“Connection is a Christian exercise video. It will get your mind, body and soul in touch with God.”
Bob Eubanks was the Newlywed Game’s (see separate post) first and longest serving host. He was 28 when the show first aired in 1966 – making him the youngest game show host ever – and approximately 175 years old when he finished that MC gig.
But idle hands are the Devil’s playground, so since the heyday of the show for which he is most famous, Eubanks has been excellently industrious: pursing “a career in the country music business”, making offensive comments and plugging his wife’s “Christian workout video”.
While his white-clad wife and her minions prance for the Lord, Eubanks’ voiceover tells us that Connection “is a Christian exercise video” [emphasis his]. Unlike your secular exercise videos, “[t]he exercises on Connection have been professionally designed to spiritually motivate you into shape.” Which begs the question, by whom, exactly? Who are these professionals accredited in spiritual exercise design? Is that a degree? Did they clinically test these moves until God could hear them? Until they were perfectly balanced between Prancersize and Marcel Marceau doing a squat thrust?
I don’t have such qualifications and I want to belieeeve but when Eubanks says “Now, I don’t care what shape you’re in, if you use the Connection video every day, you’ll soon notice a big difference”, I find myself a bit of a Doubting Thomas. Unless that “big difference” is your loved ones treating you as though you’ve had a lobotomy, it’s difficult to see how the “exercises” shown would have any impact on your health, weight or proximity to Heaven. Walking to the bathroom would be more physically taxing and more spiritual.
At $19.95 plus shipping and handling, Eubanks urges us to give ourselves “and a loved one” the gift of improving our lives through Connection. We’ll never know if homeboy was guilted or bullied into doing this or if he was actually complicit in this cynical attempt to profit off the fat guzzling, bible bashing hordes of middle America (who, let’s face it, deserve it). But they are no longer selling the video. So if you want to get fit or get spiritual, you’ll just have to seek out people who actually know what they’re talking about. Hallelujah.