My intense love for this cartoon makes me want to make some pretty hyperbolic statements. Even now, even two sentences in, I'm still struggling. It's too hard for me to separate in my mind the INTENSE nostalgia and just... satisfaction this thing brings out in me, from a more critical (and still satisfied) adult perspective.
For one thing, and in a somewhat bizarre but entirely appropriate coincidence, I'm finishing Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem right now, which is all about causality, quantum theory, polycosmic so-and-so. So it's hard to watch a cartoon that is, at its heart, a long sequence of cause-and-effect events, strung together over one of the funkiest backbeats I think I've ever heard. It's hard to imagine the novel and the cartoon being any more different, but if I could include both in a mixtape, well... But I'll say more about Anathem in another post. I'm having enough trouble describing this cartoon.
While its usually hard to remember how something felt when you were a kid, I can watch this and instantly go back to seeing it 30 years ago, marvelling at how right each successive event was. While I don't have OCD, I do take intense, often time-consuming and distracting pleasure in organizing things, filling out forms, basically putting things in their places. And while I've never really enjoyed getting high, going "out of my head", et cetera, when I was a kid this was like getting high to me. This cartoon was like an OCD birthday party: basically dozens of shots of things happening JUST BECAUSE, the way they were supposed to, the ball each time finding its way into its various temporary homes.
WHAT IN THE WORLD was the chain of events that created this cartoon? Besides the animation itself, right out of some back page in The Push Pin Graphic, there's that extraordinarily funky music. Is that the funkiest backbeat ever? Hard to say, but GOOD GOD, I can't get it out of my head. I don't want to get it out of my head. Can you imagine being part of the group of people that made this? Sitting around the table saying, "and then a monkey jumps out of the elephant and tees the ball up; maybe Teddy Roosevelt can catch the ball in his mouth?" Someone in the comment section at the Youtube post says that it's THE POINTER SISTERS singing? If this came out today, it would cost 20 million dollars, win an Oscar, and launch its own line of merchandise. But in the 70's it was just 2 minutes and 42 seconds on The Electric Company (or Sesame Street, maybe both), broadcast to a bunch of 4 year olds, each of whom stored the memory somewhere deep and secret, to be unearthed and treasured periodically for the rest of their lives.
Unearth this: the last 10 seconds of the thing MIGHT be among my favorite pieces of art of all time. I know, it's crazy. But if you judge art based on its power to inspire, to mystify, and most of all TO PLEASE, something about the end of this cartoon hits me deep, somewhere in my lizard brain. Almost as if I've been there, almost as if I'll be back soon.
TWELVE!
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right now, which is all about causality, quantum theory, polycosmic so-and-so. So it's hard to watch a cartoon that is, at its heart, a long sequence of cause-and-effect events, strung together over one of the funkiest backbeats I think I've ever heard. It's hard to imagine the novel and the cartoon being any more different, but if I could include both in a mixtape, well... But I'll say more about Anathem in another post. I'm having enough trouble describing this cartoon.
While its usually hard to remember how something felt when you were a kid, I can watch this and instantly go back to seeing it 30 years ago, marvelling at how right each successive event was. While I don't have OCD, I do take intense, often time-consuming and distracting pleasure in organizing things, filling out forms, basically putting things in their places. And while I've never really enjoyed getting high, going "out of my head", et cetera, when I was a kid this was like getting high to me. This cartoon was like an OCD birthday party: basically dozens of shots of things happening JUST BECAUSE, the way they were supposed to, the ball each time finding its way into its various temporary homes.
WHAT IN THE WORLD was the chain of events that created this cartoon? Besides the animation itself, right out of some back page in The Push Pin Graphic, there's that extraordinarily funky music. Is that the funkiest backbeat ever? Hard to say, but GOOD GOD, I can't get it out of my head. I don't want to get it out of my head. Can you imagine being part of the group of people that made this? Sitting around the table saying, "and then a monkey jumps out of the elephant and tees the ball up; maybe Teddy Roosevelt can catch the ball in his mouth?" Someone in the comment section at the Youtube post says that it's THE POINTER SISTERS singing? If this came out today, it would cost 20 million dollars, win an Oscar, and launch its own line of merchandise. But in the 70's it was just 2 minutes and 42 seconds on The Electric Company (or Sesame Street, maybe both), broadcast to a bunch of 4 year olds, each of whom stored the memory somewhere deep and secret, to be unearthed and treasured periodically for the rest of their lives.
Unearth this: the last 10 seconds of the thing MIGHT be among my favorite pieces of art of all time. I know, it's crazy. But if you judge art based on its power to inspire, to mystify, and most of all TO PLEASE, something about the end of this cartoon hits me deep, somewhere in my lizard brain. Almost as if I've been there, almost as if I'll be back soon.
TWELVE!
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