TV shows I remember from childhood

For this entry, at first I had planned to complain about how out of favor I am with the public; but then, as I got to thinking about it, the idea seemed too average. Isn’t everyone complaining about something nowadays? . . . But maybe that’s good. In fact, it’s probably very good that we all keep complaining – for it means that we are instinctively upholding traditions even older than Atlantis.

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Intro

So I opened up an old word processor file that I hadn’t looked at in a long time; and the phrase at the top of the page was “blog ideas.” I can’t remember ever caring about blogging so much that I would keep a list of recommended topics. . . . I’ll blog however I want – I’ll write about toothpaste even, and it’ll serve – I don’t need to follow my own stupid suggestions.

So the suggested topic was “TV shows that I watched as a child.” The reason this topic appeals to me is that I remember feeling a mixture of pleasure and fear while watching television and waiting for the school bus. (By “school bus,” I mean the giant yellow vehicle that would stop at the corner of our block and haul us to public school five times per week.)

So I would watch cartoons that aired in the morning; then, when I saw the bus coming round the mountain, I would leap up and race to catch it. The scary part of this was that I hated school. The pleasurable part of this was that I loved cartoons.

Shows

I remember a cartoon that was about a cat and a mouse. One tormented the other, even though they were both God’s creatures. This torment resulted in colors and movements and noises: all pleasing to God, I conjecture. The thing I myself love most about television is that it’s like the daytime version of a starry night.

People read their religious scriptures with as much attention as I watched those cartoons. Sometimes I wish that cartoons would replace religious scriptures. . . . Yet, now that I remember how it felt to watch a religious-themed cartoon, I take that back. Religious cartoons are conspicuously devoid of fun.

My favorite thing about religious cartoons (I mean those that strive to indoctrinate children with credos) is that they are like art films: I mean, they have the mood of leftover death. You feel as though immortality is something from which we escaped by diving into pain, the way that someone would dive into a pool of gelatin.

1. Alfred Jarry’s ‘Neo-Scientific Novel’ Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician contains a chapter titled ‘Concerning the Dogfaced Baboon Bosse-de-Nage, Who Knew No Human Words but “Ha Ha.”’
2. The series of animated short films titled Merrie Melodies has a character called the Road Runner who is known for making the noise “Beep Beep.”

I hadn’t planned to go anywhere with the above two facts; I simply detected a consonance between them and thought that you might want to know about it.