Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Patton Oswalt's Frankensteins and Gumdrops

Warning/Guarantee: This look at a comedy album is written from the collector perspective. If you're looking to buy an actual full Patton Oswalt CD, this is not a good place to start. If you have all his stuff and are going to buy this anyway, this is for you.

A few months ago, word came down handed unto me by the Chunklet blog that Patton Oswalt would not only have a new CD coming, but it'd be free! Well, free with a pledge to radio station WFMU which I've never heard. After discovering it was free with a $75 donation, it seemed it would not be possible to obtain this CD. Until last weekend, that is. (Don't ask me where I got it.) Limited edition, promotional, and exclusive are very important words to the collector out there, and in here. This album is largely about bragging rights, so I can go to both of my friends who care about such things and say "guess what I've got?"

Frankensteins and Gumdrops gives you 10.3 minutes of the funny. That's not a lot of funny for $75, and I'm sure anyone who actually shelled out the asking rate on eBay would probably not be entirely pleased with their purchase. But keep in mind, I've payed a lot of money for a Transformers toy just because there are only 1,000 of them in the world, so I'm not one to talk. Anyway, the tracks are:
1. There Will Be Blood
2. Mega-Leg

One track gets out some decent movie material out there, even if any references to There Will Be Blood are on the midnight train to Borat-ville. The other immortalizes the KFC Mega-Leg routine, which has been performed live over (at least) the past year now. I still laugh, and you will too-- Patton's endless enthusiasm shows through these bits and odds are that someday I'll find my hypothetical future offspring quoting some of this stuff back to me to the point of madness. (Of course, the language isn't kid-friendly, I'm just guessing that's something my kid would do.)

What you have here is a great little collectible. As a can't-miss laughfest for the car on your next road trip, well, it'll fill 10 minutes. So if you have a harrowing journey to the 7-11 or through the Wendy's drive-thru, this is just the thing. Just take my advice when I say it is not only not worth the premium pricing. One can't put a price on a premium collectible (or rather, they can, and we pay it) but the actual quantity of material here is not worth the typical EP asking price. Were this a mass release, anything more than $6.99 would seem excessive.

1 comment:

Nick The Bard said...

For that $75, you also got a t-shirt, a sticker and a poster, along with the station t-shirt, bumper sticker and a record fair admission coupon, so it's not a much of a bad deal as you're making it sound (if you picked that premium anyway...)