They — and by
they Those In The Know understand
exactly who I'm talkin' about — are finally putting aside the cartoon drawings and computer animation and are reviving a live-action
Kool-Aid Man figure for TV spots later this fall. On a lark last week I went to a closed audition for the job of the Man in the Pitcher Suit.
How I got the invitation in the first place is a longer story: let it suffice to say that (1) Iron Maiden just so happened to be filming its last Boston show, (2) some of the folks in Kool-Aid's PR division happen to be old-school metal fans just like I am, and (3) they took due note of the fired-up fan on their DVD who, yelling "OH YEAH!" at the top of his lungs, knocked over a speaker tower during the encore performance of "Run to the Hills."
At any rate, I can now say from experience that the Kool-Aid Man pitcher suit, once they've filled it up with the Flavor of the Month, is one extremely unwieldy costume. And unless you're a former Olympic gymnast or martial-arts expert, you simply won't have the balance required to stand up inside it for any length of time. That said, I owe substantial props to the folks at Kool-Aid for giving me a second chance after I fell off the sound stage and shattered my first outfit. The do-over went a bit better — I did crash through the foam-brick wall on cue, and I uttered a suitably smarmy OH YEAH! just as I passed under the boom microphone. The problem was, I had too much momentum when I came into the room. I reeled across the set, leveled two child actors (the equivalent of a 7-10 split, for you bowlers out there — I couldn't duplicate that effort if I tried), then pitched into the far wall, which was made of sturdier stuff than the first. Plywood, I think.
I can't imagine I'll get a callback; in fact, the grapevine says Bart Conner's agent had the whole gig locked up before any of us even arrived. Still, I can chalk the whole day up to experience. The afternoon tour of Kool-Aid's facility was a riot, the equal of anything Roald Dahl could have dreamt up for Wonka. One great window into history is the original pitcher suit, which I was privileged to see in its display case at Kool-Aid Central.
Legend has it that this suit was reported stolen from a hotel in East Berlin during the four-city "K-A Man Behind the Iron Curtain" promo tour back in '79. The perpetrator of the theft — so the story goes — was an East German dissident who put it on and made a run at the Berlin Wall with the hope of smashing through to freedom. His gratuitous cries of ACH JA! drew the attention of border guards, who shot him dead at fifty yards' range. His Plexiglas armor never touched the Wall's reinforced concrete, postponing for ten more years resolution of the question of what happens when Western commercialism (the irresistible force) collides with the steely will of the Communist bloc (the immovable object).
Again,
so they say — the pitcher suit I examined was indeed riddled with bullet holes on its front, but the shots could as easily have been fired by Hi-C execs on one of their guns-drugs-and-sex corporate retreats, for which they are so well-known in the kiddie-juice industry. Saboteurs have made off with the pitcher suits more than once; all it takes is the nerve and sagacity to get into the building. The bustin' out is easy.
