Let's have a party

[austin_dern]

The Snoopy Place, a Peanuts-themed restaurant at Plaza Singapura, is a slightly frustrating restaurant and gift shop: I want to love it, but it falls just a little short somehow. Part of it I think is because attempting to connect Peanuts with food requires pretty strained efforts; past root beer, cookies, and jelly-bread sandwiches folded over, can you name any iconic food from the strip? (Yes: peanut butter sandwiches. But past that, there's just some of Snoopy's fantasy menus.) It'd be too much to ask customers to do the Suppertime Dance when they're served, though they may be tempted to when they receive the bill: the staff will not bring it unsolicited, even if you sit at your table for two hours after finishing your meal. It took me four visits to get this pounded into my head.

The gift shop has a lot of ancillary trinkets -- posters, dolls, dinnerware -- but no books, no tapes, no DVDs, to my eye the things most worth buying. They do have oddities, like CDs of grownups playing synthesizers pretending to be kids pretending to be the characters covering music on kid-musical-instruments. This gives us for example the Peanuts Beatles rendition of ``Blackbird'' on fake-kazoo and toy piano. But they did this weekend have two copies of a Video CD from The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. So I leapt into action. The VCDs were taped to the cardboard stand the other music covers were on, so it took several tries before the cashier understood I wanted to buy one. (She had a ``clean'', untaped, copy behind the counter.) This is a very bare-budget thing, just one episode (it opens with Sally bringing Snoopy in for show-and-tell, and her classmates concluding he's a small moose or a kid in a dog suit), and the label identifies it as a ``Collective Item for Peanuts 50th Anniversary.'' The cashier promised there'd be others in the series in about two week's time. I can't wait.

As I opened the pack, the jewel case broke.

Ten Singaporeans survived 72 hours within the 64-degree Fahrenheit room. The winner of a 50-inch plasma TV and an air conditioner unit -- tie broken by finding the persons with the fewest yellow cards for minor violations and then a tiebreaking quiz -- was 30-year-old Lim Shuh Shien, who thanks his wife for her support.

Trivia: The first physician to tend Alexander Hamilton after his 11 July 1804 duel with Aaron Burr was Dr. David Hosack. Source: Jerseyana: The Underside of New Jersey History, Marc Mappen.

Currently Reading: Louis Pasteur, Patrice Debré.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Someday when you're back Stateside we've got to take you to Cedar Point. Not only would you get to meet giant mascot Peanuts characters and see the Snoopy ice show, but there's a huge Peanuts emporium there. I think the weirdest items they have are the CP/Peanuts crossover merchandise. For instance, you can get a T-shirt depicting the gang riding the Raptor, a roller coaster that they would not be tall enough to ride in real life!

Michigan's Adventure is owned by the same company and hence also has the Peanuts license, but they don't really have shows and the amount of licensed merchandise is smaller. Still, it was at MA that I walked up and gave the walkaround Snoopy mascot a big hug. There's just something cool about being able to get away with that as an adult. Heck, I seem to recall that Lucky did it too!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, yes, after reading about it in your journal I do want to visit and see what it's like. I just hope someday I've got enough time in the U.S. to do that sort of thing -- it's hard enough getting back for wedding and SpaceCamp and all that.

The only costumed character at The Snoopy Place is Snoopy himself, who comes out and poses for pictures with squealing children and giggly adults. Quite good fun, and since this is all within a solidly air-conditioned restaurant in a solidly air-conditioned mall I don't feel sorry for the poor guy inside, the way I do for (like) the Tony the Tiger and other characters I saw at the Zoo that one time, who pranced (well, meandered, which is impressive enough) about in huge fursuits in the midday sun.