WTF?? Bizarre Russian cartoon defies explanation

I should call this sort of thing Ick at Night: it's a tendency to find bizarre things very late, when I really should be in bed. This thing is just so inexplicable, like a Russian Wizard of Oz on acid, that I sat there slack-jawed trying to take it all in. Usually I wouldn't watch the whole thing, but this time I stayed with it, hoping I'd find some clue as to what it's about.

This is an ick day. A couple of weeks ago I got the dreaded "call back" on my routine mammogram. Something is wrong, or at least needs to be investigated further. This has never happened to me before. I've kept my mind off it, pretty much, but today it just pressed in on me. My mind ticktocks back and forth like a metronome: I have it; there's no way. I have it; there's no way. And so on. So tomorrow I have to "go back in" and they'll try to see, I guess, what is there, or not.

I stayed off the internet until last night. My husband has been begging me NOT to go on breast cancer sites. There's just so much misinformation around, and the subject has been shoved in our faces for years, to an extreme I think. I just saw a Facebook thingie, status card or whatever, that exhorted women to "set their tatas free" and have a braless day. "SUPPORT BREAST CANCER!" the thing screamed. Is that really what we want to do?

Do we want to support the disease, which is what the message looks like, or support the cure?

Since Robin Williams died such an awful death, I've seen FB pages and things like that popping up to "support depression" and such-like. One such page-creator claimed that most of the stigma from mental illness comes from the sufferers. I had a hard time mustering much support for his cause.

I could say, I'll go in tomorrow, get my ultrasound and be done with it. I've had ultrasounds before, and CT scans and all that (in fact, in the past 18 months I've had every test you can think of, trying to pin down the source of considerable pain), and they're a piece of cake. What isn't a piece of cake is the waiting. Generally speaking, if a test comes out OK and they don't find anything, they don't call you. You are left hanging, and wondering if maybe just maybe they FORGOT to call you (as has happened to me a couple of times) and you will end up untreated until it's too late.

These things happen. Hell, doctors have been known to take out the wrong kidney or amputate the wrong leg.

I will take it a step at a time, of course, tell myself as usual that I never get sick (which I don't - it always turns out to be "nothing"). I'll go home and try to forget about it all, not hear anything for weeks and weeks while the whole nightmare issue recedes into the background again.

The Wizard of Oz as you never wanted to see it

j


It was very strange to see these again. This is a bizarre take on The Wizard of Oz, with everything turned upside-down: Rusty the Tin Man really is heartless and nasty; Socrates the Straw Man (straw man? Just what IS a straw man, anyway? Sounds like something out of The Wasteland: "We are the hollow men, head-piece filled with straw") is really brainless; Dandy the Lion (an interior decorator who has definite "tendencies") is scared shitless of everything. So the weird twist in the original, i. e. that the characters already possessed the things they wanted, is twisted the other way. Nobody has any good qualities at all. The result is. . . pretty twisted.

You can find virtually pristine-quality videos of this 1961 series on YouTube, but for some reason the opening and ending sequences have been cut. When I look at them, it's very strange: I originally watched them on a grainy b & w set, so seeing them looking so brand-new and vividly, even garishly coloured is disconcerting. Almost hallucinogenic. Were the animators dabbling in exotic '60s substances, I wonder?

I wanted to include those opening and closing sequences, so I had to use this faded, slightly blurred cartoon as an example, even though it doesn't include all the characters (i.e. the Wicked Witch, who has a voice that could shred steel). There are other oddities, such as teardrop-shaped munchkins that seem completely expendable (i.e. they are casually killed in nearly every episode), a Wizard that talks like W. C. Fields, a dragon that pops up now and again (scaring the shit out of Dandy), and a land where everything is upside-down.

I can't find any one cartoon that gets all this across, so I chose this one where the main three characters demonstrate their "special" qualities. When I was about seven and watching these for the first time, I just sucked it all in like Jell-o or Junket or Cream of Wheat, without analyzing it. It's only now that I see how very strange and even disturbing it all is.

(Post-script: someone posted a comment on YouTube claiming that these cartoons were made in Canada, and I wondered: could it be? They were produced by an American animation giant, Rankin-Bass, best known for their cheesy-but-beloved Christmas specials with stop-action figures that reminded me of that annoying little Alka-Seltzer guy.  (And Davy and Goliath? We'll get into that later.) This series isn't stop-action, in fact it falls under the category of hallucinogenic art. But when I began to probe, some familiar names popped up. This series was apparently created by the '60s entertainment impresario Budge Crawley. Among the voice actors were Bernard Cowan and Carl Bana: I remember Cowan as an announcer on game shows or something. All Toronto guys. Well, why not: Spiderman was voiced by Paul Soles, a veteran Canadian jack-of-all-trades actor and entertainer, and where would we be without catch-phrases like "Walloping web-snappers!" and "My spidey-sense is tingling." There's just something about Canadians. Strange people.)

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