If there’s anything I love more than a good cause, it’s a perfectly filthy double entendre — which is why it pleases me greatly to tell you that, as of this morning, “Felt Around the World” is no longer just the title of Dave Lifton‘s mother’s autobiography.
Now it’s also the name of a good old-fashioned all-star charity benefit single, recorded by all your favorite kindie band mascots in order to raise puppet awareness. Here, I’ll let Mayor Monkey fill you in on the details:
“Felt Around the World” Intro
Recognizing that it was high time someone wrote a catchy little ditty to call attention to this important issue, Zooglobble‘s Stefan Shepherd and Recess Monkey‘s Jack Forman coordinated the all-star (or is that all-felt?) lineup you see in the clip below. It’s awe-inspiring, really. Download the song here (the proceeds really do benefit a great cause), enjoy the video, and remember — everyone needs a little Hand Aid sometimes.
We spend a fair amount of time around here talking about the state of kids’ culture (it’s even in our logo!), which means we also spend a fair amount of time grousing about the ways it could be better. But because we are sensible people, and because we lived through a time when things were, generally speaking, kind of worse, we feel duty-bound to occasionally sift through the wreckage of our misspent youth and point out just how far we’ve come. In that spirit, we present Saturday Morning Graveyard, which takes a quick, disbelieving look back at some of the poorly animated hooey we were given as impressionable kids.
These days, pulling voice duty is regarded as a plum acting gig — a sure sign you’ve arrived, and a chance to draw a paycheck for hanging out in a recording booth in your sweats. But 30 years ago, we’d just crawled out of the dark ages when studios habitually neglected to credit voice actors, and made fewer bones about treating kids like open-mouthed content receptacles who’d drink up any old crap like turkeys drowning in the rain.
Case in point: The Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour, a gross amalgamation of garbage animation and creatively bankrupt programming that took the black magic of TV spinoffs and sent it plummeting to absurd new depths. Just explaining this stupid series is going to hurt, so sit down and make yourself comfortable.
First, the Mork & Mindy portion of the program, which took the once-popular Robin Williams/Pam Dawber sitcom — then limping through its final season — and sent it through a weird time warp that ended with the same basic premise (alien comes to Earth, meets Earth people, learns Earth customs) but dropped the characters into high school and gave Mork a pink, six-legged pet named Doing (pronounced “Doyng,” of course).
If you remember the live-action Mork & Mindy, you know it wasn’t exactly high comedy. Now imagine a scenario in which Williams and Dawber say “doyng” a lot and pretend to be teenagers, and…well, I think it says something about us as a species that this show lasted 26 episodes.
And here’s where it gets weird, because the Laverne & Shirley part of the show was actually a spinoff of the pre-existing Laverne & Shirley in the Army cartoon, which was itself a spinoff of Laverne & Shirley, which (like Mork & Mindy) was a spinoff of Happy Days, which was a spinoff of Love, American Style. Do you remember what I was saying about absurd depths? Welcome to Hell, friend.
Anyway, like I said, here’s where it gets weird: Laverne & Shirley took Laverne & Shirley in the Army off in a new direction, adding the Fonz (voiced by Henry Winkler, ayyyy-ing his way over from the animated The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang) and his dog Mr. Cool to a cast that already included a talking pig named Sgt. Squealy (who was, of course, Laverne & Shirley’s immediate superior). But even though this stupid animation hour ran for 26 episodes, Laverne & Shirley only taped eight, because Cindy “Shirley” Williams up and quit her job on the live-action series. Which means, I guess, that anyone dumb enough to watch every week of The Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour saw every episode of Laverne & Shirley three times.
And with that, I feel like I need to have a good cry and go write a letter to the Wiggles apologizing for every mean thing I’ve ever said about them to my kids. In the meantime, here’s one minute of insulting nonsense. You’re welcome:
Live long enough, and you’ll figure out that every generation has its own young girl freakout. Perhaps owing to our accelerated digital culture, I think we’ve seen three over the last 15 years or so: the hubbub over Reviving Ophelia, the ruckus over Oprah’s discovery of “rainbow parties,” and our collective national cluck-clucking over the “Chris Brown could beat me” memetweetawfulthing.
But if you actually happen to have a young girl in your home, you know they’re impossibly complex creatures, impossible to lump into nationwide movements, hard not to worry about one moment, hard not to strangle the next. And if for some reason you’re feeling anxious about a young girl in your life, here’s a ray of sunshine for you: A BoingBoing report on how sewing — yes, sewing — is the hot new tween trend. (Complete with 21st century tech twist: the article talks about LilyPad Arduino, an open source project involving “sewable lights, motors, and temperature sensors.”)
It’s a fun, encouraging, interesting read — not only if you’re interested in sewing, but as an example of just how wonderfully smart, strong, and complicated our young women are — and as an example of how kids are using tools to create even as we wring our hands over our perceived national drift toward lazy consumption. Maybe the future won’t be so bad.
