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This is the cover for the soon to be released complete series box set of Sliders.
If you'll recall, Sliders was a 1990s TV series that told the story of a group of reluctant explorers who jumped from one parallel Earth to another, trying to get back home.Each week they'd travel through a dimensional vortex to an Earth that was different from ours in significant ways. They might encounter an Earth in which the Russians won the Cold War, or one inhabited by tribes of cannibals, or one in which women are socially dominant and men considered inferior.
It most definitely has nothing whatsoever to do with the Portal video game series. So why's the designer of the Sliders cover bending over backwards to make it look like it's Portal 3?
Didn't think I'd notice, did you, Sliders designers? Well I noticed. I noticed.
How did I let this this slip past me?
I recently went to a White Castle for the first time in years. While there I couldn't help but notice that their marketing department is now boldly and proudly calling their burgers "Sliders."
The general public has been calling them that for decades now of course. I always assumed it was a derogatory expression rather than a term of endearment, based on the way their greasy little burgers slide down right your throat. Or if you want to get really graphic, due to the way they tend to slide right through you and out the other side.
There's some dispute as to exactly when the term originated. Some claim the've been called Sliders since the restaurant first opened. That may or not be true, but using the term in advertising is most definitely something recent.
I wonder if the head of the White Castle marketing department finally just threw up his hands in resigned defeat, gave in and said, "Screw it! Everybody in the country calls 'em sliders, I'm doing it too." Maybe he thought by deliberately and enthusiastically embracing the word it would diffuse any negative connotations in might have in the public consciousness. Much the same way the homosexual community embraced the term "queer."
Still, it would not have occurred to me to use "greasy incontinence" as a selling point in food advertising.
