CSotD: Pardon My Flashbacks
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Vic Lee's "Pardon My Planet" with a demented twist on a common phrase.
This feature varies between social commentary and this kind of surreal foolishness, with the unifying principle being Lee's ability to show silent reactions that are often funnier than the punchline. Note that the couple in the background combine body language and facial expression in a way that wouldn't work with another style, either one that was more cartoonish or one that was more realistic. Lee has his niche figured and he has a field day therein.
Today's cartoon punched a particular button for me because I remain both fascinated and freaked out by the idea of sentient houses. When I was a relatively wee lad, our school librarian would read "chapter books" to us, a chapter a week, and I was always a little bit lost in the books because I had a nine-year-old's powers of retention to begin with, laced with a dose of what would later be called ADD.
So I was not only a little unclear on what had gone on in the chapter before, but I would also daydream during the current reading, and what I came up with in the end was something of my own devise.
My favorite of the books she read us was "The Princess and the Goblin," an 1872 children's book by George MacDonald that has two main settings:
1. A rambling old royal hunting lodge where a small door in the princess's bedroom is the beginning of a back stairwell leading up sometimes to a deadend and sometimes to a high tower chamber in which a kindly, mystical old woman weaves spiderwebs into Ariadne-like guide threads, and
2. A huge mountain honeycombed with a mix of mine shafts and of goblin caverns, in which a young miner labors and attempts to avoid the horrifying danger of blundering into the wrong passageways. (But is also fascinated enough that he sneaks into the goblin side to spy on the dangerous creatures.)
I read the book again as an adult and it was bizarre enough if you were keeping up with it. To add the twists a semi-attentive nine-year-old brought to it was, indeed, enough to create a lifetime of odd and fascinating dreamscapes.
Especially if the nine-year-old's grandparents had a rambling house with a back staircase. And he knew, in the non-specific way that kids know things, that his grandfather had once worked underground as a miner.
The concept of sentient buildings thus became somewhat hard-wired in my developing psyche.
I was well into adulthood in 1977, then, when "The Sentinel" came out, a fantasy thriller about a young woman who moves into an apartment where sometimes it's just an old brownstone with several vacant apartments and one apartment rented by a friendly, mildly eccentric Burgess Meredith, and sometimes it's a fully-occupied building full of bizarre orgies and murderous zombies.
Boy, was that movie designed to freak me out. "If walls could talk" indeed.
A movie so bizarre, so demented, so utterly beyond what the human psyche can tolerate that Christopher Walken isn't even credited in the trailer …
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