CSotD: Saturday Morning Cartoons
Skip to comments
Yes, I know. We’ll get to it after a few more cartoonists have weighed in. For now, we’ll skip the politics and have a few laffs instead.
Anyway, she’s not the only one who has suddenly popped up in a most bizarre place. Rip Haywire (AMS) is trying to figure out who he is and where he’s been and what the heck is going on.
Normally, I’d dismiss something like this as yet another “And then I woke up” storyline, but Rip’s been a little cattywumpus lately and it’s possible the strip is headed in another direction. Or possibly not, but it’s always ridiculous in a fun way, not in a “Ronna McDaniels reporting for MSNBC” surrealistic way.
And now we know that Lizzie, star of Reply All (Counterpoint), is old enough to have grown up with Ed Sullivan on the family TV every Sunday night.
My mother often included a Broadway show in our nearly-annual trips to NYC, so I saw The Music Man, the Sound of Music and several others shows live and in person, though A Man For All Seasons didn’t have any singing and Marcel Marceau didn’t make any noise at all.
But the real source of Broadway music was Ed Sullivan, because in those days of three networks and one television, he had a talent for rounding up a true variety show every week, and even if you were waiting for Bobby Rydell, you were going to hear someone belting out a tune from Wildcat, which closed before we could get there.
Actually, it closed before much of anybody could get there, but Ed must have liked it, because we had “Hey Look Me Over” repeatedly hammered into our brains whether we wanted it there or not.
But Camelot, Sound of Music, My Fair Lady and West Side Story fared much better, both on Broadway and on Ed Sullivan, and we had their whole scores memorized.
And this aside: We actually had four networks, not three, because of living within range of the CBC, so when Robert Goulet popped up on Sullivan singing songs from Camelot, we already knew him from the DuMaurier cigarette jingle on Hockey Night in Canada.
Which added to the bathos when he was chosen to sing the National Anthem before the second Ali/Liston fight in Lewiston and completely blew the lyrics.
I think Sonny had a better evening.
We’ll boost our Canadian Content with this xkcd backhanded salute to Gordon Lightfoot.
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was a tipping point in Lightfoot’s journey from folksinger to pop star, and I suspect how you think of it is weighted by which side you’re on.
Not only did I hang out with folksingers in college, but besides Hockey Night in Canada, I grew up watching Juliette and Let’s Sing Out.
Also the dirge was six minutes long, so if you didn’t like it, you were stuck for awhile.
Okay, just a little more Canadiana, as Ben (MWAM) goes literary.
Since I wasn’t an English major, I never encountered Jane Austen until years after graduation, and was surprised to find out how wickedly funny a woman writing at the dawn of the 19th century could be.
She’s one of two authors — the other is Anthony Trollope — who can actually make me LOL, with the added benefit that Pride & Prejudice and her other novels are very well-plotted books with compelling stories to tell.
Which is also true of The Way We Live Now, but the damn thing is 800 pages long, and we don’t need to read about Augustus Melmotte when we’ve got Donald Trump right in front of us, though without the rough, thick hair:
Olivia’s right, by the way: People who watch TV sitcoms would find plenty of pleasure in classic literature if nobody warned them that it was “classic.”
Just as kids like the pair in Grand Avenue (AMS) wouldn’t know to hate broccoli if they weren’t told that they hate it.
I understand how, if canned spinach were how you first encountered it, even Popeye couldn’t redeem that gelatinous slop, though two generations have grown up knowing it only in its fresh or frozen form.
But there’s no such thing as canned broccoli and, as a kid, I enjoyed being a giant who ate trees.
I blame Carl Rose and EB White.
Meanwhile, Jonesy refuses to surrender to catchphrases and cliches.
And I refuse to put that little accent aigu over the E in cliche, which isn’t an accent because the whole thing is a different letter and one not found in English, so I say it’s French and I say the hell with it.
A cliche isn’t a clique and it isn’t a cloche and if you don’t know what it is then what difference does it make how I spell it? Also if you do?
From now on, I’m not going to bother, which lifts a weight from my soul and makes me as happy as some sort of pig, I suppose.
I only wish I were still working with an editor who would sniff and correct me so I could do it again the next time.
Theoretically, I agree with Arlo and Janis (AMS), but there’s more to my acceptance than the fact that newspapers today are too lightweight to throw from the bike to the porch anyway.
“Paperboys” disappeared a couple of decades ago when some genius realized that sending kids out onto the streets before dawn might expose the paper to some liability, at which point we switched to “independent contractors,” an IRS concept that means you can only beg them to make their deliveries, you can’t order them to.
I quit getting a paper when the independent contractor began refusing to go up my driveway when it snowed. And, BTW, the online edition didn’t smell like cigarettes.
In any case, that little pamphlet that used to be a newspaper is only being delivered to a couple of houses on each block, so being a carrier makes no sense anymore.
Which is (A) a shame and (B) reality.
Not only has Spud got his priorities completely lined up in this Wallace the Brave (AMS), but he gets extra credit for annoying Amelia.
The Spud abides.
Now here’s a show tune that even Lizzie doesn’t know the lyrics to:
Comments 18
Comments are closed.