Hola, Sneakers! Welcome back to Sneaky Dragon, the podcast with the long game.
This week: put a lid on it; dumputers; crushed; pre-old school; we like CDs; permanent record; ramblin’ guy; at the border; urban explorers; track record; opening hacks; cross talk; a tame and sane guy; young snob; space sperm; Kryptonian cavemen; crime travel; mermaid in the USA; born to Zeus; Mazash!; pet or not pet; old-fashioned tiger; Oz and ends; health update; dying hard from old habits; age is just a state of body; memory update; poison allergy; a picture is worth a thousand pages; sailing the seven sushis; Top 5 Songs – Bugs Pt. 1; dragging it out; royal update; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; tl:dw: trailer trash; slob appeal; big Pee Wee fan; outcasts; Spotlight; famous blue light beam; it’s a wonderful copyright; cuckoo for The Cocoanuts; purple patch; cowboy helmet; trolling fish; Overly Creative Deckhand; taxing work; and, finally, Elephant Presley.
Top 5 Songs – Bugs Pt. 1
- The Cramps – “Human Fly” – Vengeance Records single b/w “Domino”, 1978 – 2:14:33
- The Flaming Lips – “Buggin’ (Remix)” – The Soft Bulletin, 1999 – 2:22:50
- The Constantines – “Insectivora” – Shine A Light, 2003 – 2:29:47
- Tommy Peltier – “Butterflies” – Chariot of Astral Light, 2017 – 2:38:44
- Nada Surf – “Fruit Fly” – Let Go, 2002 – 2:43:54
Bonus Song:
- The Bugaloos – “If You Become a Bugaloo” – Capitol Records single b/w “Gna Gna Gna Gna Gna”, 1970 – 2:49:40
Question of the Week:What is the strangest kids show you watched when you were younger?
Sub-question of the Week: At what age did you start to do things independently? What did you do?
Thanks for listening.
Check out some disturbing kiddie fare from the 70s:
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David, I loved the story about seeing “The Cocoanuts” at your Aunt’s house, I have a similar story only with “Animal Crackers.” Copied and pasted from when I wrote the story for Facebook:
July 21, 1979, Des Plaines, Illinois: This date is a missing piece to a puzzle I’ve had in my memory for 43 years. Thanks to this image:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59c5099849fc2b0179b94f8b/1506447892825-XOHF7GQ6IUWXXI7ZG8VI/Crackers790721.jpg?format=2500w
I now know the exact date to the story I’m about to tell you. As many of you know, I’m a huge Marx Brothers fan, however, our local affiliate in Dallas/Ft. Worth only showed the later MGM Marx films like “A Night at the Opera”, “The Big Store” and “A Day at the Races”. I had never seen any of their early Paramount films, so whenever we travelled home to Chicago in the summer, I’d grab the TV Guide at my Grandparent’s house and pour through it to see if the local Chicagoland stations might happen to be showing any of the earlier Marx films.
I was 13 that Summer and just as I always did, I checked out my Grandparent’s TV Guide first thing…then and see the image posted below, “Animal Crackers” was on Saturday night at 8:00! For many fans, “Animal Crackers” is the Marx Brother’s greatest film, I myself had only seen short clips and photos of it in books. I was ecstatic! As my family made plans for our time in Chicago, I learned that Saturday night was already spoken for, we were going to visit my Great Aunt and Uncle, Esther and Red Boesche. I asked my folks if they thought Aunt Esther and Uncle Red might let me watch “Animal Crackers” while we were there….which was replied with the dubious, “We’ll have to see when we get there.” The one thing to note about my Great Aunt and Uncle and the entire Boesche family was that they were all huge sports fans and there would most likely be some sports event on TV which meant no “Animal Crackers” for me. The sports fandom in the Boesche household dwarfed my Marx fandom by far but I asked anyway when we arrived. The entire Boesche clan didn’t disappoint my expectations, my Great Aunt and Uncle and all my second cousins filled the living room watching baseball. I quickly got my Uncle Red’s attention and asked him if I could watch the World Premiere of “Animal Crackers” knowing the chances were slim. My Uncle Red smiled and said, “Come on Eddie, follow me.” I followed Uncle Red to the basement, which most homes in Chicago have, to a little side room with a TV! Uncle Red was a big guy with sparkling eyes and an honest smile, he and my Great Aunt Esther were always so kind to me. “Is this what you want to watch, The Marx Brothers?”, he asked as he tuned in. It was perfect! “Animal Crackers” had just started. I stayed down there and watched it that night for the first time thanks to the kindness of my Uncle Red. I’ll never forget that memory, now I have the date to go with it, something I’ve wondered for years.
At this point David, I still hadn’t seen “The Cocoanuts”, it was one of the last ones on my list to see. I think my local PBS station finally showed it at some point…
I remember swimming in the old cement Lumberman’s Arch pool in Stanley Park. I guess I wasn’t too fussy back then because I didn’t mind the barnacles. You know what else has barnacles? The ocean! This summer, I was walking on that section of the seawall and, sadly, the kids’ splash park was shut down. Weeds were growing in it and there was a notice from the Park Board saying they were doing a study on whether the outflow from it was harmful to the local ecosystem. Splash parks are controversial in green circles these days. The water has to be clean so they tap into the city’s drinking water supply. And after the water splashes off the little kiddies, it ideally should be treated for human waste products before being released into the ocean. There are splash park systems that capture and recirculate the water, but they use chemicals to treat it so they are not particularly eco-friendly either.
The strangest show I watched as a kid was “The Banana Splits.” It wasn’t produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, but they built the costumes so I guess it gave them their big break in kids TV. Which is how I make my living. Thanks, Banana Splits!
And thanks to Dave, for the Top 5 Bug Songs, Part 1. My favourite bug song is an easy listening tune from the ‘70s called “Ladybug.” It was originally recorded by the Queen of Can-con, Anne Murray, but the version I knew better was a cover by Captain and Tennille which starts out with birds twittering. I performed an arrangement of it with my senior choral class which was a happy place for me in high school. The song is as cute as a bug. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVPen3l_Efg
What memories, Captain & Tennille! I aways thought “Captain” Daryl Dragon looked so miserable like he wanted to be anywhere else while Toni Tennille was so exuberant and happy all the time. I guess that was the 70’s in a nutshell, little else made sense.
I think I scared everyone off, it’s Wednesday night and I’m the only one here!
Hell-lllooo!!
Louise?, Mick? Peter? Billy? LEZAH?!
Brent?….Oh wait, he emails his stuff in.
Ian, how’s Pia’s Mom doin’? I’m no stranger to taking care of the older generation either, it’s our turn to do our part since they took care of us when we needed it. Love and care to all.
Dallas had a local show that ran for 30 years on and off, “Mr. Peppermint” (1961–1969), which was retitled “Peppermint Place” for its second run (1975–1996) and is one of the longest running studio kid’s shows on television. The host was the same man for the entire run, Mr. Peppermint aka Jerry Haynes. “Peppermint Place” was on early in the morning taped at a studio downtown, I never saw it live but I knew more than a few friends who watched the taping or appeared on “Peppermint Place” over the years. Mr. Peppermint dressed with a barbershop quartet straw hat, a magic peppermint cane and a peppermint striped suit. He had a co-host puppet, Muffin the Bear who was one of many different puppets on the show. Mr. Peppermint had guests on the show, sometimes locally famous, nationally famous, or just someone interesting. Imagine Captain Kangaroo, it was very much the same. Mr. Peppermint wasn’t a strange show like the question asked, I had Sid & Marty Krofft or The New Zoo Revue for that…
The one strange connection everyone remembers about Jerry Haynes/Mr. Peppermint is that his son Gibby Haynes is the frontman for The Butthole Surfers. I always wondered how the straight-laced wholesome Mr. Peppermint dealt with that, his son being in a band called The Butthole Surfers or The Revolting Cocks when he was running a kid’s show all those years. Sounds like the most sincerest form of rebellion.
I have good memories of the show, Mr. Peppermint was indeed a Dallas celebrity everyone knew, it was a good show.
When we lived in Mesquite growing up my brother and I had access to a part of town that we could walk to safely from home…without crossing highways or busy streets. We had our pathways that took us to most anything we needed, Toys R Us, Burger King, Wendy’s, a pool, three movie theaters, numerous stores and a mall. I was about 14 or 15 when I was trusted with the care of watching over my brother, who is seven years younger than me so we spent those few Summers walking everywhere to pass the time. We had no public transportation in Mesquite yet like busses or a train, so walking was our mode of transit. Mom and Dad both worked so it was up to me to run the show during the Summer.
Concerning OZ and the differences between the Baum books and the 1939 Musical, there were even more fantastical passages in the books that would have been too strange to fantastical to film. When the Witch puts Dorothy and Co. to sleep with the poppies, only Dorothy, Toto and the Lion are affected since they’re living beings. It’s up to the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman to build a huge cart from trees pulled by thousands of mice in order to pull Dorothy, Toto and the Lion from the field. The journey from Munchkinland to The Emerald City also seems to take weeks instead of what seems like a day in the musical. The Emerald City isn’t really green at all when they get there, it’s all a farce. Everyone is required to wear green tinted glasses while they’re in the city so it appears to be green. When our characters are finally granted a meeting before OZ, they do so individually. He appears as a floating orange head to Dorothy, as a lovely lady to the scarecrow, as a terrible beast to the Tin Woodman, and as a ball of fire to the lion. And in the end, I thing the Wizard really does literally put brains in the Scarecrow’s head since he is shown to have this overgrown bulbous head afterwards. It’s all rather strange but it really did blow me away as a young reader. Later in the series, Santa Claus even visits OZ during a huge banquet with all the characters in attendance. I remember it’s written that Santa leaves in a giant floating bubble as an orchestra plays for his exit. This was kind of a crossover for Baum since he also wrote stories of Santa’s adventures during his career. The books were massively vivid and imaginative, I wonder how they would come across to me now…
I’ve written ENOUGH, someone else take the wheel please. I’m floating away…
“There’s no place like home…..”
Adieu Sneakers, until next week….
I’m here, Ed! Always here, but not always finding time to post…
Re: questions of the week, I got nuthin’
However, I did want to comment on a few things:
1. what they young man asked us (3X) at the concert was actually ‘Are you a fan or are you a supporter?’ which I think essentially has the same meaning as what Dave had said – I took his term ‘supporter’ to mean something like, are you mom and dad of someone in the band (or some such).
2. block parents – my parents were block parents, and I remember a little boy coming to our house crying once because he got lost; we kept him, of course – err, I mean, we alerted the authorities and he was reunited with his family. He was in grade 1, had missed the school bus, decided he could walk home, and part way there realized he had no idea where home was. He was our only ‘incident’ in 20-30 years of having the block parent sign up. I remember in my early 20s having to be interviewed by someone as I was now an adult living in the house – prior to that children did not need to get checked out, so I assume some form of criminal records check had been occurring previously.
3. Steve Martin – he’s kind of other-wordly; his look is so old-school and bland and has remained pretty unchanging over decades (maybe he’s a vampire?) but he is always doing something very different. I think reading the novella Shopgirl really brought it home for me – I had a very different impression of Martin before I read that. And now, of course, he’s doing a show about doing a podcast. He’s always going in another direction. He seems to be simultaneously one step in front and one step behind all the time. Very much doing his own thing while still maintaining that everyman look.
*fade in on audio of feet running on hard floor, increasing in volume like in that Stan Freberg ‘Banana Boat’ parody that completely passed over my head as a child, having never heard the Bellafonte version you were talking about in last week’s episode*
SFX: tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap
Peter [gasping for air]: How are we for time?
Hello, All–
Weird TV of my childhood: 1974–The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, with that crazy Emu and the tiny Island of Pegi Oegi, and Land of the Lost (though I can still watch Land of the Lost–I was obsessed with it.
Inbdependence–Being able to drive to the movie theater alone at age 16.
Take care!
Hello, All–
Weird TV of my childhood: 1974–The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show, with that crazy Emu and the tiny Island of Pegi Pegi, and Land of the Lost (though I can still watch Land of the Lost–I was obsessed with it.
Inbdependence–Being able to drive to the movie theater alone at age 16.
Take care!
*Pegi Pegi, not Pegi Oegi.