It's Sunday, I don't feel like doing much (and the drizzle outside has become relentless), so I began to dig through some of my favorite YouTubes: these 27-inch Regina music boxes were the HD TVs of their day, with a high-tech changer that made the most dreadful noises, like a garage door opener. I like the fact that entire operas (such as Lohengrin) can be played in less than two minutes. The discs appear to be made of a quivery, slightly warped tin or other malleable metal. The tuning on these large discs is much more accurate than in the smaller turntable models, and the sound sweet and bell-like, lacking that awful jack-in-the-box plink I remember from the cheap music-boxes of my childhood.
Hearing the William Tell Overture in such an oddball medium made me think of one of the hokiest shows I ever watched, The Lone Ranger. Funny how shows that would seem wildly homosexual today were considered just fine back then. Don't know why. Even Liberace had lots of female fans.
And what about male song-and-dance teams, Martin and Lewis, or those two guys on Ed Sullivan who sang two different songs and made them fit together? (Not to mention Topo Gigio and Senor Wences.) To my mind, even Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby were pretty suspicious in White Christmas. All that skipping around.
Doesn't this look like a gay horse? I'm just sayin'. Ultra-white, like it's been spray-painted or dusted down with some sort of powder. It looks to me as if Silver would glow in the dark.
I'm not saying these two guys weren't manly. They were at least as manly as Batman and Robin. Tonto was pretty dignified for a man forced to repeat lines written in an insulting quasi-Indian patois. He made the character plausible, even charismatic, rising above the "only good Injun" mentality of '50s TV and movies.
There was a long wait until Little Big Man and, much later, Dances with Wolves. But Jay Silverheels beat hell out of them all. He WAS the change that needed to happen to overcome native stereotypes, and no one did it better.
http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm
