Les Meows: Victor Hugo in the trash can

Oh my GOD, I am too tired to write about Top Cat right now, but I have to get this down before I collapse! Since I started watching this show again on the Classic Toons channel, my whole life has changed. And as elegant as these opening and closing credits are - some of the neatest, most sophisticated animation I've ever seen, giving the lie to the belief that Hanna-Barbera only turned out schlock - the real discovery, or rediscovery,is a certain character: the one I used to call "The Pink Cat", my favorite Top Cat gang member when I first saw the show. When I was seven.

Which I was. Seven. And the cat was. Pink. I doubt if I knew his name then, as I was trying to keep the names of the whole gang straight and there were SIX of them which was just about one cat too many.

Another very odd thing about the show was the way they mixed cats with humans: a cat could be in a human hospital with a cat nurse, and the nurse could be engaged to a doctor who was actually a human. A cat could be a torch-singer in a night club that human males had the hots for.  It was all extremely weird and anthropo - anthropo - excuse me while I spit this word out.

I do remember Arnold Stang, T.C.'s voice, from other things, including commercials for a chocolate bar called Chunky. Stang died only a couple of years ago at age 90, so doing T. C. must've been lucky for him. They only made 30 episodes of this gem, maybe because these were alley cats and part of an actual gang of no-goods who went around cheating and stealing and breaking the law. Not a very nice example for the kiddies.

But I digress. I digress because I'm so tired my head will soon roll off my shoulders and bounce down the stairs like a bowling ball. I have to just get this in before I fade out for the day: now I've found out more about The Pink Cat! His name is Choo-Choo and he is THE coolest of the gang, wearing a white turtleneck (which was very beat back in 1961) and speaking in a Brooklyn-accented voice which Wikipedia tells me was supposed to resemble Woody Allen's.

Did someone mention Woody Allen? Did anyone know who the hell he was back then? Had he even made a movie? So unless you lived in some esoteric part of New York and went to coffee houses, how would you ever be exposed to him? Jesus. Hanna-Barbera was incredibly progressive.

The thing is, this was 1961 and I was seven. And then there was this pink cat. Then my brother got home from band practice. Then I went to bed.

TAKE TWO. . .

As it turns out, yes, yes, I DO have more to say about Top Cat. It came on late enough at night that I watched it through a drowsy haze. I liked it, but it was Different. It wasn't simple like The Flintstones or dumb like Ruff and Reddy or ridiculous like Underdog or Superchicken.

Top Cat was originally meant to be a sort of cartoon version of The Phil Silvers Show, which ran some time in the late '50s and which scared the bejeezus out of me because at the start of the show, there was this cartoon guy yelling out this incoherent gibberish. Took me years to figure out it was an army guy barking orders. I was about four, so my confusion was understandable. But who gave a shit about Phil Silvers anyway? He has been completely forgotten, and for some reason his name reminds me of an empty can of cheap salmon rattling around in a garbage can. He has all the historic importance of Arthur Godfrey's discarded fingernail parings.

But back to Top Cat.

In my last rather pathetic entry, posted in a twilight state, I neglected to mention that besides his Gang of Five (and no, I'm not going to give you their idiot names because it doesn't matter: they're something like Brain, Stupid, Fleas, Burlap Sack, and Twinkie), this show had an undercurrent of Victor Hugo that was completely missed by audiences and critics alike (not to mention Nielson ratings, which were always poor).

Top Cat was a rapscallion and a scalawag and a scofflaw and all those other things good alley cats aspire to be: but he was also hunted, chased from one end of the City of New York to the other by a menacing figure.

Behold: the Inspector Javert of the alley!

OFFICER DIBBLE!

Witless as he was, this guy had such an effect on world culture in the thirty short weeks of his cartoon life that in some parts of Australia and New Zealand, "dibble" still means "the fuzz".

As a kid I used to call him Dribble, or even Drivel sometimes, as he could be incredibly stupid. But that's not the point. Our wily Jean Valjean of the alley needed an adversary, something to push against. Otherwise there'd just be no story.

As I watch these cartoons again fifty years later (oh God, it's even more than that), they look different. I now realize "the Pink Cat" couldn't have been my name for Choo-Choo because he was grey, just like all the other cartoon characters, just like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Deputy Dawg, Tennessee Tuxedo, Wally Gator, Magilla Gorilla,  Twinkles the Elephant, Lippy the Lion and Hardy-Har-Har, and all the rest of them.

Now the colors look deeply saturated and incredibly vibrant, as if I've stepped over the threshhold and into the land of Oz. Those colors were there all the time, of course, but hidden beneath the veil of early '60s drabness. The veil peeled back, these cartoons are incredibly enjoyable to watch again, though I am not sure why.

Maybe it's their sweet pointlessness. Hanna-Barbera, clever as they could be, were not Victor Hugo, after all. But there are  still moments that cause a little frisson of shock.

Top Cat is very New York, more New York than Woody Allen (and I've already explained how Choo-Choo, my fave character, was meant to be a Woody Allen impersonation, though frankly I like Marvin Kaplan's voice characterization better -  a little more adenoidal but friendlier, not so whiny). Its New Yorkness, if ever so simplified, is crucial to every plot line.

But at the beginning of more than one episode, there's an opening shot sweeping the ramshackle skyline of T. C.'s glorious domain, accompanied by a raffish bluesy upslide on the clarinet which is strongly evocative of the first few bars of Rhapsody in Blue. 

Holy God! Is THAT where that famous opening shot in Manhattan came from? Did Woody Allen really think he was being original?

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Is Woody Allen haunted?

This is very very weird, guys,

Cuz whenever I do see

A photo of Woody Allen

Standing beside Soon-Yi -

 He starts to look like someone else

Some other kind of joker:

We wonder why she isn't fooled,

Cuz Woody ain't no smoker.

And when he plays at Michael's Pub

to get his musical kicks,

He goes through lots of clarinets

Cuz he EATS the liquorice sticks.

Although he needs his analyst

To hear his angst, and moan

He locks his door, so Woody leaves

A message on the phone.

This must go back a long long way


Cuz it looks like Diane Keaton:


We don't know why the goat is there,


Or why it isn't bleatin'.

But this-here's weird, it's way, WAY weird

A science project skewed:

If these two fused like Brundlefly,

They'd be very smart: but screwed.

 

 

Fe fi fo WTF??

SOLVED: the mystery of Woody and Harold!

Really, I don't know where this photo came from. Maybe it's Woody's Uncle Hymen or something. But whoever this is, he seems to combine some of the best-known traits we've come to love in both of our favorite comedians. I will say, however, that the terror Harold expresses when his hair stands on end (which, by the way, it really did: they jolted him with a live wire for a few seconds, for as long as he could stand it) is somewhat muted in this shot. In fact, it looks like this person might be telling a long story about how his mother used to put the boiled chicken through the deflavorizing machine.

Woody Allen: Harold Lloyd's bastard son?

This one is so weird, I can hardly believe what I'm seeing in front of my gritchy little eyes.

I've been getting over some vicious bug I caught in San Francisco (where I left my heart, not to mention my wallet). It has its barbed hooks into my immune system, so that nearly four weeks later I feel almost as lousy as I did at the start.

So I haven't been blogging very much. But I stumbled on something that I think is both cool, and very very strange.

I don't know what movie this was taken from: Harold still has an intact right hand (which was blown apart in a freak accident in 1919), so it must be a very early one. Certainly not The Freshman, though that headgear doesn't look like any football helmet I ever saw.

The robot from Sleeper is wearing some sort of a colander on his head without too many holes in it, but still. The whiteface, the dark frames. . . even the tux, coz Harold was often dressed up in his movies.

Like this:

Can you imagine Woody Allen without his glasses? Ditto Harold, who called himself the Glass Character because the glasses were crucial to the development of his movie persona.

But the resemblance runs deeper than that.

If it weren't for his Gentile-ity, I'd say Harold looked like Woody's uncle or something. Who'd a thunk it?

Okayfine, let's acknowledge that from the very beginning Harold had leading-man good looks with a sort of Barrymore profile (and a chin that would later help Gregory Peck make it in Hollywood. Not to mention Jon Hamm.) But lots of girls and women have lusted after Woody, at least until the Mia Farrow debacle which kind of turned the whole thing upside-down.

               

There's something sort of disturbing about both these photos. Harold Lloyd telegraphed his emotions chiefly through his eyes, which were not obscured but magnified by those magic glasses. At times, it was as if you were looking right down into the depths of his soul, and it wasn't a very happy place. I won't even comment on Woody, who has made an industry of his existential despair.

Yes. On the set, there is a certain sense of being in charge which seems totally at odds with the nerdy characters they portray on film.

Is it such a stretch? Maybe not, though facially they aren't all that similar. I always thought Woody Allen resembled a pastrami sandwich on Russian black bread with mustard dripping out the sides. Lloyd is more like a Maserati. (It's my blog and I'll mix my metaphors if I want to.)

Speaking of hybrids. . .cross a red-headed Jew with a famous comic Gentile, and what do you get? Woody, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your Mom had a naughty little secret.

Harold Lloyd: I would do anything for love

Reading an excerpt from The Glass Character. Anything for love.

Human/ape hybrids: what they don't want you to know

Oh yes. Damn dirty apes. Why do humans have such a complicated relationship with them? We love them and fear them, for they represent our shadow side.

I just finished a post speculating on a theoretical and long-discussed human/chimp hybrid species called a "humanzee". The more I explored this topic, the queasier I got, because it just seems so bloody obvious to me that this is something that could be done: in which case, if it hasn't been done by now, it will be.

I watched a snippet on YouTube in which a primatologist insisted that there would never be a human/chimp hybrid, "not in the wild anyway", unless some "mad scientist" put one together, "and no one would ever fund such a project."

Indeed. My feeling is that she overestimates human morality and underestimates human greed.

I think that when faced with this ghastly possibility, denial is the usual response. Oh, surely not! It couldn't happen, could it? But with more and more disparate creatures being smashed together any-old-how, creatures with grotesque and demeaning names like liger and pizzly and wolphin, this potential horror becomes more possible and even more likely with every passing day. We seem to love to step into the God role and create brand new species, but as Mary Shelley tried to warn us, such hubris can be fatal.

It's a common belief that "we evolved from chimpanzees", and because I possess a little knowledge (which is always a dangerous thing) from taking anthropology courses, I know this isn't the case. Humans and chimps had a common ancestor in such remote antiquity that it's hard to pin down exactly where, when and what. (The name ramepithecus springs out at me for some reason, but as with so much in this field, new information is constantly cancelling the old).  At some point, a single species of primitive ape branched. Why it branched is anyone's guess. Why we continued to evolve into humans (though I sometimes believe we are devolving) is a mystery.

It's all a little grotesque. This ape-creature branches off, begins to walk upright (for bipedalism came long before the brain developed significantly), but remains incredibly primitive for uncounted millennia. The variations of proto-humans form a dense branching tangle which is hard to sort out, with numerous evolutionary dead ends. But accurate reconstruction of faces is now possible from the skulls anthropologists have collected in the field.

These are not just eerie: they should contain a warning. The following pictures may be disturbing to some viewers.

It's that squeamish combination of ape and human: and in this case, literally so. The australopithecines (given that strange and bulky name for reasons that confound me) roamed around and grunted and hunted and reproduced in so many different forms that it's hard to keep track of them all. Their big hairy faces and tiny skulls have disturbing human attributes, the mouth a little different (which made it possible for us to speak, along with a larynx set lower in the throat), and the eyes - well, I don't need to tell you about the eyes.

If we take a close look at these reconstructions, might we get a glimpse of what a humanzee might look like? This would resemble the "backbreeding" experiments the Nazis undertook during World War II, in which they tried to resurrect extinct species through selective breeding (with, as far as I know, no success. . .but hey, there's always room for another conspiracy theory).  If there were some way to fuse together and reunite the two species that split so long ago, might an australopithicine suddenly spring out at us again after thousands and thousands of years of extinction?

Well, what do you think? All I can tell you is. . .

If this guy knocks, don't answer the door. He's no Jehovah's Witness.

I think this is the origin of the term "lowbrow". Don't let him in either, not even to use the bathroom.

The gangsta humanzee (IQ about the same as a human one). Outfit by House of Capone.

The Indiana Jones of the hybrid set.

Wuzzup?

This fellow's a charmer. A sort of hybrid Maurice Chevalier.

Looks a little like E.T. But why so sad? In another 200,000 years or so, he'll be

destroying the planet.

All I can say about this one is: RUN!!!!!

Animal hybrids: monsters in the making

I know, I realize I shouldn't get into these things, these creepy things, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl and also make me realize that humanity has no idea what it's doing.

What awfuls me out about this short video isn't the mammoth size of this freak animal, nor even the casual way they putter around him in total denial that he could kill them with one swipe of his gigantic paw. No doubt they think he's "sweet", no doubt they think he's "tame", no doubt they call him one of their "babies" (an ever-present symptom of the malignant disease of keeping exotic animals as pets).

I want to write more about this whole mess later, when I get a chance to see a documentary called The Elephant in the Living Room. I saw the last half of it on National Geographic Channel and spent the half-hour with my mouth open.

The cases in this documentary weren't the worst, but they were bad enough. Keeping exotic animals as pets often goes completely unregulated, sometimes with disastrous results. It wasn't just the utter degradation of seeing glorious jungle animals kept in wire cages (with one male lion slowly, agonizingly electrocuted by faulty wiring on a freezer): it was the emotional abyss at the core of the people who were keeping these "babies". "He's like my son," claimed the lion's owner before the disaster,"one of my kids." Why is it I have this feeling his real children never tapped his heart in the same profound way?

All that unfathomable sickness aside, I soon got on to the topic of animal hybrids and was pretty astonished at what I found. Astonished, and freaked out. There has been an awful lot of tampering going on behind our backs: I didn't realize the well-known liger is three times the size of a normal lion, weighing close to a thousand pounds and resembling some prehistoric beast on an unimagineable scale. All this has been engineered, folks - we made it happen - and we made it happen without the slightest knowledge or concern that the resultant creature would be so grotesquely proportioned.

From the liger and the smaller tigon, often afflicted by dwarfism (not that such an insignificant thing will stop them from being bred), I fell into the dusky world of the wolf dog, which some people own for the same reason they'd get their bodies tattoed over every square inch: look, I'm a social rebel, I own a dog that's half-wolf! Look, I take a huge risk every time I take him out of the wire cage!

Does anyone stop to think what is going on in the mind and biology of an animal that has been created from spare parts, cobbled together in God-knows-what sort of way just on a human whim? Might there be some sort of internal conflict at the most fundamental level? Might that animal not know who he/she is? Or are those kinds of concerns not on the table, so long as we satisfy our "let's try this and see what happens" impulse?

Oh, but it got worse, a lot worse! Zebroids, including a zorse, a zonkey, and a zony. A cama, fusing together two species that are, well, close enough, aren't they? Except the llama genes seem to cancel out the camel's hump. But who needs a hump anyway?

When I came to the grolar or pizzly, I began to feel sick outright. But bears are bears, aren't they? Does it even matter if they're brown or white? Then why do I feel so nauseated? Never mind that these grotesque and ridiculous names insult their animal dignity and wouldn't even suit a toy. Hey, the leopon is just a spotty lion, right? And the wolphin. . .

I stop at the wolphin. I stop at the wolphin because I know whales and dolphins are so intelligent, and I honestly wonder what sort of genetic clash might make these sea geniuses go completely mad.


What set all this off - I mean, after the National Geographic documentary, which I have ordered on a DVD - was stumbling upon something that nearly made my hair stand on end: the humanzee. I didn't like to think that it was possible, that we've come that far, that we might just want to try this out for a lark or out of scientific curiosity: but haven't we been told over and over again how genetically close we are to chimps?  

This is a weird story that has been officially discounted, and now that I look at it a little more objectively I can see why. A couple claimed to have captured a baby chimp "in the wild" in 1960. Oliver had some pretty strange traits, the strangest being walking upright without the weird staggering gait of most chimps. He also had a strange-looking face, hairless and sort of flat, though hardly human. His ears creeped me out however, as they didn't look like chimp ears at all. They looked like human ears that had been grafted on.

Other chimps shunned Oliver, who seemed to prefer human company (and even mounted his owner's wife, causing them to eventually sell him). He smelled different, not like a normal chimp. These were all little question marks that added up to a very big one: did Oliver have human genes, and if so, how had this happened?

Back in 1960, the assumption was that some man had had sex with a female chimp "in the wild", the chimp had become pregnant, and little upright-walking, flat-faced Oliver was the result. He quickly became a sensation, dressed up in a tux and encouraged to smoke and drink for the crowd. This reflected the hilarity of the times upon witnessing animals "acting like humans". (Remember the Marquis Chimps on Ed Sullivan? I hope you don't.)

But a funny thing happened on the way to fame. People lost interest. The whole thing looked a little bogus. Oliver was sold again and again, each time falling a little deeper into the hole, and ending up in a small square wire cage in a laboratory.

Decades later, Oliver's original owner (perhaps wondering if there was more money to be made) tracked him down and eventually settled him into one of those chimp retirement homes. He didn't walk upright any more - too much trouble - and by this time he just looked like an old chimp, a very relieved old chimp, relieved he didn't have to wear a tux, smoke cigars and drink brandy for the crowd. He died only a couple of weeks ago, in fact, probably about 55 years old. Certainly he had served his time.

But it hangs in the air, doesn't it - weirdly, and sickeningly. Camas, pizzlys, zorses and wolphins. Why not humanzees? At the end of his life Oliver was genetically tested, and it was officially announced that he was "100% chimpanzee", so that was that. (If he hadn't been, what would they have said? The genie would be out of the bottle for sure.)  


But I had a funny feeling about it all. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago and, by God, now it is not only possible but bloody well likely we could do such a thing, "cross" a chimp with a human and come up with a whole new sort of species.

At the embryonic level, this has already been attempted and perhaps even accomplished. We want stem cells and new organs and all that sort of thing, necessary spare parts salvaged from throwaways, and we don't seem to care how much we ravage the natural balance in order to get them.

But an actual humanzee, a hybrid? Is it illegal? Would it be funded? Who cares. Money comes. It follows curiosity. I am beginning to get this sick feeling, this prickly feeling that we're going to see this, and sooner than we think. The trouble is, no one will know what to do with this wretched thing, this product of strands of DNA twisted horribly wrong:  kill it now? Watch it suffer, or, perhaps worse, thrive?

What will it look like? Can you see it in your mind? Will it maybe resemble its human parent: "Doesn't little Johnny look just like his Dad"? Will it walk upright like Oliver, or scooch around on its knuckles and swing from the trees?  Talk, perhaps? Have thoughts, opinions, needs? But who cares about needs at a time like this: who thinks of needs except OUR needs, our whims, our wretched inability to leave things alone and appreciate a fragile, unforgiveably damaged wild world that is committing suicide right in front of our eyes.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%