In this post, I continue to follow in the footsteps of Matt Groening

Another thing which frightened and/or disturbed me as a kid:

This picture of the wolf with his belly full of rocks in the ladybird edition of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids."

"You keep using that word..."

How to play Downfall, Kid John V. version.

Load your counters in.
Then, begin! Tug at the wheels to get all your counters down to the trays at the bottom as quickly as possible, at the same time as your opponent is doing the same thing. Use brute strength to move the wheels the way *you* want them to move, while your opponent uses brute strength to do the same thing. And hurry up!

Yes, the link above says that you should take turns to move the wheels, and that's how parents and friends' parents told me I was supposed to play it, but I was unconvinced. For one thing, it didn't seem as much fun as my version. Also, the blurb on the box seemed to support my way of playing the game: it described it as a "strategy" game, and "strategy" quite obviously meant tugging at wheels trying to outdo your opponent. I guess I didn't really know what the word meant, and I was relying on the sound of the word - the "str" beginning must have sounded like "strength", "struggle" and "strain" to me.

That, and that's what I'd have *liked* it to mean.

Youse guise

Now, here is a song I wish I'd known about when I was a kid. I mean, I was familiar with the voice of Bing Crosby from Christmas records, and I was certainly familiar with Disney cartoons (see pretty much any post tagged "personal" and/or "kidhood")... and vaguely familiar with the concept of a headless horseman. But not quite as familiar as I would become...



From Ichabod and Mr Toad, the Disney package-feature with the non-chronological title. This is therefore from the second half of the film, and if you want to know who animated what in this sequence... well, you're in luck, because the draft can be found right here. By the way, anyone got any idea what "black or white or even red" refers to? The obvious answer is hair colours, but the use of "black" and "white" rather than, say "brown" and "blonde" makes it sound like they mean skin colours.

I did once dress as a headless ... man of some sort one Hallowe'en, and went around the neighbourhood with my younger sister, who was dressed as Casper the Friendly Ghost. I mean, she sang the Casper theme (transcribed by the whole family from a video, and containing one or two mondegreens), it's a shame I couldn't have sung something appropriate as well.

The costume included an over-large sweater, with a bow-tie around the top (to keep it from falling down and exposing my real, attached head... thereby destroying the illusion), and a papier-mache head with a wig on top and a gloomy expression painted on the face. It was a fairly last-minute idea and (Could have just used a pumpkin and saved myself the hassle... the shops would have been full of them, and being a traditional Scottish family, it's not like we'd have had any other use for one...)

No, there's no photos. Well, no digital ones anyway. If people are really interested, I could scan something. However, for the past decade or so, may Hallowe'en costumes have usually been variations on the following theme: "barbarian", "renegade knight", "warrior"... or, with some facial make-up, "orc", and rely on some handy pieces of sacking cloth, the fact that the majority of my clothes are black, and some arms and armour I picked up at a costume shop a while back.




Yeah, both of these photos are from the same year (for some reason they were all I could find), but they may as well not be.

In this post, I shall follow in the footsteps of Matt Groening

In the Simpsons comics, Matt Groening would often write some editorial (maybe he still does, I stopped getting them a few years ago... are they still running, actually, or is it all reprints? I mean, the ones I got were *already* reprints, of the American versions. Anyway...), sometimes related to The Simpsons but often just about his life. One of those was "Things which frightened and disturbed me as a kid." And that's kind of the approach I'd like to take to this post.

Sometimes it feels like my defining childhood moments involve watching something on TV which disturbed or haunted me. Usually they seem to be animated. There is one I remember which involved a ship which was overheating... the furnace was overloaded or something, and it was burning up. The main things I can remember are the scene where the characters escape by helicopter or something, and watch the ship blow up in a sort of mushroom cloud, and the fact that one of the characters had an unshaven face. If I saw it again I don't think it would have much of an effect on me, but at the time... well, let's just say I felt the need to leave the room any time The Simpsons was on - Homer's unshaven face brought back the unpleasant memory.

I'd love to find out what TV show that was, though.

Anyway, I think there can be something genuinely unsettling about the stark look of some of those 70s/80s animated TV shows, with their gloomy colours. One of them I am glad to say I was able to find. Say hello to... The Valley of the Dinosaurs, episode 5 "Volcano"!



Yes, it's only the second half. You're experiencing it the way I did. The first half isn't too hard to find if you're curious, and you want to know why this 70s family is hanging out with these cave-dwellers. Why these prehistoric Ama-zon inhabitants are white (or maybe slightly Asian) or why they speak in the same dialect as the 1970s family, only slower and with no inflections, remain mysteries.

So, anyway, this was a TV series that was on before Saturday morning Disney cartoons. So I invariably saw the last few minutes of it before the cartoons I wanted to see came on. This "Volcano" episode was being shown on the first morning I started seeing Saturday morning cartoons, and I must say that in spite of all the tackiness I see before me now, for a young kid like I was at the time, that volcano... referred to at 03:53 as "Devil's Pudding" for some reason... was High Octane Nightmare Fuel.

And, this was followed by an advert for some sort of superhero-based pasta shapes... which was animated, and involved a tidal wave of spaghetti sauce flooding through a city. I think I assumed this was the preview for the following week's episode: "Next time... the lava reaches the city and kills a lot of people!"

And then... the first cartoon on the Saturday Disney show was the Donald Duck classic "Good Scouts", where Donald and his nephews visit Yellowstone National Park... and begins with them all crossing a mud spring called "Devil's Stew Pot". Oh... and the fact that Donald later winds up on top of a geyser, which *erupts*, didn't exactly put the Hanna-Barbera Nightmare Fuel out of my head.

No-one... but Donald Duck!

When I was a kid I got a set of three videos with Disney shorts on them. They were:

Celebrate With Mickey
Mickey's Circus - starring Mickey and Donald
Foul Hunting - starring Goofy
Beach Picnic - starring Donald and Pluto
Mickey's Birthday Party - starring Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and others
Wide Open Spaces - starring Donald
Man's Best Friend - starring Goofy

Donald's Birthday Bash
Donald's Happy Birthday - starring Donald
Contrary Condor - starring Donald
Crazy Over Daisy - starring Donald
The Eyes Have It - starring Donald and Pluto
The Flying Squirrel - starring Donald
Wet Paint - starring Donald
Clown Of The Jungle - starring Donald

Frontier Pluto
R'Coon Dawg - starring Mickey and Pluto
Flying Jalopy - starring Donald
Pluto's Playmate - starring Pluto
Moose Hunters - starring Mickey, Donald and Goofy
Donald's Nephews - starring Donald
T-Bone For Two - starring Pluto

Notice something here? (Besides the fact that you'd think they'd have a trio of videos named after Mickey, Donald and Goofy, rather than Pluto)

Mickey appears in
Celebrate With Mickey - 2 (co-starring with Donald and Goofy)
Donald's Birthday Bash - 0
Frontier Pluto - 2 (one co-starring with Pluto, one co-starring with Donald and Goofy)

...and by "co-starring with" you can pretty much read "upstaged by".

Pluto appears in
Celebrate with Mickey - 1 (co-starring with Donald)
Donald's Happy Birthday - 1 (co-starring with Donald)
Frontier Pluto - 3 (including one co-starring with Mickey)

Donald, on the other hand, appears in
Celebrate With Mickey - 4 (three with co-stars, one solo)
Donald's Birthday Bash - all of them (including one co-starring with Pluto)
Frontier Pluto - 3 (including one co-starring Mickey and Goofy)

Not only is Donald the only one to appear in all the cartoons on his own video, but he generally appears in more cartoons in the other videos than their supposed stars. AND his video has more cartoons on it than the other two.

I guess that's what people want. Donald by the barrelfull.

Nothing but the lies

I know that Captain Pugwash didn't really have crew members called "Master Bates" or "Roger the Cabin Boy". I know that the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street was not renamed the Veggie Monster as some sort of evil plan to indoctrinate kids into eating more healthily.

(Of course, I'm using "evil" sarcastically here. Although a plan to introduce healthy eating to kids could have a morally suspect element to it, if the plan is to make kids healthy enough to form an army of muscle-bound troops to help you take over the world. But I don't think that's on anyone's mind when they whine about the government having the audacity to try to stop their kids from getting heart diseases.)

The Sesame Street one I learned on snopes, the Pugwash one I knew from being familiar with the Pugwash *books* from my kidhood, confirmed by snopes. I have heard both of these claims stated as fact. I could have replied "That's not true..." but they were unlikely to believe me, and if I did convince them I'd just have been a kill-joy. So I kept my mouth shut and let them enjoy their slanderous anti-nutritious fun. Maybe I was right to do so, or maybe that just leads down the path to ignoring other, more important truths and tacitly accepting other, more damaging lies.

Oh, and if you want PG-13 names in Captain Pugwash... well, one of them is called Willy. How snickersome. But his last (or first) name is not Gilligan.

Four-eyes

When I was a small kid, I remember having a typically small-kid-like top with a picture of a dog as an aviator on it. Also, the writing "Dog Gone Flying". The dog had a cheerful, friendly face, he didn't look evil or anything. However, there was something a bit disturbing about him. His face was quite small, compacted down in the lower part of his head. That's not disturbing, it an be quite appealing. What was distrurbing was the fact that, up on his high forehead were a pair of goggles... over another pair of eyes!

In the absence of any photos of this garment, here's a rough impression of it on MSPaint based on memory.

Look out, Itchy! He's Irish!

When I was a kid I read this joke:

"Is this yours? The name's all smudged."
"No, my name is Allsop."

I didn't quite understand it. I assumed the joke must be that the name "Allsop" apparently looked like a smudge of ink, and that Mr Allsop was saying "No, it's not smudged, my name really does look like that."

I also read a similar joke.

"Is this yours? The name's obliterated."
"No, my name's O'Brien."

I am ashamed to say that not only did I not notice the similarity between the two jokes, but I didn't know what "obliterated" meant either. (I'm not sure how old I was at this point) I thought it might mean "has an O' at the beginning" and the joke was that the foolish Mr O'Brien didn't realise his name was indeed "obliterated".

It was may years later, and, actually, many years after learning what "obliterated" really meant, that I noticed the similarity of the two jokes (some things just come to memory like that) - they were really just versions of the same joke: Person 1 is expressing that he can't read the name, Person 2 thinks that Person 1 *is* reading out a name similar to Person 2's real name.

Of the two, I think that the "O'Brien" version works better, as it's more plausible that someone might think "O'bliterated" is a real name than that they might think "Allsmudged" is. The only problem is that it's potentially insulting to Irish people, as it seems to belong on the same genre as the "Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman" or the "Pat and Mike" jokes, where a character's Irishness is used as a signpost that he is meant to be stupid.

The thing is, I don't think the joke is offensive unless you're already aware of the "Irish = stupid" tradition in so many other jokes. The guy isn't called "O'Brien" because it's a name befitting a stupid character, he's called "O'Brien" because it sounds vaguely like "obliterated". But unfortunately, because of all those *other* jokes, we have to put up with the "Allsmudged" version or risk offending someone. If it weren't for those jokes we could tell the "O'Brien" one to anyone we wanted and have a good old laugh together.

Train of thought

Ever been to the Museum of Transport in Glasgow? As a kid, obviously the preserved steam engines are the highlight. As a former kid, they still look impressive and are still, along with the other exhibits, great as a way of looking back to a past age, but their bright colours of blue, yellow and green somehow make it hard to imagine them being real. Maybe it's because most times one sees a steam train nowadays is in an old black-and-white film or photo, it's as if they really were monochromatic.


I know that pretty much every kid has at least a passing acquaintance with certain brightly coloured fictional locomotives, but I guess, subconsciously if not consciously, it seems as if their bright colours are as much a fantasy as their big grey faces.

Now, despite some momentary lapses on the part of some of my fellow students of 18th century Scotland, I think most people would think if a train showed up in a film set in 1745 they'd realise this was wrong. And yet, there was a railway *line* near Edinburgh from 1722, and one of the battles of the 1745 Jacobite uprising was fought along one! The line was used not by locomotives but by horses pulling wagons.

So, if someone made a film which included the battle, it would be more *accurate* to include the railway line, but it would be more *believable* not to... unless the film also included a scene with a horse pulling a wagon along the line. Which is more important? To portray history as it really was and risk people being pulled out of the film when they think you've made a mistake, or to change the facts so the audience will think you're remaining historically accurate?

Spectre of the Subway

Many, many years ago, I had a dream that I and the rest of the family were waiting for a train at Edinburgh Waverley station.



That's Waverley station there.

The train was sitting there in the station all right, but it wasn't doing anything.

Actually, it's only when I'm typing this post that I realise how silly an idea it is... sitting outside the train, waiting for it to move... so we can leave on it? Shouldn't we have been waiting on the train?

Oh well, maybe the doors hadn't opened or something.

Anyway, we were standing around, waiting for the train to move, and we had been doing that for ages, when I suddenly realised that the reason the train wasn't moving because it had nowhere to move. The track was only as long as the train was, and it was blocked off by solid wall at either end.

It also seemed after a while that the train was just a sort of orange pattern on the wall and/or floor, but that's kind of the way dreams work.

Well, this dream kind of stuck with me. Maybe it was the eerie silence of a station where the train didn't move. But it started to become a recurring dream, that of a train station where the trains were blocked off at either end.

It was only a couple of months ago, when I decided to visit the Glasgow Museum of Transport for the first time in over ten, maybe over fifteen years, that I finally discovered where the original dream must have come from:



This is part of the Museum's "Kelvin Street" display, which is a reconstruction of a hypothetical street in Glasgow in the... um... past. (Unfortunately I can't seem to get any images of the other parts of the display. I just have to recommend you visit it, if, like me, you like the uncanny feeling of being in a film noir, and cinemas which show cartoons like "Mr Duck Steps Out") It contains a replica of an underground station, with stationery old-fashioned train carriages sitting in it. Of course, the station doesn't have real tunnels on each side of it, it just has black tunnel-shapes painted on the walls... and compared to a real underground station, it is eerily quiet.



It's almost like the vision of Tombstone from the Star Trek episode "Spectre of the Gun." Dreamlike in itself... and most definitely the inspiration for a dream.

Can you dig it? I mean... You've got to dig!

This is one of the series which was still there on the video when I found it in summer 2002, and, indeed, which I went on to make the website about. Educational kids' TV at its best. A series about everyday events which kids can learn basic scientific facts from. Animated fantasy sequences illustrating characters' thoughts. Songs which are outside the story's continuity which may or may not have been sung by members of the cast. Dialogue which doesn't patronize the five-or-six-year-old kids in the audience but which doesn't aim too far over their heads either... (Actually, one of Charles Way's episodes would have illustrated this point a bit better) in particular, no smirking innuendo. You can read what I thought about the series back in Ought Two here.



Oh, and those shots of flowers opening up seemed to be in every schools TV programme back in the early 90s.

It's just another parcel!

Well... here he is! Check him out in all his lampshade-headed glory! It's Mr Boom! (or "Mr Boon" as continuity announcers would sometimes call him, presumably expecting a full rhyme with "Moon".) I don't remember this one (obviously, since it doesn't involve building a house) and you might notice the watching Earth bit actually comes *after* the guest... but before Mr Boo[m/n] gives us a song.



I'm not too impressed that the opening sequence seems to have been cut off, but I'm glad to see the complete (and rarely-shown IIRC) closing sequence on the end. Notice the date is 1990, so I'd have been 4 or 5 years old at the time... so I guess it could have been one of the episodes I saw. I don't remember that smiley face which sounds like a Cyberman kid though.



Hey, there's one notable fact about Mr Boom's physiology which I totally forgot to mention last time. His nose makes a squeak sound if you touch it. That was what really put him on the map for me as a kid so I'm at a loss to explain why I forgot it when I made the earlier post. And there's the name, Andy Munro. Guess it's the same guy then. I'm glad about that.

Other great things about this video include Mr Boom's use of the word "wheech" (or however you spell it), and the fact that the storyteller wears a spacesuit when he's outside, but the entrance to the Dome is just a cardboard door that won't shut properly.

So, in conclusion... thank you TributeToThePast... whoever you are!

Use your imagination!

Some seven years ago I found a bunch of videotapes which had been hidden away in a cupboard. The videos contained educational kids TV programmes from about ten years earlier. Some of them were from the famous "Look and Read" series, which inspired me to discover Ben Clarke's site devoted to the "Look and Read" stories (at the time it was not part of the Broadcast for Schools site, which didn't exist back then) and create my own (much more simple-looking) website about two of the other "schools progs" from my kidhood - "Thinkabout Science" and "Science Challenge" -- with a LOT of help from Ben Clarke!

One series, however, I did not find any of was "Over the Moon". This was a Scottish show, starring a one-man-band who went by the name of "Mr Boom", which sort of rhymes with the name of the show. I didn't find any episodes because they were all on one video, and we taped over that video long ago, with some other educational stuff (including, I think, some "Look and Read") and then partly with "The Simpsons" until I discovered there was some "Look and Read" on it.

It's a shame that "Over the Moon" has been lost to the ages, though. What I remember is this:

It took place in a glass dome, purportedly on the surface of the Moon.
Mr Boom looked through a telescope to watch people on Earth, doing some sort of activity. The only one I remember was building a house, specifically the roof of a house, and Mr Boom explaining that this was to stop all the rain from getting in.
The second part of each episode involved some sort of guest, visiting him on the moon, and singing a song or reading a story. Actually, this may have only happened once, and I could be wrong about the song or story, except that most TV programmes for kids of that age tended to end with a song or a story.
The theme song included the lines: "Use your imagination, to jump over the moon, over the moon" and a harmonica solo. When they broadcast closing credits, it included the lines "You have used your imagination to jump over the moon, over the moon, return to your Earth location..."

I never really paid attention to the name of the guy playing Mr Boom. I guess I just assumed Boom was his real surname. I did realise that it wasn't really filmed on the Moon, though. And you know how I knew? When Mr Boom looked at the Earth, he looked through a telescope that pointed up the way. But everyone knows the Moon is *above* the Earth. So surely his telescope should be pointing down!

A pirate I was meant to be!

This should be a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of the Monkey Island series. I wonder how close they'll stick to the original script - new material would be good but I'm also hoping to hear the now-familiar voice of Guybrush performing lines like "You must have mistaken me for someone else, I am not a farmer."

I remember playing Monkey Island 2 when I was a kid - the version which had about 20 discs which you had to keep on taking out and putting in. I never reached the end of it, which was probably a good thing because you kind of need to be familiar with the climaxes of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to really "get" the ending, two films I wouldn't see for a few years...

But that wasn't my introduction to piratical computer games. That would have been away back in about 1990, when we had a BBC Basic computer, and one of the games we installed was called simply "Pirate". I loved that game. There was no mouse on that computer, and you could give the game only six commands (expressed by six of the function keys) - north, south, east, west, yes and no.

Level one took place in a small sea (actually, I guess it was more of a lake - it was surrounded by coastline after all). Locations included dragon island (where you'd only survive if you had already acquired a sword earlier in your travels) and cat island, where a black cat would tell you its name - a name which would be required as a password to reach the land-based level 2.

Things which could happen to you included:

Killed by the dragon of dragon island
Cursed by a man who you refuse to rescue
Overthrown by your crew and ordered to "walk the plank" (a crocodile, or possibly a shark, eagerly awaiting your arrival in the sea)
Dashed against the rocks in that omnipresent coastline
Losing a battle with an enemy crew of pirates
Shipwrecked on an island and unable to signal for help because you hadn't captured any flags to signal with

That was in level 1. In level 2 you might get stampeded by a boar or struck by lightning... "and your boots smoke!" I never got any further than part way through level 2 so who knows how many wonders awaited later in the game?

Of course, as various characters point out in Monkey Island 3, you can't die in a LucasArts adventure game (unless they're trying something new) so I'm unlikely ever again to read (or hear) the following pronouncement:

"Cap'n, we are done for! The dogs are too much for us."

Raiding memories

Watched Raiders of the Lost Ark again this evening, and, as I always am when I see it, I was reminded of the massive gap between the first and second time I saw it.

About five years ago I saw all the Indiana Jones films (well, all the Indiana Jones films so far) for the first time in ages. A lot of the details I saw just as I remembered them - for example, I remembered Indy climbing under the van and back in, then throwing the Nazi soldier out of the front, and the soldier trying to copy what Indy did, but failing.

However, a lot of things were different from the way I remembered them... and what's more, they're different from the way I *still* remember seeing them when I first saw the film. When I watched Raiders again in '04, I didn't just say "Oh, yes, of course, that's how it really went", I still remember the other version of the film. The one with different camera angles, some scenes in a different order... and the grand finale, where the villains open the ark and it causes them to melt (you know the scene if you know Indiana Jones) taking place inside a building, overgrown with weeds and creepers, with Indy and Marion nowhere near them.

About five years ago I saw Raiders for the first time in ages. It was great to see it again. But somehow I wish I could see that "other" Raiders again, the one that must only have existed inside my head, for some mysterious and unknown reason.

Kids think the darnedest things, part one

I remember when I was a kid I enjoyed a game of Junior Scrabble. That's the version of Scrabble where the words are already spelled out on the board, helpfully illustrated with pictures, and you just have to cover them over with identical tiles.

For some bizarre reason I thought that the non-junior version of Junior Scrabble was "(A Question of) Scruples". I must, at some point in my kidhood, been told that "Scruples" was a "grown-ups game" or something, and, because the name sounded kind of like "Scrabble" I assumed it was the grown-up version of the same game.

Kids' minds work in weird ways, don't they? Or maybe it's just my mind that works in weird ways.