Discover Top Posts Tagged with #spike jones

Peter Lorre on the Spike Jones comedy show (radio). Paul Frees in the second picture imitated Peter Lorre's voice so well that Peter himself was astonished!

Here's the recording, where first you'll hear dulcet tones of a popular song of the era, and then -

#peter lorre #peter lorre radio #spike jones #paul frees #my old flame #people lorre pictures #Youtube

Dinah Shore, Spike Jones, Bob Burns, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and Tommy Dorsey in 1942 during a short wave command performance broadcast from Hollywood for boys overseas.

#dinah shore #spike jones #bob burns #count basie #lionel hampton #tommy dorsey #big band #classic hollywood #1940s

Tesla Takedown

Park Royal, London

#der fuehrer's face #spike jones #london

Here's the flag to go along with everything. I suggest using Spike Jones' "Der Führer's Face" as the new national anthem.

#christofascists #fascisti #trump regime #secret police #forced disappearance #spike jones #fuck kristi noem

The girl and her cleavage are not in the video; they are just a lure. This is a guy who goes by "Lord Vinheteiro" and whose YT channel features both quasi-serious and full-on jokey music videos, e.g., "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on tuned rubber chickens.

Normally, not my cup o'tea, but I clicked through for Research. And it paid off. Because almost all of these "10 Songs You've Heard But Don't Know the Name" show up in classic Warner Bros. cartoons. And it got me thinking about the ways in which classical music (and poetry) were so much more a part of the general cultural knowledge of adults and kids back in the '30s and '40s.

For, poetry was still memorized in school back then (I posted about it here earlier this year), and certain chestnuts of the classical repertoire, including certain opera arias and pieces, were tunes people hummed or whistled alongside the pop hits of the day.

"The March of the Toreadors" from Carmen, for example, trickled down into pop culture. Beverly Cleary's 1953 novel Otis Spofford features the titular boy singing "Toreador-a, Don’t spit on the floor-a. Use the cuspidor-a. That’s what it’s for-a."

Or, recorded in 1949 and released four years later, the classic Spike Jones version of Carmen. In tone, it twins MAD magazine, which just beat it into the world, and anticipates The Firesign Theatre's aural antics by 20 years:

Relatedly, that Chuck Jones could produce an entire cartoon parodying Wagner or Rossini says it all.

*Restored HBO Max (Max) US printCopyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for fair use for purpose

This cartoon is set to the tune of the overture of The Barber of Seville.

The impossibility of that happening today is unfortunate. While some may celebrate the Death of the Canon and whatever danger cultural works by European authors, artists, or composers may symbolize, it also means that we in the United States no longer have anything like a common heritage culture.

A large number of people being on the same social platforms or using the same memes isn't quite the same because it's not transgenerational in the same way—kids and adults alike were more or less familiar with the arias that Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny parodied—and is certainly more transient.

How many people today remember the Numa Numa kid or "Leeroy Jenkins"? And even if a few early-Internet artifacts like Doge or "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" are still in use, it's not a body of culture in the same way.

The question then becomes: Is this disappearance of a common cultural language symptomatic of 1) the devaluation of canonical European-origin culture or 2) the inability or unwillingness of the U.S. educational system to teach this knowledge or 3) a single corpus' inability to maintain primacy in the face of thousands, if not millions, of alternative and competing cultural items in the intervening half century, or, 4) U.S. society's own fragmentation? And what is the impact and significance of the loss of a common cultural storehouse and vocabulary?