CSotD: … and, on a lighter note …
Skip to comments
Bits and pieces today, all fairly lightweight but not entirely silly.
I love today's Heart of the City, because I, too, suffer from being unable to not see the strings. That is, I enjoy Peter Pan, either the classic Mary Martin original or the quite dynamic Cathy Rigby version, but I can never suspend belief to the point where I stop watching the flight sequences in terms of analyzing how they do it.
Which makes it nearly impossible to watch much in the way of network TV, because not only do I note whether a beer in someone's hand is product-placement or one of those generic this-is-not-product-placement brands, but I analyze the script continuously, as well as the delivery. And the blocking.
Most of which is pretty cheesy.
But, still, it makes me wonder at what point you become Holden Caulfield, sitting in the audience self-righteously denouncing the phonies on the stage.
I defend myself by insisting that it's not my fault when I try to just enjoy a Civil War movie only to find that they have glued bad beards on well-known actors, which makes me think not about the Battle of Gettysburg but about how little planning must go into a production when the lead actors don't even bother to grow their own beards before filming starts.
Moral of the Story: Don't ever sit between me and Heart's mom at the movies. You wouldn't enjoy it.
However, I do enjoy silly things that are not supposed to be good, as long as they're inexpensive and unpretentious, and, even as a kid, I knew the cartoons in Bazooka Bubble Gum were lame. I read them anyway, and I suppose, if there were a jar of Bazooka next to a jar of Double Bubble, I'd have reached for the Bazooka for this reason.
But stores usually had one or the other and, honestly, beyond the comic they seemed pretty interchangeable to me. Anyway, Bazooka is discontinuing the comics.
Just when my generation was getting over the impending loss of Twinkies.
The mournful cry of the Boomer: "That cheap, useless shit was still around? Dear God, how will we ever survive without it!"
Not that mainstream Baby Boomers are the only generation afflicted with Silly Nostalgia Syndrome. Gen-Xers and second-wave Boomers (I just invented that demographic — you like it?) suffer from the same thing, and it really comes to the fore this time of year when they become rhapsodic over horrible holiday specials that drove their elder siblings out of the room.
I knew nothing about the Island of Misfit Toys except that it must have come up after the first two minutes of that execrable piece of claymation crapola, but now, thanks mainly to Francesco Marciuliano's constant bagging on it, I might just as well have stayed and watched it.
More fascinating to me is the demi-generational divide in affection for Peanuts. I think the strip jumped the shark at about the point when the next group through was just encountering it for the first time, so they get all warm and fuzzy over the TV specials that I only sometimes sat through.
And, again, Ces's hilarious send-ups of the strip, and particularly the TV specials spun off from it, have kept me in stitches.
But behind his travesties there is real affection, and here he presents Six True Facts About "A Charlie Brown Christmas" that are genuinely interesting, and especially so to people like me and, by extension, to Heart's mother, who watch for the strings instead of marveling at the flight.
Nice work by a very silly man, and very much worth following the link to see the rest.
Finally, here's something that isn't around anymore that, unlike Twinkies, Bazooka Joe comics or crappy holiday specials, we really should maintain: Richard's Poor Almanac, which ran in the Washington Post in the days before Richard Thompson launched "Cul de Sac" and became a household name. At least in the best households.
Now reruns are available at Gocomics.com, which is a very good thing. The fake beards there are supposed to be fake, the lame jokes were intended to be lame and there's never an unsnipped carrot sticking out of the top of the bag unless Richard wanted it there.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments 6
Comments are closed.