I don't know if I liked it. It was on and I watched it. That's what 9-year-old boys did on Saturday mornings in 1962 until our mothers kicked us out to play. Then we stayed out until she told us to come in. Rinse, repeat.
No wait, it was more complicated than that. WMUR, the ABC affiliate on Channel 9 was three blocks away and the cartoon show had a host, Ring-A-Ding the clown, with kids getting to be on TV marching in and waving to the camera, cheering on cue, and participating in games like identifying states on a map. Ring-A-Ding quickly learned not to call on me because I got them immediately which wasn't very good theater. Just like at school. I resented it deeply.
I knew that my great uncle collected clown memorabilia, but I don't recall being told that he was the original clown on that show in the 50s. Nor that my great-grandmother and her five daughters lived four houses away in the 1910s. I figured my mother must have told me a dozen times but I didn't take it in. Except that is exactly the sort of thing I was fascinated by...
I didn't remember the whole song at the end, just some sea creature with an accent (I think it was supposed to be French) singing the last lines. "Put that treazhure map togezzer, a million dollaires in goldFeesh!" The joke was that Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent had spent the episode with a ripped treasure map that promised "$1,000,000 in gold..." He fights Dishonest John ("DJ you dirty guy!") and Billy the Squid and finally reaches Treasure Island with the aid of what I now see was a swordfish. The last scrap of the map is there, reading..."fish." Beany and Cecil was not laugh-out-loud stuff. Most cartoons weren't. Smiles. Chuckles. Nobody laughed at Yogi and his pickinick basket jokes, or Fred Flintstone being impressed by guest appearances of Ann Margrock. Warner Brothers might make you laugh, but mostly only when you repeated the lines yourself. There was a summer when we said "I'm gonna get my Wabbit Ewadicator" a thousand times.
I vaguely remembered that Beany and Cecil were based on a 1950s something. YouTube reveals it was a puppet show. I doubt I ever saw it.
2 comments:
Is that from the same guys behind "Rocky and Bullwinkle"?
No, though the level of punning and contemporary reference was the same. Clampett originally worked for Warner Brothers and pushed the envelope there in terms of characters stretching, exploding, hanging in mid-air, etc.
Rocky and Bullwinkle were by Jay Ward, who also did the very similar Crusader Rabbit.
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