Forgive me if this post is even more disorganized than usual, as I feel a bit like I'm unstuck in time, floating back to my actual youth while at the same time imagining an alternate childhood, trying to determine if the person I've become was somehow inevitable, or if a whole other set of circumstances might have changed my life.
The impetus for all this was, of all things, a story on NPR interviewing average folks in Minnesota about their feelings about the upcoming elections. They mostly spoke with hilariously typical upper midwestern reserve, particularly the lady who caught my attention when she spoke of her ambvilanence about the war: "I just wish they could do something about those darn insurgents."
After laughing uproariously, my mind started riffing on the phrase "Those darn insurgents." It sounds like a really bad early seventies Disney movie. "When Dean Jones and Bob Crane lead the kookiest corps in Kabul, they encounter an uprising of laughter that will declare a fatwa on your funnybone!"
Which got me to thinking about several things, including how all those lame Disney movies of that era held absolutely no interest for me, even though they were among few movies back then that were actually marketed to people in my age group. But I didn't want stuff made for kids, or at least stuff that announced that it was made for kids. I wanted giant monsters, or Clint Eastwood in a poncho shooting guys, or anything that involved blowing up Nazis. But That Darn Cat! or Superdad or Herbie Rides Again? Forget it.
I also started remembering how I'd inexplicably launched into a similar riff back in the early eighties, when I was in high school, drawing a comic strip strictly for my own amusement called Darn That Jack The Ripper! The conceit here was an imagined co-production between Disney and Hammer Films, co-starring Dean Jones and Peter Cushing as wacky, mis-matched investigators wandering through dull static scenes (if Dean Jones was involved) or incredibly lurid, oversexed ones (if Cushing was showcased). This sort of high-concept, low-payoff material is now the stuff of off-Broadway shows (Evil Dead: The Musical just opened this week, and Lord, I wish I was kidding), but if you were a kid in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the late seventies and early eighties, and your heroes were writers and filmmakers not pro athletes, you were isolated by your very nature, and that isolation could start to seem like your defining trait. There was, after all, no internet, and living on a farm, there was no thought of cable TV. There was no way to know I wasn't, in fact, alone.
Which led to try to imagine what it must be like to be a kid now. There are so many more entertainment options, and it's easier to access the wider world, and the things that I loved so much as a kid--Warner Bros. cartoons, monster movies--are both easier and harder than ever to see. Easier, because you can get them on DVD and watch them anytime, anywhere. Harder, because they're just another product now, and the very ease whit which they can be accessed takes something away, since the beauty of a precious jewel glows all the more brightly when viewed only in glimpses.
In other words, sitting down to watch The Floppy Show, the local puppet and cartoon show in central Iowa, was a crap shoot. You knew you'd get three Warner Bros. cartoons, but you might get Speedy Gonzales and a late period Tweety and Sylvester and a middling Bugs Bunny. But you might get a rarely screened Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett masterpiece, and if you did, you watched it like your life depended on it, because who knew if you'd see it again? And that attentiveness paid off with an appreciation for its virtues, and a sense that, in six minute increments, the world could be a perfect place.
But if I didn't have those ritualistic viewings, would the warner Bros. carttons have meant anything to me? In this day and age, irony is the coin of the realm, and even things targeted at the youngest kids are full of "attitude". But there was a time when the entertainment deemed acceptable to youth really was impossibly square and boring, and yet so many of us watched it anyway, because there was nothing else to do. And to say no, there must be something better than this, well, that's when I rebelled and became what I am. But when that very rebellious nature is marketed to kids, what is there to rebel against? How can anyone assert their individuality?
And why will the phrase "those darn insurgents" make me laugh until I die?
