I first saw this movie on the Disney Channel under the title “Mommy Market,” which is a way more disturbing title. Today, I bring it to you as Trading Mom. It stars Sissy Spacek and my personal hero, Anna Chlumsky (second only to Jenny Lewis). I saw Anna Chlumsky once on the street in the West Village carrying her newborn babe and her eyes were just glittering. That might sound creepy, but my point is that she seems fabulous in real life just like she is on Veep and in My Girl.
This isn’t a critically acclaimed movie, but it did make me feel kind of cool as a kid. It’s one of those kid’s are in charge kind of movies and basically these three brats get to trade in their mom for a new one at a store where you basically just shop for moms. Their next door neighbor is a witch and that’s how they get rid of their mom. (Yeah, yeah I know this movie horrible. It’s only 29% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.) The next morning, they wake up and find their mom’s room empty. They know their mom used to live there but they can’t remember her at all–spooky.
At the Mommy Market, each family gets three choices. When those choices run out, they’re stuck with whomever happened to be their last pick. I didn’t realize it as a kid, but Sissy Spacek actually plays all of the moms in this movie. The first mom is really into fancy things. The kids like her stretch limo and money, but she throws away all of their toys and pets because they’re “dirty.” And she makes them dress up like demented Von Trapp children, so they get rid of her after that.
Their next mom is an avid outdoorswoman (WordPress thinks that isn’t a word but they’re just fine with outdoorsman–offensive!) But she wants to bread the littlest boys iguana so they can taxidermy the extra pets. Then she takes them all on a rigorous backpacking trip through the rain. But the final blow comes when she ruins a backyard game of kickball. The older kids have organized an inclusive way to play with the younger kids (like we’re talking toddler and preschoolers). It’s really pretty sweet. But outdoor mom strikes out a four year-old by throwing balls way faster than she can kick. Then all of the neighborhood kids leave in a huff, and she makes her children do pushups to get them in better shape for competitive kickball. That’s when they send her packing.
Now it’s time for mom number three. The final choice. The most important choice. And this is when they make the worst choice because they two older children are somehow bullied by their six-year old brother. They pick a circus clown to be their mother. What they don’t realize is that she comes with a bus load of circus performers who now also live in their house/backyard area. The only cool part of this is that Andre the Giant is there (may he rest in peace). This mom isn’t so willing to leave (maybe she knows they don’t have another option after her). So the boys steal the bus and all of the circus performers run after it. Then Anna Chlumsky locks them out of the house, but the boys crash the bus and it starts raining. Thus, everyone feels obligated to let the circus people back inside.
The kids are hungry and cranky, and hear their principal (who has tried in vain to meet with their mom for days) banging on their door and talking about foster care. Things are getting serious. So they sneak out the back of the house and ask the witch next door how to get their mother back. They can’t remember her but they figure she couldn’t possibly suck as much as the others because they kept her for so long before they got rid of her.
The witch tells them to name some wildflowers and that will create some kind of potion. They know a surprising number of wildflower names. At this point they have to like break into the market, then find their own mom, and pick her in order to break the spell. The juxtaposition of foster parents in a market for kids and kids in a market for moms is kind of interesting–but hey, I don’t want to give this too much credit. They get caught trying to steal tokens and find their mom and are banished from the Mommy Market, which promptly vanishes like the Garden of Eden.
Then they all cry in an alley. Ugh, this is so dark. How did I watch this as a kid? They can’t remember their mom still, so they decide to invent a memory of her taking them to the beach and all of these other cool places. Okay, this part is really sweet even though it’s schmaltzy. I guess this movie isn’t so bad.
The next morning, they wake up and everything is back to normal. And we’re left to think this was all one big shared hallucination. Except then they find a throw pillow left behind by that weird fancy mom! The end. Oh and Andre the Giant’s throwing knife is still in the wall. And the principal gets caught by a trap that the outdoor mom made. Now, really, the end.
Very Special Lesson: Don’t be a jerk to your mom.
Jerrica finds her stealing money from her purse (the pusher has started charging now). Laura looks all around school for the drug pusher, but when she overhears him giving the same sales pitch to another starlight girl she starts subbing because he didn’t love her at all! Jerrica finds her outside of the school and takes her for a drive to talk her into going to rehab. She fails to mention that the drug pusher was selling to another Starlight girl literally moments earlier, but she does agree to go to the group, and also to participate in a sting operation to catch the drug pusher. (Luckily, the other Starlight girl didn’t want the drugs and gave them to the police right after the drug pusher gave them to her.)
As the poll from last week’s Friday Face-Off proves, this crowd is more of a “Come on, Get Happy” than a “Sunshine Day” group. That’s right, The Partridges won the Friday Face-Off, but I’m going to throw you Brady fans a bone today. As I said when I started the Reboot-O-Rama series, I’m not just attempting to complain about television and kids these days, but it’s really all been an elaborate ploy to write a post about The Brady Brides.
The Brady Brides is a terrible series that I somehow caught in reruns as a kid and determined to be the best thing ever and potentially “better than The Brady Bunch.” In hindsight, this was patently false. This show is bad. The jokes are flat. It’s weird that Maria and Jan live together with their husbands after their infamous double wedding. And all of the other, more interesting, Brady children are absent except for in the pilot movie.
But so rarely do we get a piece of kitsch quite to this level, that I think it’s high time we all stood back and appreciated The Brady Brides in all of it’s glory. Take for example today’s episode, in which Marcia and Jan decide that their adult mother cannot spend the night alone in her ranch house while their dad is on a business trip. So against their husbands’ better judgement, they invite Carol to stay over.
Then Carol comes over and they all sit around discussing the girls failures–Jan when she felt sorry for Marcia’s goldfish as a kid because they were cold and wet, so she dried them off and let them “sleep” in her bed–and Marcia who didn’t realize she needed to unbox the TV Dinner she had tried to make the night before. Then her husband Wally says, “Marcia’s best cooking is never done in the kitchen.” And they make out in front of Marcia’s sister and mother. Carol stares at them (nonplussed) and Marcia giggles and tells Wally to cut it out because Carol is watching–to which Wally replies, “Well, she’ll just have to wait her turn.” …
Then a cop brings a neighborhood boy over to the house because his mother isn’t home. And then the cop gets caught up in a game of “who’s on first” with who is married to whom and who is the mother-in-law. Ugh. Then all of these white people tell this black child that they don’t like him out on the streets at night (ugh the poor child with the absentee mother–social commentary!) and all of the white people care for the minority child. So they put the child in the bed with the two men even though Wally definitely isn’t wearing anything under that robe.
I’d like to point out that I have noticed a couch and a love seat in addition to the cot in the living room. The small child could easily sleep on the love seat and Carol Brady could sleep on the couch which looks way more comfortable than the cot. BAM solved your problem Bradys. But no, they want to make this episode into a particularly awful rip-off of Three’s Company. 
I present you with the greatest Disney Channel Original Movie ever. This month’s very special movie of the month is Model Behavior. It stars Justin Timberlake and Maggie Lawson from Psych. It’s a classic tale of dream makeover, fish out of water, and total and complete lies about one’s identity. It’s kind of like The Parent Trap or Trading Places–if those movies were about winning Justin Timberlake’s love and adoration.
Each girl is totally happy with her new life and everything is super boring until Alex bumps into Justin Timberlake and agrees to go out with him as Janine. Meanwhile, Janine is revitalizing Alex’s image at school with her super confidence. She even lands a date with Alex’s crush, a jerk named Eric. They end up at the same restaurant one night and are both pissed that the other is going out with a guy they think sucks–Janine because she thinks it’s all a publicity stunt and Alex because Eric wouldn’t date her before (when she was living her own life and not Janine’s). Thus, they briefly switch places again so they can have a conversation with their respective dudes.
Janine really rips Justin Timberlake a new one, and for whatever reason he doesn’t get up and leave immediately. When Alex returns to the table (as Janine) she tells him to forget whatever she just said to him because sometimes she has “moods” and it’s almost like she is “bipolar.” And even then, he doesn’t leave. This is the crazy/hot scale in action, people.
When Janine gets homes to Alex’s house from her classy dinner with Eric, Alex’s dad is all pissed because she forgot agreed to help her dad with catering. Then he grounds her for three weeks. Like wtf. Are you allowed to make your minor child work in your business like that and then punish her when you didn’t give her a choice? This appears to be a middle class Long Island family. Like how can they possibly afford to live on Long Island if they have to force their children to work as day laborers?
Anyway, Alex has Justin Timberlake meet her out on the streets of New York. Then she kind of changes her appearance to look more like her real self, but she doesn’t want to tell him who she is. She hands him the tape that her snooping brother made, so he can see for himself. Then they kiss. And Eric catches them–thinking that Alex/Janine is cheating on him. This leads Justin Timberlake to think Janine/Alex is cheating on him. Basically, the worst way to come clean ever.
Both of their families follow them there, and Justin Timberlake shows up too. He’s gone to the dance because he finally watched the tape that Alex gave him of both of the girls leaving the bathroom…I’m assuming she must have recorded a portion where she reveals her true identity and high school because that’s the only way this makes sense. Then their families are like woah we suck enough that our kids pretended to be other people and they decide to start listening to their children.
Keith won’t go on any of the rides after the show because he gets motion sickness and is afraid of heights.At this point in the show, David Cassidy was so popular and perfect, I think they had to start giving him ridiculous character flaws to explain why he was playing minor gigs in a family band instead of being the massive teen idol he was in the real world. Kind of like how they make pretty and fabulous women klutz’s in romcoms. Like “Oh she’s so unsuccessful even though she’s smart and gorgeous because she runs into things and falls over a lot.”
We come to learn that Danny is also in love with Mary Ann Mobly, and Keith is all like mom go tell him he’s just a child! And she’s all like Keith can you not see the irony here? And Keith is all like OMG I AM ALSO A CHILD! So then Keith decides to talk to Danny about why neither of them can date this thirty year old woman. Danny is refuses to listen to Keith, but Mary Ann Mobly ends up going on a “date” with their 8 year-old little bro anyway. They go to see Dracula Bites the World. Then we’re stuck watching another ridiculously long montage, but this one at least has David Cassidy singing.
The Bradys are also at Kings Island for work. Mike needs to present some architectural plans to the Kings Island folks. We are now five minutes into the show, and I feel like all we have seen is montages. But we do see Jan, Marcia, Alice, and Carol slide down a massive luge-type slide and it’s pretty much my only goal in life at this moment to alice be able to slide down that slide. 
Oh wait here come the plot. Jan buys a stupid poster for a kid she babysits for and harasses her dad into combining his drafts into one cylinder instead of two, so she can use the other for her stupid poster. CLEARLY THESE TWO CYLINDERS ARE GOING TO GET MIXED UP, RIGHT?? So yeah, Mike Brady takes a Yogi Bear poster to his meeting and has to track Jan down in less than half an hour. THIS IS BEFORE CELL PHONES, PEOPLE!
Jan is busy driving Marcia around in the fancy old cars that Keith drove Lori in when The Partridges made this same visit. In the meantime, she’s lost the poster. WHICH IS REALLY THE ARCHITECTURAL PLANS! But once again, this is a clever promotion because The Bradys have to go through all of the rides looking for where Jan might have dropped the cylinder. Jan finally finds the cylinder in the bottom of a boat, and now it’s a footrace to deliver the plans in time. The Bradys relay race the cylinder to the manager’s office. But don’t worry, they make it just in time.
n this episode, Corey plots to dig up the time capsule he and his friends buried fifteen years earlier in Mr. Feeny’s yard. He wears a miner’s headlight and makes a t-shirts that say “shovel,” which led the bf and I to discuss one day how we will have the disposable income to make ridiculous t-shirts and wear them around like people wear those shirts you get from a 5-k or a fundraiser but it will just be like some arbitrary thing that only four of our friends participated in and received a commemorative shirt for.
Corey also has a set of shovels (one for him and Topanga, duh). We soon realize that a third shovel is for Shawn, who rushes in thinking Corey is ill from the urgency of his phone call. When he sees all of the shovels on the wall (thinking it’s a matter of “life and death”) he assumes that Corey wants their help in digging his own grave. I laughed out loud. Anyway, someone mentions Angela while Shawn is talking to Corey’s daughter’s bff’s mom (apparently there’s some romance there). And the kids say that they must come on the trip as well.
Mr. Feeny finds them all digging up his yard, and then Maya and Riley attempt to do “the Feeny call.” HAVE THEY NO SHAME! You don’t irreverently yell in the face of an old man whom you have never met in a mockery of his name. You need to know someone and love someone forever before you get to yell in that person’s face in a mockery of that person’s name! Then they also oddly swat and/or hiss at him.
First up, for this week’s matchup is Saved By The Bell: Mystery Weekend. As you know, all the kids from the cool clique in high school liked to spend their free time at bed & breakfasts solving mysteries with middle-aged retirees. So things start off with the teens chilling with a lot of creepy adults in a “haunted mansion.”
Meanwhile, Lisa, who was packing while Zack retrieved the vouchers, has disappeared from a locked room. This leads Zack, Screech, and Slater to discover a secret passage leading from the bedroom to the host’s office (sketch). This causes Zack to somehow figure out that Lisa was in on the whole thing, the game never stopped, and the host is actually dressed as a woman and the murderer/thief/it doesn’t entirely make sense to me.
Todd Susman plays the private detective who was supposed to protect an 88 year-old man from being shot. He failed and the 88 year old guy’s twenty-something wife is also “dead.” Todd Susman finds an exotic dagger near the woman’s body and a gun in the old man’s spinster daughter’s purse (you follow?). He then tells the group of guests that they should be able to solve the murders just from this information.
Basically, there’s a rival with Blanche named “Posey McGlenn” They’re both trying to sleep with their boss and get a promotion. Dorothy determines that Ms. McGlenn must have killed Blanche’s male friend because she was jealous (and new exactly where Blanche had left her dress whilst showering pre-romantic rendezvous). Then Posey almost shoots Dorothy, but the cops intervene in time. And surprise, surprise, the dead guy walks down the stairs because it was all part of the game.
Hi Very Special Readers! Every now and then I like to do a little PSA. I don’t know how many of you listen to podcasts. I’m a dabbler myself, but I heard about this one today and I feel like it’s worth reporting to all of you pop-culture nostalgists.
You may have heard by now that 
Like when they tried to replace Jan in The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
The Very Special Blog 