long for Punsteria. He always says, “Which is why you should call,” directly after the joke, even if it has nothing to do with why you should call. For instance: “I took a woman out for breakfast the other day and I said to the waitress, ‘I’ll have burnt toast and a rotten egg. The waitress said burnt toast and a rotten egg. Why would you want that? I said I don’t, but that’s what you gave me yesterday….which is why you should call now.” WHAT?
It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t have to. While The Prince Of Love is selling you on calling the Dial-A-Date, he’s also selling you on becoming a millionaire by working for Dial-A-Date. You might think this would deter some callers but NO! Money is no deterrent when there’s a woman who likes beaches and has to talk to you.
Reading up on The Prince of Love, I learned that some people think Dial-A-Date was such a success because the narrators for phone sex line commercials were usually too suave and handsome. People liked seeing a loser paw at models who can’t escape! They could more easily picture themselves as The Prince Of Love and his many cringing victims. Oh no, did I make the article too sad? Here’s your Linda Hamilton cameo again.
She appears at the last possible second, after the credits for Mr. Bronstein’s catering and Mr. Bronstein’s wardrobe. I love the implication that they brought in catering for one man, and none of the models were allowed to eat.
See, this isn’t sad; it’s a man eating Italian alone in front of thirty models and Linda Hamilton, or maybe her twin sister now that I think about it. Some of the models are holding a beach ball and spinning around. There are a few other men there as well. They are also not allowed to eat the Italian food. Which is why you should call.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, who charges way more than $3.99 a minute to emotionally exhaust a room full of Canadian models.
When you work for 1900Hotdog, you have to keep track of your maniacs. Roughly once a year, for the last three years, I’ve reported on the movements of a man driven to madness by the loss of his one true love, a Garfield licensing deal.
So, what’s Nathen Mazri, failed GarfieldEats restaurateur, been up to lately? Well, he’s taking his fight for Garfield straight to the top. He’s running for political office. Ladies, get a man who fights for you the way Nathen Mazri fights for Garfield. He will become the Prime Minister of Canada to get his ex-back.
I know you’re probably thinking that this isn’t about Garfield and I’m being a silly little goose when I say it is, but it’s very explicitly about Garfield. He says it’s about Garfield. It’s been four years since he lost the license to sell Garfield merchandise and two years since he actually stopped selling Garfield merchandise…
… give or take some NFTs of him and his Garfield frozen lasagna. The point is, he’s still WAY not over it. He’s making himself the Garfield candidate of Canada’s far right.
What does the People’s Party Of Canada stand for exactly? It kind of seems like they’re a far right party that’s trying to present itself as a middle-of-the-road Sensible Joe party. They do have one policy point that seems pretty radical: “Approve Trans Mountain.” I too think we should give Trans people their own mountain. Whether it’s a theme park, a restaurant, or a secret dojo, do it: Approve Trans Mountain.
Oh, sorry, that’s about oil drilling, boo. Apparently, Mazri is a huge climate change denier. In his opinion climate change can’t be real because God wouldn’t let us drill too much oil, or something.
His main platform seems to be talking about corporate corruption, which, in his opinion, means he wanted to start a business and found out it’s actually pretty hard. Sometimes things happen that are totally out of your control, like Paramount gets mad when your tweets sound like you kind of want to fuck Garfield, so they take your Garfield license away, or no one wants to buy Scooby-Doo Lasagna because that makes no earthly sense, Scooby-Doo isn’t a big lasagna guy. So, that’s government corruption.
You can tell someone from The People’s Party Of Canada is working hard behind the scenes to scrub social media in a way that makes him seem less weird. They managed to delete the post-Garfield phase where he was rebranding celibacy. Good note, but sorry, the internet is forever, People’s Party Of Canada.
However, they couldn’t pry the Garfield thing from Nathen’s lasagna-covered hands. His knock-off Garfield Jesus podcast, The Nathfield, is still up, and it’s going strong. He’s posted one nine-minute long episode in the last two years, probably due to government corruption. He even released a sad country theme song about Nathfield fighting the apocalypse, or at least something called a grease storm? Which seems like a very climate change-based apocalypse scenario, but maybe I’m wrong? Let’s check out those lyrics. They’re probably normal.
Yes, the theme song mentions Nathen Mazri by name and how good he is at licensing, which is not a skill, multiple times, at one point referring to him as “Nathen Mazri, The Wizard Of Dreams.” There aren’t many theme songs bold enough to take a long pause in the middle to compliment the person who wrote and produced them. “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Paul Francis Webster can slam dunk a basketball” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Nathen Mazri has made Nathfield, the Garfield knock-off that Paramount can never steal from him, an integral part of his identity, and he’s made himself a character in Nathfield’s world. So, does that mean the People’s Party of Canada is part of the Nathfield universe? Well, in the Nathfield Discord, Nathen invited people to send in fan art of the character, and this was one of the responses.
The Nathfield Twitter has a People’s Party Of Canada cover photo and tweets a lot about politics but in a far more radical way than Nathen Mazri does on his own profile. His profile has a lot of political interview clips of people he idolizes, like Tucker Carlson. Meanwhile, on the Nathfield account, he’s still taking out personal grievances, and not just Garfield-related grievances either. He had the orange cat that’s going to save our world from grease call his sister a “butch raging lesbian.” As far as I can tell, Nathfield’s butch raging lesbian sister is not a character in the cartoon.
He also went through a phase in 2024 where he kept predicting the end of the world every few months using cat food-brained numerology, and never deleted his predictions when he was wrong. Nathen! You can delete things when you’re wrong, and no one will ever know it happened! Like when you jumped up and down in a CELIBACY IS SEXCY shirt. But he is right about one thing: 48 + 8 = 57.
The deeper you dig into Nathen Mazri, the more his political views turn to conspiracy theories. The Nathfield Discord has members who believe Apple is using airpods to steal your thoughts so they can advertise to you better. I wanted to let them know that Apple doesn’t want their thoughts. Apple doesn’t care enough about you to waste the server space combing through your irrational fear of stingrays and desire for a pastrami sandwich, guys.
The main Nathen Mazri account does have nods to Nathfield as well. His AI-generated action figure comes with an orange cat sidekick! It’s cute, but don’t ask what it thinks of its sister, or things will get real dark.
What about that new podcast episode that Nathen dropped earlier this year? Surely, he knew he had political aspirations in mid-January when the episode was released. It looks like he announced his candidacy a month later. Did he do anything to tone down the podcast’s weird religious themes or untamed Garfield rage? Sort of! It did get less religious! Way angrier, though; in exchange.
In episode four, Pig Bill and Nathfield finally meet and fight! This is huge for the Nathfield universe which has so far been mostly a commercial for another unsuccessful Nathen Mazri business, an app called egeez, and characters monologuing about how corrupt the world is. It’s the first real action in the Nathfield universe, and it attempts to explain what a grease storm is!
Pig Bill, a “dangerous cybernetic troll and hack pig,” is attacking the people of Toronto with a Nano Blaster 5G, a device that releases a massive hacker attack clogging digital lives with grease. I think this means he’s stealing information from people’s phones, and the grease is more thematic or metaphorical, and more about the fact that Pig Bill is a pig that makes bacon, which is greasy. It’s also important to note that in this cornerstone episode, Nathfield has a new voice actor. Can you guess who it is?
If you said licensing wizard and world’s youngest Garfield Licensee, Nathen Mazri, you’re correct! Nathen gets some real zingers in on Pig Bill like, “Give up already! Just like the Metaverse, no one’s joining your 5G greasy nano lame-o squad.”
This is such a convincing argument that Pig Bill is absolutely hobbled by it and quickly retreats on a “hoverboard made of frying pans from Walmart.” It’s a nine-minute episode with one minute of theme song, so not a whole lot happens, but everything that does happen is now officially tied to The People’s Party of Canada for life.
This is probably going to shock you, but the People’s Party of Canada currently has no member seated in parliament. They ran 312 candidates in 2021, and none were elected. I don’t love Nathen’s chances of beating the odds and winning his election. Remember, he is running to go after the people who took Garfield away from him—he says that explicitly. This final failed bid for Garfield’s love could put him over the edge.
I’m just kidding. I’m not that worried about Nathen. He’s got a new sidepiece, and it’s The Smurfs.
He’s supposedly been in talks with them about the app he says he’s launching in 2025. It will help small companies secure licenses to sell official branded merchandise from corporate IP holders. I hope The Smurfs love Nathen in a way Garfield never could. If not he will run for Winnipeg City Treasurer and show them who’s boss.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Velo, who understands that if you let Nathen Mazri win an election, you legally have to download the Nathfield app.
Categories
Nerding Day: The KFC DC Crossover🌭
Remember when comic books had dignity? No? Me either. I kind of love that DC will whore Superman out to anyone with enough money.
Today, I want to talk about the Colonel Sanders DC multiverse promotional comics that were given out for free at Comic-Con in 2015, 2016, and 2017 because anytime a marketing company has to expand an original IP so far beyond the realm of the original idea, it will inevitably snap.
It’s like they’re trying to perfect teleportation, but all they’ll get from the end product is a deformed Jeff Goldblum monster. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. In issue 2 of the KFC/DC crossover comic, there’s a response to a fan letter that clarifies for readers that Colonel Sanders, the KFC mascot, is a real man who has risen from the dead.
I am a real man; I died, yadda yadda, then came back. You’re yadda yaddaing some pretty important shit there, Re-Colonelizer. I need to know if the chicken mascot is supposed to have died for my sins, or what is the deal? They didn’t have to specify that this superhero Harland Sanders is the real, original Harland Sanders of our Earth, a human man with the godlike ability to return from the dead and fight alongside superheroes.
The KFC marketing department also gave us a breakdown of the special equipment that Colonel Sanders has on him at all times, including his Gravy Pen accessory. This is a “highly specialized fountain pen that supplies fans with tasty autographs and dresses up mashed taters,” which is all fine, but why is it eighty-five thousand dollars? It’s a squirt gun. A squirt gun filled with Colonel-temperature Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy.
I’ll tell you why because DC Colonel Sanders is not just a mascot for terrible, truly dogshit fried chicken that tastes like maybe someone accidentally fried a seagull. He’s the mascot of capitalism. He’s a ninety-year-old man who never ceased being productive. This isn’t even me being abstract. Literally, the moral of the comic sounds like a Russian propaganda poster from the Cold War.
“The easy way does not pay, so heroes do it the hard way.” What a moral. All I can picture when I hear this is The Colonel appearing in shadow to say, “Walking on your normal unbroken legs? Looks pretty easy.” (He pulls out his cane.) “Let me fix that for you.”
The main villain of the KFC/DC crossover comics is Colonel Sunder, and he does things the easy way, which is evil, I guess? Listen, KFC, we all know Colonel Sanders is the real villain in any universe. He’s an old southern white man who demands your labor. Also, he’s obsessed with chicken in the exact same way The Penguin is obsessed with penguins, Cat Woman is obsessed with cats, and Cat Man is also obsessed with cats. There aren’t enough cool animals to base your villain personality around.
KFC has to do all of this zany marketing so that we forget the fundamentally unlikeable qualities of its mascot, and they’re doing such a bad job of it here. We can’t have universal healthcare, but Colonel Sanders can have an $85,000 gravy pen and 3 million dollar glasses that violate people’s privacy? Ok.
They want you to look at stuff like Colonel Sanders calling Colonel Sunder his finger-licking foe and find it so quaint and random. They want you to see Colonel Sunder say, “How easily I drown your mash-potato minds in the grim gravy of your own worst nightmares,” and be charmed, entertained even, but I will not.
I will instead be angry that, as punishment for working with Colonel Sunder to… make KFC slightly worse, Colonel Sanders manages to convince The Green Lantern and The Flash to force The Rogues to work at KFC. So the Colonel believes in forced labor as punishment, and the worst punishment he can come up with is working at one of his restaurants. Wow, KFC.
I thought labor would set us free, Colonel Sanders? Make up your mind. I thought The Colonel’s biggest fear was retirement. He literally came back from the dead just to do more work. Shouldn’t The Rogues be thrilled with the opportunity to do sweet, purifying labor? Checkmate, plantation zombie.
This isn’t a one time thing. Colonel Sanders regularly conquers his foes by forcing them to work for him. Structurally, this is a great way to end the comic with everyone eating KFC. Spiritually, it’s because Colonel Sanders is a monster who infects its host and makes it part of him. Of the three KFC/DC crossovers that exist, Colonel Sanders’s villains end up working for him in two. In the third, they are straight-up dead. Colonel Sanders murders Colonel Sunder in issue #2, and half of the word bubbles over his corpse are about getting back to work.
Larfleeze, the Orange Lantern, you all know him, everybody knows Larfleeze, is the villain of issue 3. He suffers a fate worse than death or conscription: He becomes a KFC franchise owner. He’s never going to get the grease smell out of planet Okaara, which as everyone knows is where Larfleeze lives. Someone should be protecting this poor alien from Colonel Sanders, but the Green Lantern just stands there and watches this happen.
I expected more from the Green Lantern because on the cover of issue three, he’s destroying a bucket of fried chicken. This is what I wish would happen to me every time I think of eating some KFC. If I could hire a superhero to blast a KFC bucket out of my hands twice a year I would, and my digestive tract would thank me.
The third and final adventure of Colonel Sanders and The Green Lantern is where DC crossed the line. They abandoned the Sanders multiverse and did a simple plot where Colonel Sanders wanted to deliver his zesty chicken sandwiches to the hungry aliens of the universe, so he enlisted the Green Lantern Corps to help him. The Green Lantern Corps is a public service and he turned them into an intergalactic UberEats. Then, when Larflezze steals all of the sandwiches for himself, The Colonel hunts him down, using The Green Lantern as a Pinkerton to demand payment.
We already know how this ends. Larfleeze is consumed into the Colonel Sanders symbiote. The Orange Lanterns Corps, famously the lantern that represents avarice, extreme greed, yeah, they all work for Colonel Sanders now.
The KFC/DC comic book universe is canonically Earth 1 (the one WE live on), which is the most threatening way this comic book could have phrased that. In Marvel comics, our universe is Earth-1218, where Superheroes don’t exist, and the Marvel Universe that we read about in comics is Earth-616. In DC comics, the DC universe is called Earth Prime, or Earth 0. Earth 1 is the most dystopian version of Earth in these comics. The Daily Planet is reporting on Colonel Sanders’ battle for chicken supremacy. Was it a slow news day, or does the resurrected chicken man have that much power and influence over the world? Maybe next issue the writers could consider The Colonel throwing some delicious, affordable sides to distract a bank robber rather than enslaving a galaxy in his chicken franchise.
All of these mascots that are powerful, rich men are about to fall way out of favor. I’m looking at you, Mr. Fucking Peanut. We don’t need that shit right now. Don’t give them a multiverse and an intergalactic goon squad. Nobody wants that, KFC. I don’t want to purchase chicken from the best possible version of this man, which is a cartoon with a big head and a tiny stick figure body instead of his weird little bow tie. This intergalactic oligarch might get me to swear off fried chicken forever, or at least hire The Green Lantern to blast it out of my hands.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham who found asylum on Earth-43, where the bloodsucking overlords at least have the decency to call themselves vampires.