I’ve always said Eric Roberts doesn’t get enough credit for being Julia Roberts’ Frank Stallone. Now the hardest working man in show business is trying to become the hardest working man in show business (truly sorry for this joke), after he went on Australia’s The Morning Show to promote a new erectile dysfunction product called “The Rocket.”
The clip, in which Eric Roberts initially gets the name of the product’s website wrong, is a masterpiece of gloriously pointless Australian television. The over-caffeinated hosts goad Roberts into saying “erectile dysfunction” over and over so they can make winky references to sex, but don’t let Roberts actually describe how the product works. Presumably because that might involve, you know, talking about penises and such. Croikey, Eric, you can’t say that on telly! Roberts also begins the segment by clarifying that he didn’t actually suffer from ED when he discovered the product, which would seem to make him a bad judge of cures for it, but hey I’m not a scientist.
According to what I can glean from a piece in the Daily Mail (entitled “Would You Try Zapping Your Penis With ‘The Rocket?’”) the device, which you wand up and down your penis (important to note) works by “sending sound waves through the penis to encourage blood flow and the creation of new blood vessels.” Ooh, can I program it to play “Shock the Monkey?”
It was invented, the piece goes on to note, by Stephanie Wolff, “an anti-aging specialist,” which is definitely a real job, and her husband, Dustin, on whose penis she presumably tested it, and with whom she runs the “Novus anti-aging center” which I think we can all agree is a very fancy name for a thing.
Stephanie and Dustin run a Novus Anti-Aging Center, where a large portion of Stephanie’s days are spent using a kind of mild shock treatment on men’s penises, with the seemingly paradoxical goal of making them work better. [DailyMail]
Can we all give the Daily Mail writer a round of applause? “Stephanie’s days are spent using a kind of mild shock treatment on men’s penises, with the seemingly paradoxical goal of making them work better” is one of the greatest sentences I’ve ever read.
Roberts’ appearance on Australian TV was in February, but he also went on comedian Dave Landau’s podcast in June to promote The Phoenix, which is apparently what The Rocket is called now after a lawsuit settlement with another company that also claimed the name. Update your bookmarks, people.
With this, Roberts adds “Australia’s This Morning” and “Dave Landau’s podcast” to his list of 2020 film and television credits. I was just trying to count them on IMDB but lost track at 40. That is not an exaggeration. He had more than 40 credits just in 2020, a year when filming has been shutdown. Is there a job Eric Roberts won’t take? He works so much that you’d assume he has 15 divorces to pay for, but he’s apparently been married to the same woman since 1992.
Here’s to hoping we all find something we love in life as much as Eric Roberts loves having a camera pointed at him.
Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.