Congratulations To Mad Men's Vomit Hose Operator
This is a great day for the unsung heroes.
There’s a famous scene in the first season of Mad Men. It takes place near the end of an episode titled “Red In The Face,” after Roger and Don have been out on the town for a dinner of oysters and enough alcohol to kill a stegosaurus. They get back to the office and find the elevator broken. They have to take the stairs. Roger, older than Don and with decades of living like this under his fashionable hat, struggles mightily. They finally reach their destination and everyone is standing around for a discussion that is important to the characters on the show for business reasons but more important to viewers at home because whoooooooooops Roger pukes up all that booze and shellfish.
I bring this scene up today because Mad Men just dropped on HBO Max in sparkling 4k. Also, because I like talking about my favorite scenes from Mad Men. (LAWNMOWER .) But mostly that first thing. HBO Max made a big deal about it all, with a little publicity campaign and a prominent rollout on its home page, which was actually kind of cool, this idea that a streaming service was going to take one of our best television shows and give it a big fancy makeover to thrust it back into the cultural conversation in all its glory.
One little problem, though: Something went kooky along the way and whoooooooooooops the freshly uploaded version contained a series of goofs. Like, for example, the thing where the episode titles got mixed up and the one where this happens is listed as a different episode, "Babylon." Also, the thing where you can very clearly see a member of the crew operating the vomit hose in the scene described above. I posted the unedited screencap at the top of the page, but let’s zoom in a little to drive this home.
Computer, enhance.
This flub was spotted by a number of people who dove into a Mad Men rewatch over the Thanksgiving weekend, perhaps most prominently by a Twitter user named “bigrackspart7” (sure), and was investigated by outlets like Vulture, which identified the problem as a shipping issue with Lionsgate more than incompetence by HBO Max (although, one could argue that HBO Max should be taking a closer look at the highly publicized things it flings up on its website, if one wanted to be a stickler). There is a whole conversation to be had here about the streaming industry and its business model of blasting out content without great regard for quality and whether the phrase “vomit hose” is almost too on-the-nose for all of this, metaphor-wise.
And you are welcome to have that conversation. Not with me, though. I’m too busy thinking about the dude up there who was working the vomit hose.
There’s not much glory in working on the production crew of a television show. It’s a lot of grunt work and lugging cables and doing important stuff that only gets recognized in the post-episode credits roll that is often sped up and thrust into the corner of the screen while the home viewer is begged to watch another episode of whatever they just watched. This guy played an important part in a memorable scene in a genre-defining show that still gets referenced 15 years later, and no one ever thought about his role in it all until today. I bet his friends don’t even believe him.
THIS GUY: [watching Jon Hamm in some commercial during a football game] Hey, did I ever tell you about the time I got fake vomit on his shoes on the set of Mad M-...
HIGH SCHOOL FRIEND NAMED LIKE TREVOR OR JEFF: Ohhhhhhh here goes Mr. Hollywood again. Sure ya did, buddy. You sprayed fake puke on the handsome TV man. Grab me some pretzels.
Well, eat shit Trevor or Jeff, because here he is, right there in 4k, operating that damn Hollywood vomit machine.
What an incredible day at the office that must have been. I hope they shot the scene 40 times. I hope this is his only job. I hope there are union rules that mandate who can use the vomit machine and exactly what training they need. I hope he spent two full workdays getting the consistency of the vomit mixture correct. Mostly, though, I hope he’s having a great day today getting to relive all of this, and I hope every crew member working on a grueling production right now gets to see this and be glad their profession is getting a moment of appreciation. They deserve it. What fun is blasting a vomit hose onto Jon Hamm's shoes if no one ever knows you did it, you know? Good for him. Good for all of us.
Two notes in conclusion:
- Let’s all please agree not to research the fun out of this, and maybe top out with “someone interview this guy if he’s cool but don’t make it a bummer if not”
- I like to think there’s some other guy who was on the Mad Men crew and has been running around telling everyone that he worked the vomit hose in this scene and now his whole story got blown 15 years later because of a screw-up releasing the show in 4k
The Trevors and Jeffs in that other guy’s life are having a great day, too, in their own way.
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STUFF I CLICKED ON
— great blog by Tyler Parker about my favorite basketball blur, Tyrese Maxey
— The Chair Company ended its very weird first season with a very wild finale, and I found this recap by Erik Adams very helpful in sorting it all out
— Bill Hanstock wrote a good thing about Pluribus, which keeps getting stranger and better
— interview with Mike Schur about A Man on the Inside, a show I enjoy a lot
— speaking of A Man on the Inside, big fan of them having a “private eye” do an investigation that takes him to the “Oates Hall” School of Music
— the beef between Vin Diesel and The Rock is finally, at long last, squashed
— the fictional main character of Pluribus did a Reddit AMA about the made-up series of books she writes, which was fun
— “The 30-foot sea cow quickly hunted to extinction because of its tasty meat”
— “Officer called to 'abandoned dog' finds toy reindeer”
— “Truck driver chases masked meat theft suspects off with baseball bat in Philadelphia”
— “Experience: I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar”
— SVU decreased Ice T’s screentime this season to make room in the budget for another cast member and he has been remarkably cool about it
— Panera Bread will try to improve its lagging sales with revolutionary tactics like “making the food better” and “having staff to assist customers"
— Elle Duncan is leaving ESPN for a big new gig at Netflix, which is bad for ESPN but great for Elle Duncan
— my beloved Shoresy is back soon and I cannot wait
Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and let me operate a vomit cannon.
