The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television
Page 7
Stevens contends that this show will hit hardest at the “silent majority” of which Nixon prattled, not the hip minority that is aware of what’s coming down. I hope he’s right. We so desperately need him to be right.
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12: 28 DECEMBER 68
Now the truth is revealed. My guilty secret. I am a devout Saturday morning cartoon watcher. I could cop-out and explain it all by saying a TV critic has to watch everything, but there would probably be a fink in the crowd who would point out that if such was the case, why did I miss the much-lauded Michelangelo special last week, not to mention the Elvis, Brigitte and Ann-Margret bashes? Or I could bring mist and tears to the eyes of my readers by reconstructing my hideous childhood when, as a result of being one of the shittiest kids in Painesville, Ohio, I was unable to make friends, and was thus (fortunately for me and the World of Literature) shunted off into a land of dreams, inhabited by the denizens of horror movies, comic books, pulp magazines and Golden Age radio. (It was a wild world where my companions were Doc Savage, the Shadow, Plastic Man, Sheena of the Jungle, Kharis the mummy, Simone Simon, Capt. Midnight, Jack/Doc/& Reggie, The Spectre and Lawrence Talbot the Wolf Man; you can readily understand why I get along so well with film producers and hippies.)
But none of this would actually, strictly be the truth. And since I have begun the unseemly habit of dealing in honesty with you, gentle readers, I must confess boldly that I watch the Saturday morning cartoon shows because they are a consummate groove. I dig them; that simple.
You can sympathize, accordingly, with my upset at the major networks’ fear&trembling as regards what they show the little no-neck monsters every Saturday ayem. Last season, there was such a hue and cry raised by paranoid parents (who can’t cop to being responsible for their kids’ traumas, so have to blame it on everything from Hong Kong Flu to masturbation, with comic books and TV getting a big blast), that the kiddie shows—notably the animateds—were warping their urchins’ minds, that radical changes were proposed in Saturday morning programming. The nitwit parents were aided in their Holy War by that perennial doomcrier, Dr. Fredric Wertham, the man almost solely responsible for the institution in the Fifties of the Comics Code Authority, a bluenose regulatory apparatus dedicated to keeping the world as pure as the driven snow.
Refuting Wertham and the running-scared set is no difficult problem. Arrayed against the Wertham philosophy that TV (and comic book) violence cause children to use meat-cleavers on their mummies are hundreds of psychologists and psychiatrists who contend that filmed horror and terror are good for kids, that they offer a purgative, a release for adolescent tensions and hostilities. On a personal level, I can vouch for the accuracy of that theory. Every guy I know who grooved behind horror movies and comic books when he was a tot is today a productive, beautiful person, with imagination and a sense of wonder. The few I know who were only allowed to read Albert Payson Terhune and see movies where the virtues of God and Dogs were extolled are square, hidebound, bigoted, short-sighted schlepps who sport support your local cossack bumper stickers.
There is a thing called “tolerable terror” that kids derive from seeing Superman battling the Giant Tapioca Pudding That Swallowed Pittsburgh. There is a sense of wakening mysteries in the soul that kids derive from seeing Frankenstein stalk the moors. There is a keying-in to exaggeration of the human condition in following the battle against ee-vil waged by the Lone Ranger and Spider-Man. To deprive kids of these simplifications of the complex world of good-and-bad, when they are at an intellectual stage where they cannot grasp the subtleties of inter-personal relationships and global politics, is to deprive them of the one genuine training ground for their thinking, on a level to which they can relate.
But I carp needlessly. Kids will still find their outlets, even if Saturday morning is turned over to cute gophers and harmless old men in clown suits. (What I’m concerned about is what I’ll do for amusement on Saturday mornings; the chick is still asleep, and nudging her first thing on a Saturday morning can only serve to ruin a warm and growing relationship.)
Yet the days of the super-heroes may be numbered, and for those of you who have not as yet fallen-down on what joys present themselves pre-noon every Saturday, let me clue you to several shows of worth.
Nine o’clock, Channel 7, the adventures of the Incredible Spider-Man. Peter Palmer, who is, in reality, the dreaded nemesis of evil-doers everywhere, Spider-Man, while a high school science student, was bitten by a radioactive spider (don’t boggle, read on); he acquired the super-powers of a spider, as a result. Wall-climbing agility, gymnastic excellence, clear-thinking ... and his acne cleared up overnight. Considered to be an outcast and a menace by the Establishment (as portrayed by J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of a great metropolitan daily—faintly reminiscent of Mr. Luce at his crankiest), Spider-Man goes his lone, revolutionary way, socking it to malefactors and bumbling cops with a nice impartiality. His struggles every Saturday morning to implement the revolution would bring tears of joy to the most hardbitten placard-carrier.
Nine-thirty on Saturday mornings is a toss-up. You can either dig Channel 7 and catch the adventures of a team of micro-reduced secret agents in their Fantastic Voyage (based on the s-f film of the same name) or turn to Channel 4 and groove with an insane rock group called The Banana Splits. In favor of the former is a team-member named Guru who is a Hindu shaman of no mean talents. He can perform all manner of wonderful shticks while having been reduced to the size of a white corpuscle, and speeding along inside someone’s urine tract. Now, you gotta admit, a show that has a mystic microscopically moving midst miniscule matrixes manhandling maladjusted menaces means much mystery. How can you pass it up?
(But if you have to, the Banana Splits is the way to go. There are these four lunatics in funny suits, see. One of them is a big dog, and another is a ball of hair with a long snout, see. And they play Fender bass and rhythm guitar and drums, see. And they knock each other around, and they’re live, not animated, like these other shows, see. And they’ve got some cartoons on the show, too, see. Like The Arabian Knights and The Three Musketeers and this live-action adventure called Danger Island, see, where there’s this buncha people trapped on an island fulla cannibals and other unsocial types, see. And the whole show is a wild, insane takeout, with some very nice rock music on top of everything. See?)
Then at 10:30 on Channel 2 there’s the animated Batman/Superman Hour of Adventure, and need I say more? The Riddler is there, and the Penguin, and the Catwoman, and the Joker, and Robin, and Batgirl, and Superboy with his wonder dog Krypto, and it is some of the best animation on network TV, and if you dug the comics, you’ll love the films.
(Did you ever wonder if Superman wore a jockstrap under that long underwear?)
But the best, the very best, is a Jay Ward entry called George Of The Jungle. It usually gets usurped by a football game (as with the Army-Navy game a couple of weeks ago), but ABC puts it on sometime around four or five-ish. Check your local listings, as they say.
On the George Of The Jungle show there is this extra-lovely fuckup Tarzan named George, who can’t swing on a vine without he bashes his punim on a banyan tree. He’s not too bright, this George, and he’s got a girl friend named Ursula that he calls Fella, cause he don’t know the difference. There’s an ape named Ape who speaks with a Ronald Colman accent, and an elephant George thinks is a big dog: his name is Shep ...
(Ably assisting George in the supplementary segments of the show are Super Chicken—alias Henry Cabot Henhouse III—and a racer named Tom Slick.
There is nothing on prime-time to compare with the social comment and satire being purveyed weekly on George Of The Jungle.)
And so, having hipped you to all the wonders extant on the kiddie terrain, I sign off, having written this on a Friday, knowing that tomorrow morning I’ll be able to tune in on my favorite crime-fighters and nutsos . . . and only wishing I knew a deranged chick who dug them, too, who wouldn’t get uptight when I kiss the ba
ck of her neck and whisper romantically, “Hey, honey, guess what? The Fantastic Four is on. Y’wanna watch, or y’wanna make it again?”
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13: 3 JANUARY 69
Comes a moment of truth.
Several weeks ago, in these pages, another Free Press columnist invoked the wrath of the readers by siding with The Establishment. Before what I am about to set down is construed as a like cop-out (pulling a mintz, as it has come to be called, he said innocently), let me inform my readers that acquaintances of mine in the nine-to-five scene handily castigate me for (as they put it) pandering to the muddy thinking of the “anarchists, hippies, unwashed degenerates and corrupt eggheads.” Apparently, I am neither fish nor fowl, sorta twixt and tween, neither of one camp nor the other, a chickenshit to both sides. Well, friends and rock-toters, I like to think of myself as an honest man, mayhap even a seeker after Truth. (Stop that giggling right now, wiseacre, or I’ll use phrases like “I tell it like it is.”)
And this pathological concern with Truth leads me into areas where I’m forced to deny some of the things my gut tells me are groovy, simply because my head says they’re full of nonsense. All of the preceding, naturally, is geared to set you in the proper frame of mind for a denunciation of the Holy.
But first, a word from my sponsor, the Great American Viewing Animal, which has asked me to remark on the following:
As beautiful as Stevie Wonder may be on records, it was horrifying to see him on the Ed Sullivan Show several Sundays ago. There are blind musicians whose mannerisms on stage don’t make you feel like a descendant of Custer at a Buffy Sainte-Marie concert (Ray Charles, Feliciano, Shearing). But Stevie Wonder ain’t one of them. And if venal peddlers of the Sound like Sullivan have to slip in acts like Wonder between the trained dogs and acrobats, for Christ’s sake the least they can do is camera-shoot him in such a way that he doesn’t come off looking like a spastic.
The Apollo moonshot was the biggest washout, dramawise, since Mama Cass opened in Vegas. Here it was, for all of us science fiction buffs, the most incredible step away from this war-crushed mudball since Columbus said, “C’mon you guys, knock off the mutiny shit; we’ll be in Cuba in a few days!” and the most exhilarating thing about it was Cronkite informing us that the English Flat Earth Society was prepared to reevaluate. Sure, okay, I’m woolgathering, but I just wish to God we’d get an astronaut with a sense of the dramatic. A guy who’d broadcast back from the darkside: “Jeezus, Houston, you ain’t gonna believe this, but as we passed over the Mare Imbrium, we saw this little pink-and-white gingerbread house, with smoke coming out of the chimney, and there was a tiny gray-haired lady out in front waving a banner that said Lemonade, 5¢ a glass ...”
And now, back to my main thesis this week, the Great Denunciation. Have I gotten you jollied enough?
Well, I’ve carped repeatedly in these pages that one of the networks should air a rebuttal to Daley’s panegyric on Chicago (Wonderland of the Midwest). Two weeks ago, on Channel 11, one Sunday night, I saw it. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Yippies had an hour to state their case. It was telecast on the same channel that had aired Daley’s propaganda, with typical disclaimers that the opinions herewith set forth were not those of the blah blah blah. The ACLU had 45 minutes, the Yippies had 15 minutes.
While the ACLU portion was nowhere nearly as artfully executed as the Daley film, a matter of money is all, it made its point with strength and conviction. Over and over we heard the now-classic Daley utterance, “The police are not there to create disorder, they’re there to preserve disorder.” There were touching and convincing interviews with college-age nursing students, McCarthy delegates, newsreel cameramen, straight types who could get the message across to the squares.
When the ACLU forty-five minutes was ended, one had the feeling that while it might not convince the 74% of the Great Unwashed who applauded the actions of the Chicago police (even after the release of the Walker Report) that the dissenters were not Communist-inspired anarchists bent on the assassination of the Hump, still it might put a nubbin of doubt in their dense skulls. Hurrah! Gold stars for a job well done.
Then came the Yippie’s 15 minutes.
In just 15 short minutes, the Yippies managed to negate everything that had gone before.
Let me make a point: I quite agree that there is a need for humor and satire and ridicule in the Dissent Movement (if that’s what it’s called). The Establishment and its lies are what novelist John D. MacDonald once referred to as “a thing. Heart empty as a paper bag, eyes of clever glass.” Any possible way at our command to make the piranha look ridiculous and jabberwockly should be taken.
But when it becomes (apparently) impossible for the strategists to realize they are in a war, and that war may well be hell but certainly ain’t funny, then they must be labeled irresponsible. Not irresponsible to those nebulous jingoisms of Our Times—Law&Order, Civic Conscience, Human Rights, Respect For Our Appointed Leaders—none of that jello, friends, because those are the slogans the piranhas use to keep everyone in line. But irresponsible to the Cause and, more important, down in the nitty-gritty, to the troops. To the foot-soldiers in the war who are getting expelled from high schools and colleges all over this Cheyne-Stokes country. Irresponsible to the thousands who used their odd-job money to get to Chicago to protest, and for their concern got busted heads and police records. Irresponsible to all of (them, us, me, you, all of the above) who have spent endless hours in doctors’ offices getting repaired after Our Appointed Leaders used heavy clout against us. Irresponsible to those of us who don’t conceive of the war as a love-in or a gambol or a frolic. There’s nothing funny about three John Laws stomping on your arm till they break it.
So. Funny. Yeah, the Yippie segment of that TV documentary was funny. It opened with a scantily-clad chick standing in front of a gong with Daley’s face in the center of it. As a voice proclaimed, “And now ... here’s Yippie!” the chick swung her striker and the gong rang hollowly. Funny. I laughed. I laughed because I thought Hoffman and Rubin and Krassner were going to zing the mothers as they deserved to be zinged.
But I stopped laughing very quickly. The fifteen minutes was taken up with self-indulgent, irresponsible private jokes and adolescent jabber.
Interspersed with badly-selected newsreel footage of the riots and truncheon-swinging cops, the Yippies intercut footage from a silent Cecil B. DeMille bible orgy ... I think it was Sodom And Gomorrah. Sure, I got the point: Chicago was an orgy of violence as opposed to an orgy of sex and depravity, both culminating in the fall of the metropolis. I got it, fellahs, I got it.
But the Yippies didn’t just play that note once. They hit it again and again and again, and there was the porcine presidential candidate, Pigasus, and there were scuffy dudes making faces and sticking out their tongues, and there were kids running around shrieking insanely. And no point was made. No convincing argument was made.
Well, then, one of you out there offended by my seeming turncoat attitude will say, “So what? Who the hell were they supposed to be impressing? Surely not the squares!”
Yes, you jerk, the squares!
Otherwise, why go on TV, a mass medium for the dissemination of information? Those of us who know what came down in Chicago, know it. We don’t have to be convinced. We’re there already. That television production was intended to show the other side, to let a little light into the catacombs. If not, what purpose was it to have served? Assuage the wounded egos of the Yippie leaders? Pull a shuck on the boobs? Commit a great put-on to posterity?
Nonsense. This was the only opportunity all the dues-payers who went to Chicago had to have their side of it heard. And the opportunity got blown.
Because by the time that fifteen minutes was ended, it had invalidated everything the ACLU had labored to put together; it made the Yippies look like the clowns they must be; it firmly solidified the prejudices and fears of the Great Unwashed. And by me, friends, that is stinking irresponsibility.
But if they can’t separate their own ego-needs for childish demonstration (on a level with the romper tot who emerges in the living room of his parents during a party and pees on the floor to get attention), they damned well ought to admit that they don’t care about what’s really happening in this country in terms of dissent, and start a night club act like The Fugs, where they can pick their noses in front of the jerks who’ll pay to be insulted, and stop paying lip-service to the Cause.
If this makes me a humorless bastard who can’t understand the necessity for ridicule and satire in a world going mad, so be it. But I merely suggest that if there be any in the Yippie camp who think war is a ha-ha, sort of a refined Hogan’s Heroes, have somebody run newsclips of the camps at Belsen and Dachau.
Life ain’t a TV spectacular. And if it is, if God is truly mad and it is, then the only way these comedians are going to get their show renewed for next season is with the blood and pulped faces of kids who think they’re into something dead serious.