Concerning the comics of June 20th and June 27th...

The Happy Flower Welcome Song.

Hopefully some of you out there in Internet-land have heard of Yankee Candle. It's a chain store that sells candles (duh). The flagship store is located in South Deerfield, MA. It's huge, with an accompanying overpriced restaurant and car museum (including one of the Batmobiles, and I think a DeLorean...I'm not sure, I've never actually been in that part). There are animatronic figured littered sporadically throughout the store, and many of the sections are Christmas themed...including Santa's Yankee Candle Workshop, where the old man himself arrives by helicopter every year and sets up shop for a part of the Christmas season. Anyway, in the food court/register section, there are tables gathered around a stage with an animatronic band, The Oom-Pah Boys. Three fat German guys with the accents and liederhosen and everything, with a show that repeats every 20 minutes. Of course there's your "O Tannenbaum", but the inspiration here (ah, the point!) is their opening/closing song, "It's Always Christmas at Yankee Candle". All I really remember of the song (as I've tried my best to forget it) is the first couple lines: "It's always Christmas at Yankee Candle / Where it's Christmas time all year round..." Sorry the tune doesn't carry well in this medium, but it's for the best, trust me. This is the song that plays in my head when I came up with the first couple lyrics for the flower song. I can only imagine what it's like for the cashiers that have to work across from the Oom-Pah Boys for 8 hours every day, with them playing that song 6 times an hour. *shudders* Hence the song getting stuck in Mandy's head in comic #128. I'm well acquainted with songs stuck in my head...it happens to me all the time (hell, I've got one in my head now!)...and during band camp it was especially frustrating.

Oh, and the "6 1/2 Hours Later" is supposed to be spoken in a lazy French accent. An homage (I'm saying that "oh-magzz") to SpongeBob Squarepants, in case you didn't get it.


posted by Tim at 2:59 AM