My friend J9 and I went out to Palm Springs this week and encountered some snow while driving out there. While in Palm Springs, we went to one of those concerts that the two of us seem to find ourselves at together, where the core audience is about 20 years older than us. We shared a table with a particularly delightful member of the core audience, and when we shared that we had heard that West Hollywood had also gotten some snow that day, our tablemate said something about better there being snow outside than on the coffee table. This lady had some stories to tell.
I don’t exactly know where I’m going with this, other than to say that the only snow in this cartoon is in the kitchen.
The rain has finally stopped here for a moment. I am thinking that I should go out in the yard to see if there is a child Phyllis Diller tending to giant pumpkins out there. Just a sec –
I suppose an argument could be made that this cartoon is espousing a conservative and humble “Christian values” approach to living, but wouldn’t the stronger argument be that Happy Valley is a model of a socialist utopia? The latter seems inescapable to me, even though this was produced in 1952 when we were getting a lot of “Capitalism vs. Communism: Freedom vs. Oppression”Cold War propaganda cartoons. I never considered Paul Terry to be much of a radical, but maybe I need to read some more.
In the meantime, keep throwing your frozen pants in the air and blowing bubbles and making water clouds and all that stuff as long as you have a nice warm place to retreat to.
(It seems I posted this a few years ago, but I have yet to find a decent groundhog cartoon…)
Not sure what’s going on in this picture that Benny found, but it might make sense for you to be suspicious of any authority figures and cultural icons until this gets figured out.
Sorry if the audio on this one makes you seasick, but it’s kind of fitting my mood this morning. I think most of the dialogue in this cartoon was ad-libbed – don’t miss the “Hello, big boy… swing it!” growl from the nice lady.
On New Year’s Eve this year, I went to a party hosted by a very generous Russian lady and her husband. If you ever have a chance to go to a party hosted by a very generous Russian lady, do it. I was excited about the prospect of caviar and borscht, but I wasn’t prepared for the magic of Olivier Salad and Salmon Under Fur. Just the names are magic. Oh geez, I need to stop thinking about them. Or somehow convince the very generous Russian lady and her husband to adopt me. They also had cats and a really nice massage chair and lots of friendly guests. I didn’t even find the caviar and it didn’t matter. It was a good New Year’s Eve.
I guess a lot of people luckier than me have been getting a video recommendation on YouTube about a quest to find a lost creepy cartoon from some guy’s childhood. I say “luckier than me” because my recommended videos have been flooded with a character named Emilia Fart ever since I clicked on one of her videos, and I don’t know how much Emilia Fart I’m supposed to consume but apparently it’s a lot more than I’m able to.
Back to this video that’s been recommended to the lucky people. Maybe they’re not so lucky either, because the video that was recommended to them is 23 excruciating minutes long. Maybe I found it excruciating because there is so much hyperbole in the description of the search for this lost cartoon. A fruitless search for the former owners of a foreign cartoon distributor from the ’80s is embellished with “it was as if they vanished,” and so on. A chapter (yes, this thing has chapters) is entitled “False Leads.” Way too much time is spent on explaining the plots of other cartoons and fairy tales that people on the search are conflating with the cartoon in question. And a great deal of this search seems to have been made on 4chan, where everybody is stamping their childhood fever dreams (literally; “I REMEMBER THIS FROM TV WHEN I WAS HOME WITH THE FLU”) as irrefutable fact. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to have a good old fashioned Freak Ourselves Out Klub meeting, but all of this is presented so breathlessly that I couldn’t help rolling my eyes.
Of course, maybe I found it excruciating because I watched the cartoon in question before the “in search of” video, and it’s just not creepy. I know that “creepy” is awfully subjective (I find Sesame Street’s classic opera singing orange somewhat disturbing, if fascinating), but come on. Maybe I’m annoyed because the “in search of” video never addresses the fact that all of the young men describing this cartoon remember the main character as a boy instead of a girl, or maybe I’m annoyed because there is an overproud air of “look what great researchers we are” to this thing that really should not have taken five years to resolve. I don’t know. Have your fun, I guess. I’m just a cranky old person who gets scared by citrus fruits singing Carmen.
If you find “The Search For Clockman” pop up in your recommended videos, allow me to recommend that you skip it and just watch the actual cartoon “About Dressy Sally” instead. Here it is:
Having a beauty pageant right after a time of people stuffing themselves with rich foods to the point of discomfort seems like a bad idea to me, but maybe it puts the contestants on a more even playing field. Here she comes, Miss Bloat 2019.
