Warning: This video might send you screaming to the sidewalk. The management takes no responsibility.
I love Tolkien and I love Leonard Nimoy; but put them together, and the result is jaw-droppingly awful. I mean, people have been put to death for lesser crimes.
Who among you is tough enough to watch all two-and-a-half minutes of this horrific video?
Hoo, boy, do I need a sanity break! The delivery man ignored the sign we taped to the door, “Place All Deliveries in the Foyer,” and left the box on the front step: I almost broke my neck on it when I stepped outside. “Foyer? What’s a foyer?” And then the bank threw up all sorts of bureaucratic obstacles to my opening a Qualifying Income Trust account for Aunt Joan so she can get on Medicaid…Eeyah!!! You should see the paperwork!
Right. Okay. Chinese food tonight. I am afraid my wife will plotz if she has to make supper, after all this.
But this song brought a smile to my face.
Perry Como, 1959–What Did Delaware? “She wore a brand New Jersey,” of course. Hey, I remember this song! And I like it even better now. It’s funny, witty, clever, and also pretty good at teaching a ten-year-old some United States geography.
Lean back and enjoy it!
Suddenly I’m so tired, I could just plotz. Writing my Newswithviews column sometimes does that to me.
So I found myself whistling this ancient tune, Glow Worm. It was on one of those red plastic records kids’ parents used to buy for them in the early 1950s. It must’ve made an impression on me, for me to be whistling it all these decades later.
Listen to the lyrics. Feel the innocence. Nice, isn’t it?
I couldn’t find quite the rendition that was on my record, but here are the Mills Brothers performing it on The Nat King Cole Show, 1957. I remember it as being sung by Rosemary Clooney, but couldn’t find it on youtube.
Sometimes on a dreary, rainy day, my father let us take the slats out from under our mattresses, set them up across the beds, drape the throw rug over them, and pretend that we were camping.
Having done so, my brother and I would break out the toy animals and dinosaurs and set them on adventures. We never got into army men, but we did have a couple of toy knights, which my mother identified for us as Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad. Under the shelter of our make-believe tent, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad enjoyed some exciting times exploring lost worlds full of dragons, jungles, the North Pole, and the planet Venus.
Assisted by assorted lions, rhinos, elephants, stegosaurs, and giraffes, our knights overcame aggressive tyrannosaurs, hostile natives, and alien beings. Sometimes we resorted to Grandpa’s old stone building blocks and endowed the knights with castles and forts that had to be defended. A gigantically overgrown Dimetrodon was their biggest challenge, but they were up to it. Occasionally they would recruit bands of cowboys on horseback to help out.
It was amazing how time flew by, when we were doing this. Did I mention that we had lots of little toy cavemen, too? They usually found their way into the story, sometimes as the good guys, sometimes as the bad.
Video games? Fah! Who needs video games?
Some say I live in the past. Guilty, your honor, but with an excuse: it’s nicer there.
In fact, I have an even better reason.
The past is full of proof, undeniable proof, that we can do all sorts of different things better than we’re doing them now. It’s true that I don’t write about what was bad in those days. I focus on what was good, and what was better than it is now.
Because, dagnab it, if we did it well once, we can do it well again!
The good parts of the past are signposts to a better future. We do not have to live with the trash that’s poured on us every day and night, these days.
Winston Churchill was described, in his lifetime, as a man from the past, a Victorian relic, no place for him in the exciting world of 1940. But this was the man who came galloping out of the past to save his country, chosen by God for that purpose, when no one else could do it. Without this man from the past, his country might not have had a future.
And we remember sweet things because their sweetness is good in and of itself, and our loved ones because we love them still.
And we do not have to accept “the way things are.”
This 1958 (or ’59) pogo stick is the same kind I had at the time, with the red sponge rubber ball on top for a handle. And if my mother had ever seen the tricks I was doing with my pogo stick, she would’ve had a kazoo.
The kid in this video is good–but I was bouncing up and down our cellar stairs and even up and down the high school football bleachers. You do things when you’re ten years old that you wouldn’t dream of attempting after you’ve grown up.
My friends across the street had a pair of stilts just like those in the video, but none of us ever mastered that art.
One day, alas, a kid in the neighborhood who was much too big for my pogo stick tried it out and bent it beyond repair. And so my pogo days were over.
But if I can ever get my hands on another one…
P.S.–Dig the cool cars in the background!
Just so you can better appreciate what Max Fleischer was able to do with cartoons in the 1920s, here’s “Clutch Cargo,” which debuted in 1959. They made the lips to move with a process called “syncro vox”–but nothing else moved. More like suspended animation than animation.
Remember Koko the Clown? A real blast from the past! These cartoons were from the 1920s and 30s, but were still being shown on TV in the Fifties. This one features the voice of Cab Calloway singing the lugubrious St. James Infirmary Blues.
Max Fleischer, better known for Betty Boop and Popeye, created these cartoons. Amazing animation was produced by drawing the figures over film clips of real people moving around. It must’ve cost a fortune, for its time. I haven’t watched any cartoons lately, but the ones I saw ten years ago or so couldn’t compare with these for quality.
Yes, in my early life there was a weekday afternoon cartoon show hosted by Uncle Fred Sales (who also hosted pro wrestling, providing off-camera sound effects by cracking his knuckles), featuring mostly Farmer Grey cartoons and Terrytoons, but with a sprinkling of Koko specimens.
Was I a better person for having seen all these. Not likely. But they kept me too busy to play with matches.
I write about a world that never was, inspired by a world that used to be.
This is footage from Roy Chapman Andrews’ Gobi Desert expeditions in the 1920s, for the American Museum of Natural History. This is Mongolia as it was then, but isn’t anymore.
God has wired into some of us a longing for places we cannot reach, either because they exist no more or because they never did exist. A fantasy writer taps into that. We know the past was real, because we used to live in it: but was it really? Things change. Sometimes they change too much. Places I used to know very well are so gone, so wiped out without a trace, that they might as well have been in Mongolia in 1926: or tucked away in Lintum Forest. Pick one.
Did I dream these places? Were they ever really real? Because I can’t find them anymore.
Oh, but God can. He most certainly can.
This show came out in 1964, when I was in eighth grade, and it was a huge hit. I remember when our U.S. History teacher, rhapsodizing over John Adams and his descendants, sighed, “Ah, yes, the distinguished Adams family!” And the whole class laughed uproariously, prompting Mr. U____ to remark, “Your minds are in the gutter!”
But it wasn’t such a bad gutter. In addition to having a terribly funny format, hilarious scripts, a terrific cast, and great guest stars like Richard Deacon and Don Rickles, The Addams Family had something good going for it. All the weirdness aside, the members of this family really loved each other! I think they were the happiest and most harmonious family on TV. And that’s worth watching. Oh, very much so!
Uncle Fester, played by Jackie Coogan–watch him steal this scene from co-stars John Astin and Carolyn Jones: still crazy, and still funny, after all these years.
It reminds me of my own family, back when I was five or six years old. Only without the eccentricities.