I had this written a week ago, and then the work week started and finishing it up took a back seat. I am really looking forward to retirement, except for the not being wealthy part. Hi ho, as Vonnegut would say.
I was in a dark depression this summer, which ended the day after the 4th of July.
Bah! Humbug!
Lexapro kept me moving during those days, so I wasn’t completely closed off, but I was definitely phoning it in. My relationship with the 4th is complicated by my job, you see; when I first signed on to my current career in 2009, there was a city parade every 4th, and that required a remote setup, hours of running cable and setting up cameras in July heat. I came to refer to it as The Day My Job Tries To Kill Me.
COVID put an end to the parade, and it hasn’t come back yet. One point for House Freexulpuff! This still left the annual concert (which was inside and air conditioned) and the post-concert fireworks, when at least it was dark.
I am looking 70 in the face and am quite over fireworks.
None of that really contributed that much to my funk. It was that guy in Washington who decided to fucking ruin the 4th like everything else he touches.
The 1976 Bicentennial was the year I graduated high school. That was a noisy, gaudy time. It felt important and bracing and worth celebrating. This anniversary? Not so much. I could provide a laundry list of what’s wrong right now, but I’m pretty sure you already know.
But… Every immigrant I know was enthusiastic and celebratory about the 250. It was those people that kept me from writing the whole thing off. They helped me realize – or, better, remember – that the celebration was about the country and its promise, not the current occupant vandalizing the White House. So let him ruin the celebration in DC. We had our own, and didn’t need him. If we ever did, which is dubious.
Also, they’re still using Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as background for the fireworks, though it now switches off after “To go and kill the yellow man” as if somebody was actually listening to the lyrics for once and went, “Yipe!”
So I felt better afterwards. Started journeying toward “more normal”. That took the next week editing and producing the videos, and it was finally off my desk and brain (at least for a year). Actually watched a movie. Hope to do that more.
Okay, okay, it was Supergirl – naturally – and it was good. It was fine entertainment. We’ve learned by now if the initial review bombing is savage and insulting, that is a movie to go see, yes? As it should be.
Anyway.
Warren Ellis wrote in one of his many online notebooks:
“I never had a problem with being a generalist – it’s a big world and it’s been around a long time and I want to learn as much about it as I can. But, these days, to get ahead you have to niche down hard, to become a trusted expert in one particular thing. You want to be the one voice the AI reaches for to answer a question, or the single speaker in your specific pigeonhole.”
That’s as succinct and clear a picture of Where We Are Now as you will find. I started wondering, what the hell could I possibly point to as an niche in which I am expert? There are lots more people more knowledgeable about crap cinema than I. Probably not that many (stop laughing), but enough that contribute more regularly to the conversation. So I had to go out there. To get niche-ier than Nietzsche.
Then a Facebook challenge engaged me (it happens). The question was basically, “What cartoons did you watch as a kid that nobody knows about?” and class, I shined.
I started off with Yippee, Yappy and Yahooey, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon out of 1964, which I thought surely was not too obscure. After all, it was part of The Peter ‘Potamus Show. Slappy Squirrel mentioned them on an episode of Animaniacs. They’re even characters in the Jellystone series on HBOMax.
Nobody had heard of it. Then again, a fair number of my friends on there are younger than me. But come on! Peter Potamus? Master of the Hippo Hurricane Howler?
Water thus tested, I went for actual obscurities. Bucky and Pepito was a series of 36 cartoons made in 1959. It was in heavy rotation in South Texas television in the 60s, where a friendship between white and latino boys was much more common.
Again, nobody had even heard of it. I think they were starting to believe I made it all up. Glad I didn’t trot out the much more entertaining Spunky and Tadpole.
It was aired in daily three and a half minute slots, with one storyline taking about 10 episodes to play out. That clip is a week’s worth of Spunky, and yes, that is Joan Gardner as Spunky and Don Messick voicing Tadpole. It got squeezed out by other syndicated TV fare like Huckleberry Hound, which at least looked better animated.
Never got around to stuff that wasn’t broadcast throughout the Southwest, like Crusader Rabbit and Colonel Bleep, as that was not part of the original question.
Don’t even get me started on Super President.
Or Fantastic Voyage, right? Surely you fellow oldsters remember Fantastic Voyage?
Anything with a Ted Knight introduction deserves some attention.
So now I just sit back, relax, and wait for the algorithm to send querants my way, then stage three, PROFIT, amirite?
… Goddamnit, now I need to know Tadpole’s okay.
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