Charles Phoenix

Charles Phoenix (born December 20, 1962) is an American pop culture humorist, historian, author and chef whose work explores 1950s and 1960s kitsch and Americana.

Phoenix is widely known for his "Retro slide shows" featuring a collection of vintage film slides capturing mid-century American life and culture—set to Phoenix's commentary. He is also known for his "test kitchen" creations of exaggerated novelty foods and desserts, including the Cherpumple, a three-layer cake/pie hybrid. Phoenix has appearanced as a recurring judge on the Food Network series Cake Wars and served as a frequent guest commentator on NPR and KCET.

Biography

Early life Phoenix was born in Upland, California in 1962 and raised in neighboring Ontario, the son of a used car salesman and a "happy homemaker. He traces his love of things vintage and retro to his early years spent on his father's used car lot, where he became enamored with the automobiles, which he learned to identify by make, model and year by the time he was six. Phoenix's obsession with classic cars ultimately led to his interest in mid-century architecture, fashion and photography.

In 1982, Phoenix moved to Los Angeles and attended the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, after which he started working as a fashion designer.

Retro Slide Shows

In 1992, Phoenix was shopping for vintage clothing when he came across a shoebox labeled "Trip Across the U.S., 1957" filled Kodachrome color slides of an unidentified family's vacation photos at numerous roadside landmarks. Fascinated by the vivid color depictions of the era, Phoenix began scouring thrift stores, flea markets, and estate sales buying boxes of slides taken from the late 1940-1970s, amassing a sizable collection.

Phoenix began developing his slide show in the mid-1990s when he would show his collection with accompanying commentary to his friends and acquaintances at private parties. According to Phoenix, he originally intended for his slide shows to be straightforward and serious presentations, but the inherent kitsch of his slides invoked frequent laughter from the audience, prompting Phoenix to restructure his show with a more comedic tone. Phoenix now takes an observational comedy and storytelling approach to his slide presentations, usually attempting to employ a narrative using what few facts Phoenix can derive from the slides' annotations with his knowledge bank of history and pop culture trivia as well as juxtaposing slides from different collections, though he emphatically states that he never fabricates any portion of his narration.

Despite the overtly comedic tone of his slide shows, Phoenix has stressed that his shows are explicitly about honoring and celebrating American culture rather than mocking it. Describing his shows as "history disguised as comedy and comedy disguised as history", he has been quoted as saying "My goal, first off and foremost, is to entertain people, but just below the line of entertainment is to educate and respect the past", hoping that through humor he can instill an appreciation and admiration for mid-century culture in people otherwise uninterested or unaware of such topics. Get in touch with your inner Americana, embrace it, have a sense of humor about it, and proudly share it with the whole wide world. source =– Charles Phoenix's Americana "mantra". As of 2014, Phoenix's "slibrary" contained more than 200,000 slides and he enlists the help of a "slibrarian" to assist him in sorting through his constantly growing collection on a weekly basis. As Phoenix and his shows grew in popularity, fans from around the country started sending him their own slides; Phoenix has said that he rarely ever searches for slides in thrift stores anymore as they've been consistently arriving at his home for over a decade. His most famous creation is the Cherpumple, in which cherry, apple and pumpkin pies are baked into several different flavors of cake and then stacked together, a concoction which The Wall Street Journal dubbed "the turducken of desserts" and The Huffington Post described as "awesome and absolutely offensive all in one".

Among some of Phoenix's other creations include "Bambrosinana", a layered fusion of banana pudding and ambrosia, "Inchezonya", a hybrid of enchilada and lasagna, "Frosty the Cheeseball Man", a snowman constructed out of Velveeta and cream cheese which is melted into fondue, meatloafs molded into various shapes ranging from tiki heads to giant rats, numerous multi-layered cakes incorporating such ingredients as breakfast cereals, marshmallow Peeps and jelly beans, and a lighted Jell-O Christmas tree which uses an orange traffic cone for a mold and contains working Christmas lights. Phoenix also demonstrated the "Astro-Weenie Christmas Tree" along with a striped candy cane cake on a 2013 episode of The Queen Latifah Show and, on a Halloween-themed episode, a Jack-o'-lantern version of his cheeseball fondue sculpture.

Other endeavors

In addition to his slide shows, Phoenix has hosted several humorous bus and walking tours of Los Angeles since the early 2000s, ranging from the "Retro School Bus Field Trip Tour", which shuttles guests around in a vintage school bus to various mid-century landmarks highlighting Googie architecture, ranch-style tract homes, drive-in theaters and Space Age neon signs, to the "Yesterday Once More" tour of Downey, which visited locations related to the Downey-based pop duo The Carpenters. The tour, which received ample coverage from the likes of LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, proved so popular that it expanded from being held every few months to a regular bi-monthly engagement.

Phoenix has authored and co-authored several coffee table books dedicated to vintage Americana, showcasing many of the slides he has in his collection.

In 2009, Phoenix served as grand marshal for the 32nd annual Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, and in 2012 he appeared as part of the Rose Parade on the city of Downey's tiki-themed float.

Image and lifestyle Phoenix has been called the "King of Retro" by the Los Angeles Times, while LA Weekly has given him titles ranging from "King of Kitsch", "Knight of Nostalgia and "Chancellor of Cheese". Phoenix uses the self-appointed title of "The Ambassador of Americana", while also describing himself as "a man with a particular Pee-wee Herman, Martha Stewart and Huell Howser sensibility". Despite Phoenix's retro lifestyle and interests, he has expressed a preference for living in the present. "One thing we don't see in the photos – or if we do see it we don't want to acknowledge it – is what a repressed and conformist society it was", he said in an interview with Time Out Chicago, "I'm happy to be alive today." Cake Wars (2014–present) The Home and Family Show (2015) Jay Leno's Garage (2016) Nailed It! (2019)

Film The Cool School (2008) – archive and stills Bible Storyland (2012) – interviewee