Thursday, July 31, 2014

Not a Burger Stand becomes a viral sensation and makes me ask, "Why doesn't this kind of joint exist up in Northern Cali?"

'Are you kidding? I know I'm ugly. I stuck my head out the window, got arrested for mooning.'--Rodney Dangerfield
As someone who used to listen to No Respect repeatedly, I will probably nail this. (Photo source: Not a Burger Stand)
Down in Burbank, a city that, thanks to late '80s-era Nick at Nite's Laugh-In reruns, I can't refer to without channeling Gary Owens and calling it "Beautiful Downtown Burbank," the chalkboard specials at a burger joint called Not a Burger Stand have gone viral. Not a Burger Stand's specials, which the Burbank restaurant posts on its Tumblr and Facebook pages, are accompanied by terrific re-creations of TV and movie characters by illustrators Lila Gonzalez and Kyle Carrozza. These specials also offer the kind of wacky discounts that are atypical for a burger stand but aren't surprising to see coming from a restaurant that's right next to Hollywood and the voiceover industry: customers get discounts if they order in the voices of--or dress up as--the characters that Gonzalez or Carrozza drew on the chalkboard. It's a really clever way to both run a business and see how terrible everyone's Matthew McConaughey impressions are.

I wish one of Not a Burger Stand's specials was "Order the Cap'n Crunch Fried Chicken and Funnel Cake in Cap'n Crunch's voice and get 10% off," but nobody who was born after 1988 knows what Cap'n Crunch sounds like. However, these other specials would be fun to order, especially for someone like me who's a fan of many voiceover artists and actually practices doing a few impressions of celebrity voices. These discounts make me think, "Damn, we need a burger joint like this up in here in the Bay Area so that I can trot out my '60s-era Sean Connery or my Tracy Morgan and get 10% off a burger."








(Photo source: Kyle Carrozza)

If you're just like me and you've never seen The Lego Movie, and then you stumble into some business where you get 10% off if you sing "Everything Is Awesome," but you have no idea how the Lego Movie theme goes, it goes a little something like this:


I didn't weep for Oberyn, but I felt bad for all the Latino viewers out there who hate it whenever a likable Latino character gets killed off on white television. "Ritchiiiieeee!," screamed Esai Morales, right after he saw the end of "The Mountain and the Viper" that night, even though the Viper isn't named Ritchie.

(Photo source: Lila Gonzalez)

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