Cinema

As I’m almost certain I’ve mentioned before, I have an endless fascination for YouTube and the things people feel compelled to share there. I find it charming in a way that makes me glad I’m human — the little songs, the pratfalls, the cinematic experiments, the hokey amateurism, and the fun of it all.

This month’s Dardanella is from someone named Tom Smith, and it’s simply his hands on a keyboard bringing this ancient and venerable song to life. There are no frills here, just Tom and his electric piano. I don’t know who he is, but something in him has brought him to YouTube to share his music, and he has posted almost three dozens songs, some with other musicians, but most with just his own good self. I like that.

Click to play, numbskull!

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Gather ’round, children, while I tell you a story.

Long ago, in the dim ages before the Internet, we had this thing called “television.” It was a lot like YouTube, but you had to watch whatever happened to be on, and shut up and like it. There were only four channels, one of which was “good for you,” and everything was in black and white. If you wanted a cartoon, you had to wait until Saturday morning. And you never had a thought that things could ever be any different.

But then there was Tom Terrific, which ran occasionally on the daily Captain Kangaroo show, perhaps the best children’s show of the era. Tom was what he was: a boy with no apparent adult supervision who wore a funnel for a hat. Where he came from, or how he got the hat, was never explained. The funnel imbued him with the magic power to change into any object he could imagine, which stood him well in difficult situations. Thus equipped, Tom sought adventure with his “faithful companion,” Manfred, a talking dog who mostly wanted to stay home and sleep.

Tom had a winning enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur, and was drawn as simply as possible, probably due to a constrained budget. I, too, am drawn with a constrained budget, and that accounts for my featureless countenance and underdeveloped personality. One does not get the impression that there was much money backing the Tom Terrific production, but the show had a palpable charm nonetheless.

There does not seem to be much available of the Terrific oeuvre online, but YouTube does provide a sampling. Watch it now and get an idea of what I was watching then. There are some unfortunate characterizations of Native Americans herein, but such was the time.

Click to play, dummy!

And part two:

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Since we’re talkin’ stop motion video (see my previous post about Neighbours, an innovative short artsy film made over 50 years ago), and since Kenny just mentioned it in the comments to that post, let’s look at Poop Today, a very short stop-motion viddie made a couple of years ago. It went semi-viral a couple of years ago and boasts some 69,032 YouTube views as of this writing. The soundtrack includes a cryptic song with an offensive lyric, but the Internet is unexpurgated and you deal with it, yes? Here you go:

I find it endlessly fascinating how these ideas ping around, and how people make their own versions on the same concept. I guess this is whatcha call a “meme,” meme being a word I find beyond annoying, but I don’t know a shorter way of expressing the thought in this case. Here’s an answer to the “Poop Today” video above, called “Poop Tomorrow.” Just some teenagers goofing around in a basement, but still:

That being said, it would appear that the undisputed YouTube Champion of this business is a vid called “Tony vs. Paul,” with over 4.5 million YouTube views. Maybe you’ve already seen it. It doesn’t try to achieve as much as “Neighbours” did, but it’s fun nevertheless:

There are a lot of people on YouTube trying this stuff. The means of production are in our hands, people. Can the Revolution be near?

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Until tonight, I think it’s been something like forty years since I’ve seen this film.

I remember it in black and white, but shazam! Turns out it was in color. Being that I was only slightly more than an embryo when I last saw it, the bits of it I remembered were hazy. But it’s the sort of film that sticks with you, especially if you see it young, and I did see it many, many times.

They used to show it on television a lot, on Sunday mornings. Sunday because, as you’ll see, it presents a rather important moral lesson that you’d best pay attention to, you licentious ninny. We didn’t have a color television (we were Amish, as I recall), so that’s why I remember it being in black and white (I was mistaken). (I was also mistaken about being Amish just now.) It turns a lot more violent than I remembered, too. Mayhem! Havoc! Two thumbs up!

I’ve had vague memories of it ever since, and I didn’t think I’d ever see it again, given that I didn’t know the title, who made it, who was in it, where it came from, or even if it wasn’t something I had dreamt. But, as I’ve pointed out before, we live in an era beyond obscurity. I put four words into the Google-izer (the four words: fence flower fight animation). These represented the few solid details I could recall. Booyah! There it is, right there on the ol’ YooToob.

The film is called “Neighbours.” The director was one Norman McLaren, hero of the National Film Board of Canada. (Canada is a small country near Spokane.) It was made in 1952, and it won an Oscar for Best Short Subject (or something) way back when. It runs about eight minutes. And you can tell it’s authentic Canadian because they spell “neighbor” with that ridiculous and laughably unnecessary “u” in it. Those Canadians with their weirdo orthography — they’re lucky they don’t have oil or we’d force proper spelling on them at gunpoint. No wonder they hate war.

Click to play, Dumstead!

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There are two sides to human nature, and they are forever at war. There is the cool, soul-dead rational side. There is the raging animal, all appetite, all anger. Neither side can win the battle, for to win is to destroy our own nature. Victory is cataclysm. It’s like that Star Trek episode with the two Kirks. No, not that one, the other one.

Monkey hate technology
Robot hate the monkey
They will fight eternally
Monkey vs. Robot!
Monkey vs. Robot!

I first saw this video seven or eight years ago. It’s always hung around in my head since then as a metaphor for our inner battles, and as a meta-metaphor for really cheesey metaphors. I lost track of it, and I couldn’t find it forever. But being that we now live in a world without obscurity, there it is, smack-dab on YooToob.

It’s brilliant. It’s stupid. It’s stupidly brilliant.

Click to play, Dummy.

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When the burdens of life weigh heavy my soul, I often find solace in contemplating the life of the Great Emancipator.

I loves me my Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln.

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