Great balls o’fire! This is indescribably awful! It sounds like a dirge. I can’t bear to stay for the whole two minutes of it.
“Unknowable” had a truly horrible thought: What if this show were made by Disney today, instead of Disney as it was in 1955? Ai-ya! Run screaming to the sidewalk!
Hey, it was bad enough with all that singing and dancing, and Moochie and his pals ALWAYS winning the national championship… and yet I watched it, and so did all my peers. Why did I watch it? I only wanted to see the cartoons.
It makes me suspect that television hypnotizes people.
That clip does seem awful, yeah who could watch something like that, but we did. And before I watched that clip, my memories of the Mickey Mouse Club TV program were good. We have been spoiled with all the advancements in the movie industry over the last 60 years. The acting, dancing, special effects, and most other technical efforts are so much better. However, morals and such, have gone the opposite way, and it seems can’t get much worse. The Oscars’ for example, Piers Morgan said some Oscar party stars ‘looked like strippers’ in skimpy outfits. I shouldn’t have looked at the pictures of some of the women he was referring to… now I will never get those nasty pictures out of my mind… one wore, what looked like two band-aids and a feather on her top…the rest of her upper body was bare.
I am absolutely certain of your last sentence. I’ve done a layman’s study of cult behavior, and a lot of it comes down to light trance hypnotism. If you keep people in anticipation, and in a suggestible state, it’s quite possible to get them to do all sorts of things that they wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. If you keep a carrot on a stick, a lot of people will follow, focused on the carrot, without stopping to think that the goal always remains just out of reach. If anticipation of an ever-moving goal is kept alive, some people, actually, many people, will just keep following, fixated on an anticipated reward, and never stop to realize that they are being led down a path.
As it turns out, people are actually fairly easy to hypnotize, if you can keep them distracted from their own thoughts. Distraction is the key, because if someone can’t process information without interruption, you can introduce an idea, and it won’t be rejected, even if it doesn’t make sense. If anticipation of some desirable outcome is used in parallel with distraction, many people become quite pliable.
Television is the perfect medium for this, because television programs keep you in anticipation of what is coming next, while commercials interrupt your thought process, then, commercials skip from one to the next, a series of non sequiturs, which abruptly end, and allow you to become engrossed in the program, while the information from the ads bounces around in the back of your mind.
To make matters worse, television shows, themselves, are frequently a series of non sequiturs, jumping from one camera angle to another or one scene to another, without the continuity of action that real life provides. If I want to visit my office, I have to experience the travel to my office, but in a TV show or movie, that can be portrayed in an instantaneous scene cut, which takes us out of reality, and forces us to suspend disbelief.
It is my opinion that the social changes of the last decade or so are greatly the result of the new media possibilities made possible in the age of the Internet. Social Media thrives on building anticipation, and flooding people with information, much of which is not particularly sensible, but there’s so much information that people don’t have time to process it. Suggestion and half truths become cemented in the mind and treated as facts. The constant stream of information hitting people from several directions leaves the mind in a highly suggestible state, which is pretty much the crux of hypnotism.
TV, social media, instant messaging, etc. are all excellent ways of keeping people suggestible.
C.S. Lewis would’ve had a field day with this era.