Review: Hey Folks! It’s the Intermission Time Mixtape!

I Dream of a World That’s Sparkling, Crunchy, Satisfying, Sizzling, and Authentically Italian

In the documentary Crumb (1994), artist Robert Crumb recalls the memory of a woman looking at his drawing of happy, marching household products and saying something on the order of, “Oh, that’s so cute!” To which Crumb, being Crumb, responded, approximately, “What? No! This is horrible! This is a nightmare!” They both have their points. To the woman, the image presented a cuddly promise of comfort and convenience. To Crumb, the image – reminiscent of the famous “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” pitch that ran in movie theaters in the fifties and sixties – was a false promise, an insinuating façade of cheery consumerism hiding a bottomless well of corporate greed and cultural debasement. What one could take away from it depended on whether one was willing to settle for the shallow, benign masquerade, or the artist’s determination to rip the mask away through exaggeration.

In the audio commentary for Hey Folks! It’s the Intermission Time Mixtape! (2024), creators Bret Berg and Joseph Ziemba liken their impressionistic montage of movie and drive-in theater “snipes” (the technical term for any footage that runs before the feature that isn’t a trailer) to a descent into Hell. Although they immediately back off that comparison, I can see what they’re getting at. Compiled from Something Weird’s Hey Folks! It’s Intermission Time! home video compilations, which started on VHS in 1992 and ended on DVD in 1997, Berg and Ziemba’s mixtape takes decades worth of snipes – exhortations to patronize the concession stand; pitches for the foodstuffs offered there (burgers, franks, coffee, barbecue (soooooo much barbecue), pickles... pickles?); ads for local restaurants, car dealerships, and the occasional wig shop; and appeals to patrons’ piety and patriotism – and William Burroughs them into a cyclone of mid-20^th century mass consumption.

To say Mixtape follows a kind-of dream logic would be a cop-out, sidestepping just how random the feature feels. That’s not necessarily a dig. Berg and Ziemba admit to following their own, idiosyncratic muses in putting together the film – splicing subliminal flashes from one pitch into another, swapping soundtracks, even reversing audio for that most-famous-of-all Let’s All Go to the Lobby snipe. Depending on how willing you are to go with the insanity (and I admit chemical enhancement might help), the swirl of chaotic imagery is compulsively engaging. The producers do have the sense to back off when the material demands it, as in the case of a bizarre “educational” film from some local dairy farm – apparently based on a live show that the company toured around area classrooms – that features a ventriloquist dummy poorly tricked out as some sort of alien, cheap magic shop illusions, and an over-enthusiastic, and somewhat creepy, “milkman” presiding over it all. Berg and Ziemba let it run fairly intact, just occasionally intervening to cut in stuff like a kid grousing, “He sure talks a lot,” after the one of the dairy pimp’s extended diatribes.

Is Hey Folks! It’s the Intermission Time Mixtape! necessary when the original, six-volume compilations are provided on the same disc set? It’s up for debate. Judging by the thirty minutes I viewed out of the nine some-odd hours provided, there’s plenty of cognitive dissonance and randomness in the source material itself. The deteriorating colors, with rainbow arrays of sodas reduced to cups full of dishwater and hot dogs attaining the shade of raw liver; the peculiar local ad gambits – one pizza and Broasted chicken restaurant seems to imply that its owner works the kitchen dressed in a three-piece suit; all those intermission clocks, counting down to entertainments that will never arrive; and the too-late attempts to leverage pop culture, with both Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam and Yellow Submarine’s George Dunning getting ripped off – on its own, it all manages to invoke an aged and disturbing alt-reality of endless commerce and consumption, without much need for support from outside forces.

But above and beyond providing a more convenient snapshot for those not willing to throw away a work-shift’s worth of time to go through all the material, Berg and Ziemba, in their impulsive and gleeful jumbling of ancient footage (the most recent of which appears to be an incongruous public service thing in which the cast of Married with Children, in character, pitches for the Will Rogers Institute), manage a convincing simulation of how all this stuff eventually gets lodged in our brains: Random, decaying, half-recalled snippets that haunt us long after their utility has passed. In Hey Folks! It’s the Intermission Time Mixtape!, the past reaches out not in the warm glow of nostalgia, but a desperate assault on our senses, proclaiming a grip on our consciousnesses it can no longer justify.