Though Gidget's Taco Bell commercials only ran from 1997 to 2000, her work inspired numerous catch-phrases that raised the nation's spirits during Monica-gate. Gidget went on to give an unforgettable performance in Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde as Bruiser's mom, but this Viva Gorditas commercial best captures the mix of strength and pathos that she brought to every role:



In this groundbreaking 1960s commercial Mr. Ed, one of the earliest spokesanimals, informs his owner that his horseback riding days are over. Mr. Ed has already gone for a test drive in a Studebaker, and from now on he'll be doing the driving.



Obviously, Mr. Ed's message didn't reach these Clydesdales. A decade later they're still hauling around shipments of crappy beer at Ed McMahon's request.



But some commercial critters had it better than others. 9 Lives spokescat Morris rose to fame in the '70s and even starred in the 1973 film Shamus opposite Burt Reynolds. In the '80s, he ran for president against fellow actor Ronald Reagan, but lost when Americans got a look at his cabinet proposals in the commercial below.



Spuds MacKenzie's career as the "ultimate party animal" was marred by the discovery that he was actually played by a female dog named Honey Tree Evil Eye. But nothing can diminish his performance in the 1988 Olympics. Despite his lack of opposable thumbs, Spuds took home the gold in pole vaulting as the "Spudettes" cheered him on.



The Aflac Duck is smart enough to compare various insurance policies, but his biggest achievement is being the bane of Ben Affleck's existence. Ben has said that after these commercials aired people started walking up to him and screaming "Aflac" all the time.



Duke from the Bush's Baked Beans commercials seems pretty intelligent too, as he has taught himself to talk. But if he's so smart why does he live with an adult man who uses a baked bean bedspread?



Technically David Duchovny doesn't qualify for this list, but he deserves an honorable mention for his voiceover work in the Pedigree commercials. Even though for years, talking about dog food was the only post-X-Files work he could find, he demonstrated an utter lack of shame. We'd be happy to rub your belly, Mulder.



Toby may not be that well known yet, but every time we see the mom in this Stanley Steemer commercial roll her eyes and ignore her child, we can't help but applaud Toby's new trick.

Earlier: R.I.P. Gidget

In 1989, while walking her dog, the woman in question had a 10-minute encounter with a man with a "Scandinavian-type accent" dressed in what CNN describes as "a flying suit-style outfit" on a playing field in Norwich. Upon returning home, she then observed a large, glowing object rising above some trees. The whole experience, she said, left her "completely terrified."

Apparently this wasn't the only UFO sighting the government investigated; according to CNN, there was a whole X-Files Bureau (okay, "a computer database of sightings") scheme, which was abandoned on P.R. grounds. As it is, between 1987 and April 1993, the MoD recorder details of more that 1,200 UFO sightings. At the time, there were also reports that the United States was deleveloping "a top secret spy-plane known as Aurora," with ET implications. The newly-revealed files are available for public view for the next few weeks.

According to the Evening Star, "Dr David Clarke, a UFO expert and journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, said the newly published documents showed the MoD was 'not in the slightest bit interested in aliens'." Except to the extent that they were? And what we're curious about it, why are these suddenly on view? Is this standard practice? Has enough time passed that such actions have passed some kind of risibility statute of limitations? And why now? Everyone knows that the 1950s sci-fi boom had just a little something to do with the Cold War and threats of Nuclear aggression. The documents cited above would date from a time of Recession. We've heard, lately, that zombies are in and vampires abide - but are we due for a newly-revved interest in aliens and their sightings - or just governmental openness? Either one would probably bring a measure of reassurance to the troubled global psyche.

British Ministry of Defence briefed on UFO sighting [News.au]
Dog walker 'met man from another planet' [CNN]
UFO Files: dog walker's alien encounter [Evening Star]

The Good:
It's funny: Gillian Anderson's one of those actresses who frequently looked awful on the red carpet. And then she gets pregnant and boom! Suddenly she's amazing 100% of the time.
Actress Mary-Elizabeth Winstead looks dead elegant in LBD. Points for the shoes, too.
I'll admit to a period where The Tudors was my guilty pleasure, and as such, I am glad to see Natalie "Ann Boleyn" Dormer looking good.
Natt Weller and date may be the most awesome/ridiculous/back to awesome couple, ever. He's also like 19.


The Bad:
These two elegant lovelies are Sam and Amanda Merchant. They are "sexy twins" and were on Big Brother. Yes.
It's not that Imogen Lloyd-Webber's outfit's awful, just dullsville. Yes, she's his daughter. Also, a writer.
Petra Ecclestone is apparently "the younger daughter of the head of Formula 1."
This is her sister, Tamara. Apparently impeccable taste runs in the family.

[Images via Getty, Filmmagic]

The Washington Post:

Viewed without skepticism, "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is a taut, well-acted, thoughtfully organized, not very scary, not very hard to figure out serial-killer mystery revolving around two 40-something adults with trust issues. They still drive a Taurus, and their adventure takes place over a few gray, snowy days in NoVa and WeVa. (British Columbia, once again, reprises its "X-Files" role as a wet, overcast Anywhere.) Described thusly, the movie sounds like a low-budget yawner from an off night at Sundance.

People will complain (and already have) that "I Want to Believe" looks cheap and easy, barely rising to the level of a usual episode back when. Doubter that I am, I actually took it as a sweet bit of epilogue, made by and for adults. Even the show's "shippers" . . . may be surprised by how grown-up our paranormal sleuths have become. With simple sanity and lack of flash, Mulder and Scully make it clear: Our summer movies are part of a big conspiracy plot to trash our minds. I want to believe Mulder and Scully are correct.

Time:

A subtler anachronism is the seriousness with which Mulder and Scully take their work and themselves. On TV, Duchovny settled quickly into his role as an obsessive plodder; Anderson's gravity served as a rebuke to all the actresses her age who spoke in baby talk and aspired to nothing higher than Baywatch. The movie continues that dark, quiet tone, which means that today's moviegoers will have to forgo expectations of wisecracking heroes and snarling psychopaths, and to take seriously a couple of anguished folks who look and behave with the tired tenseness of anchors on C-SPAN.

USA Today:

For one thing, the Mulder-Scully chemistry seems to have evaporated. David Duchovny is still engagingly low-key as the truth-seeking Fox Mulder, while Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully seems to have become even more dour. Grounded in science, her doctor character was always serious, but she has lost some of what made her more human: passionate emotions and flashes of dry humor. There's a discernible lack of sparks during a bedroom scene. Sure, it's meant to be cozy rather than sexy, but it feels forced.

The Los AngelesTimes:

Scully, who now works as a surgeon at a Catholic hospital (Our Lady of Sorrows, nudge nudge), was always a wrestling act for Anderson, who had to fight against the character's morose, doubting-Thomas side, not to mention prosaic literary tendencies. Anderson loses the match here: Scully has ossified into one of the most humorless characters to suck the life out of a summer movie.

The New York Times:

That relationship still simmers, though at a reduced temperature. There’s nothing stirring the air between Mulder and Scully, who, having left the bureau, come across as unmoored and unfocused, even when they’re working on the outlandish criminal case that drags them back into the twilight zone. A similar lack of urgency characterizes the movie, which despite its yowling dogs, barking Russians, screaming women, swelling choral voices and moody cinematography by Bill Roe — which turns even dark blue a deeper shade of black — never finds a sustainable pulse. Mr. Carter knows how to grab your attention visually, but the amalgam of trashy thriller clichés that he has compiled with Frank Spotnitz, another series regular, creates its own deadening effect. It’s no wonder Mulder and Scully seem so diffident.

ReelViews:

The film's central "mystery" is painfully underdeveloped. The pedophile priest, in addition to being a walking cliché, adds little to the proceedings, and the revelation about what lies behind the kidnappings and murders is B-grade bad. The film musters a little tension toward the end, with Mulder in peril, but that's in stark contrast to the dull and tedious 90 minutes to precede it. One keeps waiting for I Want to Believe to shift into high gear, and it never does. Do we ever believe that the characters are in danger or that their "mission" means anything? No. The film feels like an excuse for nostalgia.

The actors don't seem to care, either. Duchovny is okay, and the film was apparently made largely because he made himself available for it, but the Mulder in this film is a lot more laid-back than his TV series counterpart. Gillian Anderson claims that it was difficult for her to re-discover the character after such a long layoff, and it shows. Scully is a shadow of what she once was. Most distressingly, where these two used to play brilliantly off one another, here they never mesh, even on those occasions when the screenplay allows them to share the screen. What's the point of a reunion if the characters are going to be kept apart so much? Amanda Peet has more scenes with Duchovny than Anderson does.

Slate:

The nefarious plot behind the agent's abduction is so far-fetched I'm itching to spoil it. But I'll limit myself to observing that, if ever I'm dying of a rare brain disease, I hope my surgeon won't go home and frantically Google treatment options, as Scully does at one key moment. (Couldn't she at least log on to Medscape?) The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience. If you're going to posit stuff this crazy, you'd better have some solid-sounding bullshit to back it up.

The New Republic:

The story unspools adequately from this premise, but rarely feels like more than a middling episode of the series extended to twice its usual length. In part this is thanks to series creator (and first-time feature director) Chris Carter, who repeatedly gets failing marks in How to Make a Movie 101. It's difficult, for instance, to follow even the basic geography of the film, which jumps back and forth between the rural West Virginia crime scene and Scully's hospital (are she and Mulder commuting?), and features a climactic chase in a city I assume was Richmond but may have been somewhere else. Worse, the coy are-they-or-aren't-they relationship between Mulder and Scully that was emphasized in the latter years of the series has progressed into something revealed so opaquely that it takes a good while to recognize what it is.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe is in no conventional sense a good movie. And yet, for fans of the series, it may be just good enough. There are moments of penetrating moodiness and horror; stabs at mystical profundity that don't miss too badly; some nice performances (especially by Connolly); and even an all-too-brief appearance by Mitch Pileggi's Walter Skinner. Most important, the chemistry between Duchovny and Anderson has lost little of its fizz, and it's nice to spend more time in their company, even as it's hard not to wish they could have found a better way to occupy themselves than wandering through such a shaggy retread. This latest, and presumably last, X-Files installment is not an unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours, provided you, too, want to believe. But you have to want it pretty badly.

There was a time, like Rebecca and Starski6 over at Feministing, that I was completely obsessed with The X Files. That time was not the Mulder-less seasons, though I never thought of him quite like Rebecca does, as "a walking pheromone, all languid eyes and long-necked eroticism." But I did cut a date in college short to go home at watch the show, a good date, even, with a nice guy, but it was a new episode. Even when the plots had spaceship-sized holes, even when there was not enough Mitch Pileggi to satisfy my Elektra complex, even when she didn't get to kiss Luke Wilson because he was a frickin' vampire, I was still coming back the next week to watch Scully be Scully and be smarter and faster than Mulder.

I liked Dana Scully because she was the clear-eyed pragmatist, the nerdy girl done well for herself, strong, self-assured and still willing to learn and to question things even when she was pretty sure she knew the answer. So I am pretty damn excited to see the movie, and I'm pretty sure that I'm going with my dad because most of my SciFi-loving friends are still dudes. Unless Rebecca Traister wants to come with us? I'm pretty sure my dad can be conned into paying for the popcorn.

Scully Have I Loved [Salon]
Feminism And The X-Files (My Ode to Dana Scully) [Feministing]