Animation Celebration

Started off today with the Saturday American Top 40 re-run. Rather appropriately for a patriotic weekend, we returned to the Bicentennial year of 1976. Hits from early September include "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" by Elton John and Kiki Dee, "Let Them In" by Wings, "This Masquerade" by George Benson, "Get Closer" by Seals & Croft, "Low Down" by Boz Skaggs, "Fallin'" by Fleetwood Mac, and "Play that Funky Music" by Kool and the Gang.

The big hit song of that week began the dominance of the Bee Gees and disco, "You Should Be Dancing."

There wasn't really much going on today. The bank was surprisingly busy when I came in. There was a customer giving the cashiers a hard time and holding up the line. The one yard sale on Congress Street in Oaklyn had nothing of interest.

The Farm Market, however, was bustling. Many crops and farms still haven't recovered from Hurricane Irene. I heard several farmers mentioned that this is the last week for peaches, tomatoes, and eggplants, and the organic farmer told me that melons are done. Corn and peppers should be winding down, too.

The fall harvest is just starting to debut. I saw the first fresh pears of the season, and the orchard booth was laden with every kind of apple grown in this area. Onions and leeks are back as well. I ended up with two onions, a small acorn squash and butternut squash from the organic booth, tiny Gala apples, the last white peaches of the year, green beans, plums, and mushrooms.

I rode around looking for yard sales, but found nothing. It was getting hotter and more humid out by the minute. It was cloudy when I started out, but the sun had begun to emerge when I was at the Farm Market. I treated myself to a Pumpkin Soft Serve cone at Kayla's to cool myself off on the way home.

Spent the rest of the day at home, working on baking, putting up the general fall decorations, dressing the American Girl dolls in clothes appropriate for late summer, and dubbing DVDs. Mom let me take home all of the remaining tapes my family recorded off of cable and broadcast TV in the mid-late 80s. All of these videos date back as far as 1986, and they're beloved childhood memories.

I concentrated on the Disney and Looney Tunes items today. First in the queue was the original version of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, apparently taped off of an 80s Wonderful World of Disney broadcast from what remained of Micheal Eisner's introduction. Rabbit is fed up with Tigger's not watching where he bounces and tries to rally Pooh and Piglet to help him tame the overly excitable feline. Tigger, however, not only gets himself into trouble, but Roo as well. It's the narrator, of all people, who gets Tigger out of his pickle.

Moved to a couple of classic Mickey Mouse shorts next. I already have The Little Whirlwind, but not Hawaiian Holiday or The Brave Little Tailor. The first takes the gang to the shores of Hawaii, where Pluto battles a crab and Goofy hits the waves...and they hit back. The second is one of Mickey's very best starring vehicles, a wonderful adaptation of the fairy tale of the same title.

In 1988, my family taped several Disney holiday specials that can no longer be found anywhere else off the Disney Channel and Channel 29 (before they became a Fox affiliate - you can see their original call letters in one short promo). In fact, I've never seen The Halloween Hall of Fame on any other channel besides 29, including the Disney Channel. The Hall of Fame has Jonathan Winters playing a Disney security guard with a penchant for impersonations who is working late on Halloween night. He encounters a talking Jack O'Lantern in a crystal ball (Winters in a pumpkin head). Seems Jack doesn't like what's happened to the holiday. It just isn't spooky enough for him these days. Winters directs him to the shorts "Pluto's Judgement Day" and "Trick or Treat" and the featurette "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

This one's mostly notable for Winters' impressions and for being the only one of the three Disney Halloween specials to feature most of the "Ichabod Crane" segment of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

Scary Tales Halloween, like the Jonathan Winters special, looks like an episode of the Disney anthology shows of the 60s and 70s. Disney's Halloween Treat is basically the Disney Channel's expanded version of Scary Tales. Both feature a far friendlier talking pumpkin than Jonathan Winters' Jack as a host/narrator and make use of scenes from Disney movies and cartoons ranging from mildly spooky (comic sequences from Peter Pan and The Sword In the Stone) to freaky even today (the "Night at Bald Mountain" segment from Fantasia, the classic Mickey/Goofy/Donald short "Lonesome Ghosts"). Halloween Treat features a segment with the Magic Mirror (voice of Hans Conried) introducing sequences featuring some of Disney's most famous villains. (This must be from a 70s Wonderful World of Disney episode, as then-new movies like The Aristocats and The Rescuers are highlighted.)

A Disney Channel Christmas is a combination of two earlier Disney anthology show holiday specials, Jiminy Cricket's Christmas from the 50s and 60s and A Disney Christmas Gift from the 70s. Along with the inclusion of the catchy theme songs for those specials "From All of Us to All of You" and "On Christmas Morning," we get classic winter-themed shorts like "The Art of Skiing," "Donald's Snow Fight," and "Pluto's Christmas Tree," the two Santa Silly Symphonies, a few segments of Disney movies that show gift-giving or winter (Bambi learning to ice skate, Peter teaching the Darlings how to fly, Cinderella receiving her pink dress from the mice), and the touching black & white short "Mickey's Good Deed." Disney being Disney also had to throw in a segment from the then-in-theaters Mickey's Christmas Carol as a promo.

And I always get a lump in my throat when Jiminy Cricket sings "When You Wish Upon A Star" in the finale, with all of the Disney characters gathered around him.

(One of the best parts of the specials we got from broadcast TV are the inclusion of a few vintage commercials, including ones for Milky Way bars, Wendy's, CVS, the romantic fantasy/comedy Date With an Angel, and Robin's 8th and Walnut, a jewelry store that's still in downtown Philadelphia to this day.)

Worked on three Looney Tunes movies while making applesauce cookies from that healthy baking cookbook. The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island, and Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales all came from HBO in the late 80s, probably around 1987-1988. Bugs Bunny/Road Runner has part of the graphics that opened HBO movies in the late 80s.

These are all collections of shorts edited around new material. Fantastic Island has Daffy and Speedy turning their deserted sandspit into paradise with the help of a wish-fulfilling well. The older shorts come into play when Daffy starts selling wishes to the rest of the Looney Tunes gang at $500 dollars a wish. Taz and Yosemite Sam are right on their tail as they search for the map they lost. This, of course, is a spoof of the early 80s TV show Fantasy Island, right down to Daffy and Speedy in their white duds. (It may also be why this is currently the only Looney Tunes movie that isn't on DVD.)

1001 Rabbit Tales also features Yosemite Sam as the villain. This time, he's a sultan who wants Bugs to read fairy tales to his spoiled son. The "fairy tales" are all cartoon segments, including Bugs rescuing Hansel and Gretel from Witch Hazel, Sylvester chasing Goldimouse and being chased by a giant, and most of "The Pied Piper of Guadalupe" with Sylvester and Speedy Gonzoles and "One Froggy Evening" featuring Michigan J. Frog.

The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie takes a far simpler approach. Bugs introduces us to his life story and the story of comedy and comic chases, via some of Chuck Jones' most famous Warners shorts. Segments from favorites like "Bully for Bugs" and "Long-Haired Hare," along with the full "Duck Amuck" and "What's Opera, Doc?", make this the best of the Looney Tunes "movies." It also proves that Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner are best seen in small doses or as part of a collection - I actually like them better here than in the Golden Collection.

Since there was a little time left on the DVD, I tossed my own newer copy of Bugs Bunny's Easter Funnies on. It's the same deal as the movies - cartoons edited into a new wrap-around story - with an Easter theme. The Easter Bunny gets sick, and Granny has to find a replacement among the Tunes.

Oh, and my cooking came out well tonight. The applesauce cookies were delicious, and I made some yummy apple-peach sauce with the last of last week's farm market apples and peaches, too.