OLD MAN [fading in]: Alright! This way! This way now! What a wonderful clearing in the jungle! just the place to build our camp! Alright, you men get cracking now. The pup-tents right over there, | think. Right!
SOUND: Dog barking. Men moving about in the wet.
OLD MAN: The foundation should go right about here The stockade! The stockade!
DR DOG: Excuse me, Sir. Can | speak to you alone, Sir?
OLD MAN: Why of course you can.
DR DOG: Daddy, I've lost the Lincoln Logs!
PABLO: That's alright! I've got an Erector Set!
DR DOG: Show-off!
OLD MAN: Throw a towel over it!
DR DOG: Do some push-ups, Pablo! It'll go away! [They all laugh uproariously]
BABE [startled awake]: Hey! What are you guys doing in my car?
--How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?
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?
This is Chaos in Kansas (1989), a scenario for GURPS Cliffhanger or GURPS Horror, depending on how you’re feeling. The cover doesn’t even come close to telling you what amazing things lie in wait inside, but it’s a start. In truth, the title alone is gold. Say it with me, Chaos in Kansas, Chaos in Kansas, Chaos in Kansas.
There are two scenarios and some source material on the setting, a town called Liberty. The first involves a kidnapping by a coven of witches who worship the horrible sorcerer monster that’s trapped in a cave outside of town. They’re led by a teen flapper, the girlfriend of the kidnapped victim, who she intends to use as a human sacrifice to free the Dire Dreamer. She has a goat mask with crystal eyes in the trunk of her car. The cave is guarded by a horrible humanoid spider creature. The Dreamer itself is a mummified head on top of a pile of human intestines. I suspect that the phantom on Miro Sinovcic’s cover is meant to be the Dreamer, but good taste prevailed against depicting the pile of intestines. When the players defeat the Dreamer, the head explodes in a splash of goo, which should happen at the end of more RPG boss fights if you ask me.
The second scenario has the players investigating strange goings on at the local cement factory. And by strange goings on, I mean getting hired by the boss to root out the “Bolsheviks” who have been disrupting the work. Except it isn’t Bolsheviks, its the ghost a Wobbly who was murdered on the site. When he came back as a ghost, he just kept on agitating for the workers, adopting the guise of the Demon of Capitalism to terrorize and sabotage the work site. He can’t be exorcized (he was an atheist, lol) and he won’t rest even if his killer is brought to justice. The only way he’ll depart is if the workers organize a union. The scenario includes lyrics to “Solidarity Forever” and other labor movement songs, presumably so you can sing them to the players in the character of Joe the Ghost. Joe’s my hero.
I am currently reading The Devils by Joe Abercrombie 🔥
The official character art by Joel Daniel Phillips is so stunning!
Pictured: Brother Diaz the monk, Alex the thief princess, Jakob of Thorn the immortal warrior, Baptiste the ex-pirate, Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi the necromancer magician, Baron Rikard the vampire, Sunny the elf and Vigga the Norse werewolf.
Since I can't edit polls to retroactively link parts together, here's a masterpost of them all, updated as it happens.
Vote to solve a thrilling mystery of assassination and intrigue, or at least to eventually discover if the body in front of you is actually dead or not, that bit has been taking us a while.
yousharknotpass
2087
blakekathryn
