"Little House on the Prairie"

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My television-viewing options were quite limited as a kid.  "The Simpsons" was unknown to me until college, and even "The Wonder Years" was off-limits due to its treatment of burgeoning young adult sexuality.  I was, however, allowed to watch ABC's catchphrase-laden "TGIF" lineup (and "Did I do that?"  Why of course, "don't be ridiculous!"... OK, now I'll "cut! it! out!"...), which I'm sure rendered me a joy to be around. 

I was also allowed to watch "Little House on the Prairie," which played in syndication on a seemingly endless loop on TBS.  It looked like wholesome family fare, what with the smiling Laura in her gingham frock playing airplane in the meadow (anachronism?  hmm...) and leaping joyfully in the air at the end of every episode.  Sure, there was conflict--often driven by Nellie "Bad Seed" Oleson and her busybody mother--but there wasn't any swearing, and even if there ever was, Pa would probably fiddle right over it and make it all better again.

But there was also a darker side to the "Little House."  And it made me afraid of two things: nosebleeds, and cornmeal.

Nosebleeds?  Well, that's what killed off Albert.  It meant he had leukemia (!!!) and was going to die.  Imagine my terror after every pinkish-looking sneeze thereafter.

As for the cornmeal, there was an episode called "Plague" where rats have infested the town's cornmeal supply, which gives everyone typhus.  I have been suspicious of cornbread ever since.  Yes, it might make a delicious accompaniment to chili, but is it really worth dying for?

There were other traumatizing episodes too--I mean, life on the prairie was hard, and as The Oregon Trail will teach you, death is pretty much inevitable--not to mention "Sylvia," which involved a masked child rapist who kills Albert's first love (not horrific enough for one episode, they extended it out for two!), but that's a tale for another time.  Play us off, Pa!

Lesson learned:
Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea that they blew up the entire town.


"Little House on the Prairie."  Worldvision/NBC 1974-83.  Perf. Michael Landon, Melissa Gilbert, Karen Grassle.
Buy Little House on the Prairie: The Complete Nine-Season DVD Set

Goodnight gosling

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My apologies for the lack of updates!  I--well--I hatched a gosling, so to speak.  So I have been reading--and rereading, and rerereading--a lot of board books lately, and have discovered that even with a monosyllabic vocabulary and an average of five words per page, there's often the suggestion of something sinister.

For instance, in Goodnight Moon there is that old lady who demands, in a whisper, that we must "hush."  Given the sparse furnishings of the rodent-infested room, I find this suggestive of what is perhaps a hostage situation.  "Goodnight nobody" and "goodnight noises everywhere"?  Maybe in the little house with the red balloon, nobody can hear you scream. 

Lesson learned
You don't want to know what's in the mush.

Brown, Margaret Wise.  Goodnight Moon.  HarperCollins, 1947.
Buy Goodnight Moon

"The Witches"

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Writing about The BFG the other day, I was shocked to realize that I hadn't yet taken a look at Roald Dahl's work.  Surely no other author tapped so well into a child's complex psyche-- he gave us the terrifying thrills we craved, the naughty humor we guiltily loved, and he never talked down to us.

After I'd devoured all of Dahl's books in the "Juvenile" section of the library, I remember eagerly moving on to his other titles-- the ones way over in the "Adult" section.  They didn't have Quentin Blake's illustrations, but they did have a man who had his skin flayed for his tattoo, a woman bludgeoning her husband to death with a leg of lamb, and a compulsive gambler who chops off people's fingers.  Such wonderful, twisted stuff!  I imagined that all those "adult bookstores" I saw signs for downtown must have shelves full of similar stories.

For some reason, just the label "Adult" had prepared me to expect the morbid twists and turns in those books, but the same Hitchcokian plot devices absolutely shocked me in Dahl's fare intended for children.  The one that most stuck with me was from the end of The Witches.  The hero, a little boy, gets turned into a mouse and doesn't ever get turned back!  Then Dahl goes for another turn of the screw--the boy asks his grandmother how long a mouse can expect to live.

‘A mouse-person will almost certainly live for three times as long as an ordinary mouse,’ my grandmother said.  ‘About nine years.’

‘Good!’ I cried. ‘That's great! It's the best news I've ever had!’

‘Why do you say that?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Because I would never want to live longer than you,’ I said. ‘I couldn't stand being looked after by anybody else.’

There was a short silence. She had a way of fondling me behind the ears with the tip of one finger. It felt lovely.

‘How old are you, Grandmamma?’ I asked.

‘I'm eighty-six,’ she said.

‘Will you live another eight or nine years?’

‘I might,’ she said. ‘With a bit of luck.’

‘You've got to,’ I said. ‘Because by then I'll be a very old mouse and you'll be a very old grandmother and soon after that we'll both die together.’

Yes, this is "the best news [he's] ever had!"--the fact that he will only live another eight or nine years, that he will remain a mouse, and that he will die in tandem with his aged grandmother.  Way to dream big, kid.

Now, I realize that if this plot were to be found on the shelves of an "adult bookstore," it would only appeal to a very, very, very specialized kind of audience-- folks more twisted than even Dahl's tales.


Lesson learned:
Did you know that the heart of a mouse beats at the rate of five hundred times a minute?

Dahl, Roald.  The Witches.  London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Buy The Witches

Doggone it.

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I grew up convinced that I was totally deprived because I didn't have a dog.

At one point, I even came up with a half-baked plan to play with a lit firecracker so I could get blinded just enough to merit a super-smart seeing-eye dog like in Follow My Leader.  (Eventually, I realized that I might also miss seeing, so I tabled that plan until I could think of something less permanently disfiguring.)

In fairness, I should mention that my family actually did have a dog.  But Choo-choo was sixteen years old, blind with cataracts, and pretty much just liked to sleep.  Sure, she was gentle, tolerant, obedient--but what did that matter when she was old and couldn't do any cool tricks?

She weighed about twelve pounds, so I couldn't ride her like Belle from "Belle and Sebastian," or  Falcor from The Neverending Story.

She couldn't talk, like Poochie, or Cooler from "Pound Puppies."

She wasn't a scrappy ragamuffin from the streets, like Boomer, or Benji, or Sandy from Annie.

She lacked heroism.  She was never going to save me from imminent danger, like Chips the War Dog or the wolf-dog from The Journey of Natty Gann.

She also was not an alien.  There went my "Fluppy Dogs" theory.

After reading Julie of the Wolves like a how-to guide then coming home to watch "Lassie" reruns on Nickelodeon in the afternoon, I was pretty convinced I would be an awesome dog trainer.  "Lie down, Choo-choo!" I would say.  (She would remain prostrate on the couch.)  "Good dog.  Now beg!" (She would open one cloudy eye, if I was lucky.)  "Okay then, drool, Choo-choo, drool!"  (This she would do with utter abandon.)  "Good girl."

Why did the '80s have so much dog-centric programming?  Was it to ensure against a new generation of Cat People?  Was it to make the allergic kids feel even more unloved?  Or was it just to put us off guard, so that when we were all subjected to Sounder, and Shiloh, and Where the Red Fern Grows in middle school, we would all feel appropriately devastated?


Lesson learned:
Of course, when your dog goes all Old Yeller on you and dies, you could always revive him, per Frankenweenie.

"Struwwelpeter"

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By popular demand, I'm addressing the timeless children's classic Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman, author of the similarly-themed Slovenly Betsy.  I somehow was lucky enough to miss out on being subjected to these tales as a child, but it sounds like if you were, you never forgot them. 

The most infamous story in the collection has to be "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher," or, in English, "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb."  The story is presumably intended to dissuade children from sucking their thumbs.

There is a way to humorously cure children of nasty habits, but I don't think Hoffmann's story is it.  I remember whooping with laughter as a kid at Shel Silverstein's poem "Warning," which reads:

Inside everybody's nose

There lives a sharp-toothed snail.
So if you stick your finger in,
He may bite off your nail.
Stick it farther up inside,
And he may bite your ring off.
Stick it all the way, and he
May bite the whole darn thing off.

See?  Direct and to the point, but hilariously absurd.  Roald Dahl's The BFG teaches a fine lesson about burping in a similar fun fashion-- the BFG advises Sophie that burping is "flithsome," so "us giants is never doing it."  As a kid, the BFG seems completely awesome, so if he says burping is taboo, you believe him.  (Of course, whizzpopping is another matter entirely, a bodily function to be celebrated, even, so you should feel free to fire a whizzpop at will.)

But now we must get back to "Little Suck-a-Thumb" to see how Hoffmann's parable plays out.  Mother warns Conrad not to suck his thumb while she's gone because:

"The great tall tailor always comes
To little boys who suck their thumbs;
And ere they dream what he's about,
He takes his great sharp scissors out,
And cuts their thumbs clean off—and then,
You know, they never grow again."

Why a tailor should care about thumb-sucking I have no idea.  A manicurist I could understand, but a tailor?  Perhaps he specializes in constructing thumbless mittens.

Regardless, Conrad fails to heed his mother's warning and sure enough, the tailor barges into his house, and--"Snip! Snap! Snip!"--he cuts both of poor Conrad's thumbs off.  Thus are vanquished Conrad's future plans to effectively hitchhike, become a movie critic, or play Nintendo.

Lesson learned:
One must presume the tailor only punishes children with anatomical-oral fixations, since I imagine that with adults, the potential consequences might prove far more dire.


Hoffmann, Heinrich.  Struwwelpeter: Merry Tales and Funny Pictures.  1845.
Struwwelpeter: Or Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures

YA books: a cure for optimism

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Hey kids, do you ever feel happy, laugh at funny jokes, dance like no one's watching?  Do you ever take pleasure in uplifting stories that speak to the triumph of the human spirit?  Do you, in short, have faith in humanity?

Let's cure all that for you with your middle school reading list.

Yes, reading YA fiction is an exercise in masochism, offering a dystopic worldview and a sense of the futile struggle for decency in the face of man's inhumanity to man-- in short, it is much like the experience of middle school itself.

Here, a brief rundown of some perennially popular YA titles:

* Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell, 1960.
Island of the Blue Dolphins
When everyone in Karana's tribe is setting sail to leave their island home forever, Karana sees her brother being left behind and jumps ship to stay with him.  Shortly thereafter, her brother is killed by wild dogs, and Karana must survive in isolation for many years with only the animals of the island for companions.  What's even worse is that the book is based on the true story of Juana Maria, who was rescued after 18 years alone on an island, only to find that no one could understand the language she spoke--and she died a mere 7 weeks later.

* Watership Down by Richard Adams, 1972.
Watership Down: A Novel
War seems somehow even more brutal when the soldiers are all cuddly little bunny rabbits.  Humans appear here too, as a kind of faceless, menacing threat of evil--they destroy the rabbits' homes, shoot them, and catch them in snares.  This is "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" but with blood and urine and carnage, and where Mr. McGregor isn't the only antagonist to fear; Flopsy might make a shiv out of a carrot and go after Cottontail.

* Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, 1977.
Bridge to Terabithia
This is one of those books that the older kids warn you about before you even know the basic plot-- you know beforehand that it's going to be sad, much like Where the Red Fern Grows or the movie My Girl.  So, while you might anticipate Leslie's death, what you don't realize is that the book will also ensure you will never use a rope swing again in your entire life.  Most elementary school-level books encourage imaginative play, but this book's message is unequivocal: imagination kills.  LARPing ruins lives. 

* Good Night, Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian, 1981.
Good Night, Mr. Tom
Books set during World War II are rarely uplifting, and that goes double for YA books.  So how do you make a WWII YA book even more soul-crushing?  Why not add in a heartbreakingly self-loathing, bed-wetting child who is horribly abused by his own mother?  I remember not being able to sleep all night after reading one scene where the boy is locked in a closet for days holding a dead baby.  How can one face 7th grade gym class after something like that?

* The Goats by Brock Cole, 1987.
The Goats
I remember the description of the story on the back jacket of this book began with the words: "Stripped and marooned on a small island by their fellow campers, a boy and a girl..." and that was all I had to read.  I knew what "stripped" meant, but not "marooned," but the co-ed context gave me hope that "marooning" must be the term for one of those tips described in Cosmo that I didn't quite understand yet.  Sure, the kids on the front cover were quite possibly the most unattractive pair I'd ever seen, but still!  Ultimately, despite my imaginative "maroon" ideas, there was no purple prose, just some message about bullying in its stead.  Disappointing.


Lesson learned:
Even at age 13, YA lit confirms it: you will die alone, misunderstood, and unloved, and--if you're especially unlucky--marooned.

"The Truth About Mother Goose"

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Writing about Mother Goose Rock 'N' Rhyme recently, I was reminded of another Disneyfied look at Mother Goose nursery rhymes that was--if you can believe it--even more macabre.  It was the short "The Truth About Mother Goose," which is a kind of exposé of the origins of popular nursery rhymes. 

One has to wonder how many of these explanations are apocryphal, in the same spurious vein as the "true story" everyone hears about "Ring Around the Rosie" being about the Black Death.

The most memorable part for me was the bit considering "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary," which the cartoon claims tells the tragic story of Mary, Queen of Scots.  In this segment, we see, among other things, the beheading of one of Mary's lovers and the exploding(!) of her "weakling" husband.  As the camera then pans to reveal the innumerable corpses of soldiers who died defending Mary's honor, all piled into sky-high mounds, Mary reflects on the carnage with an unruffled, "Oh dear."

After Elizabeth I grows jealous of Mary's popularity at court, she has her cousin imprisoned in the Tower, and the jester-narrators sing the saddest, most dirge-like rendition of "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" that you'll ever hear as Mary ascends the Tower steps and the screen fades to black, indicating her botched execution via multiple strokes of a butcher's axe.  Ouch.

Lesson learned:
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? / With silver bells and cockle shells, and the tears of kids who watch this show.

"The Truth About Mother Goose."  Dir. Bill Justice, Wolfgang Reitherman.  Perf. Page Cavanaugh Trio.  Disney, 1957.

Watch Part 1 on YouTube here and Part 2 here.
Walt Disney Treasures - Disney Rarities - Celebrated Shorts, 1920s - 1960s