Pop Culture Kids Should Have #PCHH

Linda Holmes, Trey Graham, Glen Weldon, Mike Katzif

Last week's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from National Public Radio was primarily devoted to paying tribute to new mom Barrie Hardymon and to suggesting pop-culture entertainments for children. After the show's recommendations were elaborated on by posts both on that site and its Facebook page, I had lost track of the plethora of great suggestions (and hit myself on the head for failing, for example, to recommend the children's books of Marjorie Flack (1897-1958) and others). So what would be handier and quicker than to organize all those suggestions? Oh. Not so quick. But here's what I came up with by combining what was posted. To find out why folks came up with those specifics? Well, check out the show, its comments, and its Facebook page. 

TV

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993-1994)

Adventure Time (2010- )

Animaniacs (1993-1998)

Blue's Clues (with Steve) (1996-2002)

Dexter's Laboratory (1996-2003)

The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966)

Electric Company (1971-1977)

George of the Jungle (1967)

Jack's Big Music Show (2005-2007)

Kids' science shows, such as Beakman's World (1992-1997), Bill Nye The Science Guy (1993-1997) and, of course, Mr. Wizard [Watch Mr. Wizard (1951-1972) and Mr. Wizard's World (1983-1990)]

The Magic Garden (1972-1984)

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968-2001)

Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974)

The Muppet Show (1976-1980)

Pee-Wee's Playhouse (1986-1990)

Peter Pan starring Mary Martin (1960)

Phineas and Ferb (2007- )

Pinky and the Brain (1995-1998)

Rocky and Bullwinkle

Schoolhouse Rock (1973-1985, 1993-1999)

Sesame Street (1969- )

The Simpsons (1989- )

SpongeBob SquarePants (1999- )

Tiny Toon Adventures (1990-1992)

The Upside Down Show (2006-2007)

The Weird Al Show (1997)

Movies

Babe (1995, 89 min.)

Babe, Pig in the City (1998, 97 min.)

Fantasia (1940, 124 min.)

Fantasia/2000 (1999, 74 min.)

Hansel and Gretel (1954, 72 min., with Anna Russell as the witch)

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977, 74 min.)

The Muppet Movie (1979, 95 min.)

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985, 90 min.)

The Point (1971, 74 min.)

Films with the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, and Danny Kaye

Looney Tunes cartoons ["What's Opera, Doc?" (1957, 7 min.) especially]

Books

Art Baltazar (1968- ) Tiny Titans series

Doris Burn (1923- ) Andrew Henry's Meadow

Patricia Coombs (1926- ) Dorrie the Little Witch series

Susan Cooper (1935- ) [The Dark Is Rising series]

Bruce Coville (1950- ) Magic Shop series

Roald Dahl (1916-1990) [Note: While such of his children's books as Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and The Gremlins are well known, some of Dahl's output is for older readers]

Eleanor Davis (1983- ) The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook

Ul de Rico (1944- ) The Rainbow Goblins

Kate DiCamillo (1964- ) and Alison McGhee (1960- ) Bink and Gollie illustrated by Tony Fucile

"Franklin W. Dixon" the Hardy Boys series

Edward Eager (1911-1964) [the Magic series]

John D. Fitzgerald (1906-1988) Great Brain series

Louise Fitzhugh (1928-1974) Harriet the Spy

Wanda Gág (1893-1946) Nothing at All and Millions of Cats

René Goscinny (1926-1977) Asterix series illustrated by Albert Uderzo (1927- )

Theodore Gray (1964- ) The Elements

Ben Hatke Zita the Spacegirl series

Kevin Henkes (1960- ) including Chester's Way; Julius, Baby of the World; Lily's Big Day; and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse

Hergé (1907-1983) Tintin series

Norton Juster (1929- ) The Phantom Tollbooth illustrated by Jules Feiffer (1929- )

"Carolyn Keene" the Nancy Drew series

Judith Kerr (1923- ) Mog the Forgetful Cat

James Kochalka (1967- ) Peanutbutter & Jeremy; Pinky & Stinky; Monkey vs. Robot; and Johnny Boo

Gordon Korman (1963- ) [the Bruno and Boots series]

Roger Langridge (1967- ) The Muppet Show comic book

Joaquin Salvador Lavado ("Quino," 1932- ) Mafalda comic strip (1964-1973 in Argentina)

Munro Leaf (1905-1976) The Story of Ferdinand illustrated by Robert Lawson (1892-1957)

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) A Wrinkle in Time

Elizabeth Levy (1942- ) Something Queer Is Going On books

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Chronicles of Narnia

Mercer Mayer (1943- ) Professor Wormbog in Search for the Zipperump-a-Zoo and One Monster after Another

Jean Merrill (1923- ) The Pushcart Wars and The Toothpaste Millionaire

A.A. Milne (1882-1956) Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner

Barbara Park (1947- ) Junie B. Jones series illustrated by Denise Brunkus

Dav Pilkey (1966- ) Captain Underpants series

Peggy Rathmann (1953- ) Good Night Gorilla

Andy Runton Owly series

Lore Segal (1928- ) Tell Me a Mitzi

Ellen Raskin (1928-1984) The Westing Game

Anne K. Rose The Triumphs of Fuzzy Fogtop

Louis Sachar (1954- ) Sideways Stories from Wayside School series

John Scieszka (1954- ) Math Curse and any of his other collaborations with artist Lane Smith (1959- )

Maurice Sendak (1928- ) Nutshell Library and the TV musical Really Rosie (with Carole King) based on it

Dr. Seuss (1904-1991) The Lorax

Shel Silverstein (1930-1999) The Growing Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up [Note: As with Roald Dahl, be aware that not everything by Silverstein was aimed at a young audience.]

Christian Slade Korgi

Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002) Caps for Sale

Donald J. Sobol (1924- ) Encyclopedia Brown series

Kean Soo Jellaby

Art Spiegelman (1948- ) and Françoise Mouly (1955- ) editors of the Little Lit series

Raina Telgemeier (1977- ) Smile and comics adaptations of The Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M. Martin (1955- )

Jill Thompson (1966- ) Magic Trixie

Judith Viorst (1931- ) Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Landry Q. Walker (1971- ) Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade illustrated by Eric Jones

Bill Watterson (1958- ) Calvin and Hobbes collections

E.B. White (1899-1985) Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web

Audrey and Don Wood Quick as a Cricket

Jane Yolen (1939- ) Sleeping Ugly

"Records"

Free to Be … You and Me (record and book) (1972)

P.D.Q. Bach

Edvard Grieg "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

Arlo Guthrie Woody's 20 Grow Big Songs

Tom Lehrer "New Math," "The Elements," and his songs for The Electric Company

Peter, Paul and Mommy

Sergei Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf (Columbia recording directed by Stokowksi and narrated by Basil Rathbone or — on Disneyland backed with Dukas' The Sorceror's Apprentice — Sterling Holloway)

Leos Janacek, Rudolf Tesnohlidek, and Stanislav Lolek The Cunning Little Vixen (Spoiler note: The Vixen dies in the end: not the case in the original comic book.)

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine Into the Woods (Act I)

Camille Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals (Trey recommends the version in Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts; my favorite is the version with comedy narration by Ogden Nash)

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Ella Jenkins

Allan Sherman

Bob Newhart

Smothers Brothers

Bill Cosby

Shelley Berman

"Darktown Strutters Ball" and "Jelly Roll Blues" performed by The Boston Pops

Sweet Honey in the Rock

Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition

Spike Jones

Sufjan Stevens

Pete Seeger

They Might Be Giants kids' music

Simon and Garfunkel Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

Engelbert Humperdinck Hansel und Gretel

Motown: The Big Chill soundtrack

Henry Mancini "Baby Elephant Walk"

Johann Strauss II "Blue Danube Waltz"

Stevie Wonder

The Supremes

Iron & Wine's Kiss Each Other Clean

Raffi Baby Beluga

The Flirtations singing Fred Small's "Everything Possible"

Gian-Carlo Menotti's "The Telephone" 1949 (Columbia) version (Marilyn Cotlow and Frank Rogier), now maybe available on the Pearl label

Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One: The Early Years

Other

Wonderground Radio (online/HD station run by The Current, a Twin Cities station)

The Goon Show radio series (1951-1960)

Wii games, especially with a group

hooded animal towels

Jearl Walker The Flying Circus of Physics and website, books, etc.

Gyroscope

Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky ballets Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker (Pacific Northwest Ballet version of the latter recommended)

Have a crazy uncle who provides such pop culture as episodes of Mel Blanc's Story Lady radio show and Jack Benny's radio show.

"Expose them when they're too young."

Stay up on new technology: Develop animation skills via iPad and DSi, record yourself reading to your children.

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Pop Culture Happy Hour #PCHH Follow-Up: Gifts

In the first of National Public Radio's "Pop Culture Happy Hour" podcasts of 2011, there was something of a catch-up on gifts from the end of 2010. Listeners may have yearned for (to pretend to coin a phrase) outward and visible signs of inward and emotional delights. There was, for example, a question regarding the success of Stephen's gift of an arcade-size game of Frogger, ostensibly for his kids. Here for all to see is a photo of that success (and, fear not, all three had a chance to play). (You may also be canny enough to see that, while Frogger was A Main Attraction, other games were included in the device.)

I also had the opportunity to capture an image of the reaction of "Monkey See" blogger Linda Holmes to another gift. Let me put on the record here and now The Tale of the Sampler: Several months ago, an annoyed comment was posted regarding something or other on "Monkey See": "This is beneath NPR's dignity." I wrote to Linda that that was the sort of remark that cried out to be immortalized via a cross-stitched sampler. She responded that, if such a thing were to be created, she would be pleased to hang it. So I asked a craft-skilled friend - Kim Frankenhoff, wife of Comics Buyer's Guide Editor Brent Frankenhoff - whether she could provide such a sampler. She tackled the project with a will, coming up with a variety of fabrics, sizes, threads, font choices, and the like. We plotted it out together, she did all the work (including her own design of the fleur-de-lis ornaments), and I took the completed project to a wonderful local shop where the folks know how to frame such things. I must say that, judging from Linda's reaction, the project was unexpected. I love it when things work out!

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The Courtesy of Spoiler Warnings

I tried some time ago to track down who coined the term "Spoiler Warning" - with no success. My guess is that it caught on the the late 1970s, but that's just a guess. I know that Don and I grabbed it when we heard it and began to use it as a warning whenever we wanted to discuss a plot development that we knew some in our audience had yet to experience.

Linda Holmes' "The Spoiler Problem (Contains Spoilers)" essay on the Nov. 11, 2009, "Monkey See" page of the National Public Radio website - and the commentaries that accompanied it - may make up one of the best discussions of the problem of spoilers. As one of the brilliant recappers (as "Miss Alli") on the Television without Pity website a few years ago, Linda was freed from spoiler concerns in her recaps of The Amazing Race, Big Brother, Married by America, Survivor, The Apprentice, and The West Wing. Followers knew from the get-go that her delicious analyses took episodes from start to finish.

In effect, there was a big fat "Spoiler Warning" that went for the entire website. And that's my point: It is the civil thing to do to warn a listener or a viewer or a reader that the upcoming sentence or paragraph or essay is going to give away something that the listener or viewer or reader might want to have kept secret.

That is because: There will always be someone who hasn't seen or read an entertainment designed to be seen or read for the first time. Do we - should we - just say, "The hell with them"? When the American Film Institute came up with its "100 Years 100 Movies" list, I'd seen something like 96 of them. How many have you seen? As a grownup, you've certainly had the opportunity to view them all, but it's a safe bet that visitors to my website (who are more likely than the general population to be pop-culture savvy) are not going to score 100 out of 100. Nevertheless, from Citizen Kane (1941) to The Graduate (1967) to the last line of Some Like It Hot (1959), there are developments in many of them that are designed to be seen for the first time, rather than encountered as a conversational gambit or a cheap joke. (I have an intelligent friend who thought he knew what happened in Psycho (1960) but (as it turned out) hadn't seen it and was taken aback when he actually saw the film recently.)

Laura (1944) is one of my favorite films; I recommend it to people who like mystery movies and often lend them my copy. But the frickin' DVD packaging gives away a plot twist that doesn't occur until 46 minutes into the 88-minute film, so I always put the disc in a different shell and tell the friend not to read reviews before they watch the movie. (By the way, since I was 2 years old when the film was released, I didn't see it until more than a decade after its initial run; luckily, people weren't as determined in those days to show off that they had deep pop-culture knowledge, so I was able to see it for the first time without knowing that twist in advance. Whew!)

Because everything goes double for mysteries. The gag of people leaving the theater saying to those coming in, "The butler did it," was printed long ago - but the tendency remains. Agatha Christie mysteries, for example, can often be revealed in a sentence: hardly, then, bonus points for those who spill the proverbial beans. Whether it's Murder on the Orient Express (novel in 1934, film in 1974), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (novel in 1926), or And Then There Were None (novel in 1939, film in 1945), it's simply impolite to give away the solution. Yes, even when the conclusion (And Then There Were None) differs between print and screen.

That doesn't mean you can't talk or write about it. It just means you need to warn your audience, so those who choose to do so can skip it. Mental Floss ran an informative article on Christie recently, and it included a discussion of Ackroyd. All it had to do was run a vivid text bar as the discussion began, a text bar that told readers that the article would reveal the solution to that mystery. Simple. Courteous.

People who Tweet comments along the lines of, "I just saw the season ender on SHOW X and was surprised when THE HERO turned out to be THE VILLAIN"? Well, I won't be following those Tweets any longer.

That doesn't mean it's always simple. Linda Holmes, for example, is faced with an endless, twisting, annoying complication, no matter what the subject of the pop-culture blog may be. Some may even be annoyed at something as basic as that a sequel to something is in the works. But, for the rest of us, I think we can handle things well by following a basic two-point guideline:

1) If people have seen something, you don't need to reveal it; if people haven't seen something, you shouldn't reveal it.

2) If you can't resist discussing an entertainment's surprises, clearly mark that discussion in advance with a "Spoiler Warning" notice.

Is that so hard? It's been our policy at Comics Buyer's Guide for 27 years, and it seems to have worked without many glitches.

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Abandoning Condescension in 2010

Yesterday evening, son Stephen called my attention to a brilliant essay on National Public Radio's Monkey See blog. That it is brilliant didn't surprise me; the writer is wordsmith Linda Holmes, whose commentaries have always illuminated their topics while providing delicious (and quotable) phrasing.

The essay opens,

"Familiarity breeds contempt."

Perhaps it is this little saying, or some variation of it, that convinces people that disdain and discernment are the same thing: that the more things you roll your eyes at, the smarter you must be.

Those of us who have spent many hours in following a variety of fields of popular culture have surely run across the phenomenon. "I don't own an idiot box." (I suddenly realize that I haven't recently heard that cliche; at least that phrasing seems to have gone out of favor, though the sneer remains in what amounts to the same thing.) And in comics? Even as the term "graphic novel" actually intimidates some, the humble "comic book" still hasn't achieved the same respect - though they're synonyms.

In any case, do check out Linda's "Let's Resolve" - and join us all in the resolution.

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Monkey See is my "Must-See" NPR blog

Since it began 11 months ago, Monkey See has become my favorite blog on the favorite-blogs-filled National Public Radio website -- and one of my two favorite blogs, period. (The other is Mark Evanier's newsfromme, packed with insights, hilarity, and information that's mostly about things I care about. But I digress, though it must be clear from this that popular culture is one of my ongoing affections.)

To quote its own information, Monkey See aspires "to be a haven for the geek and a translator for the confused, and to carve out a space where both longtime residents and curious visitors can comfortably roam the pop-culture landscape." It is presided over by Linda Holmes, whom I first encountered on Television without Pity, where her remarks (as "Miss Alli") actually kept me following The Amazing Race for a season or two, despite my lack of interest in "reality TV."

Monkey See is a spot that keeps me informed about events at which I could turn out to be entertained -- by its commentary as well as by the events themselves.

Yesterday, for example, there was an intro to Bravo's Top Chef Masters. Such is Linda's skill that she managed to provide a hook that explained the show, evaluated the differences between it and "Top Chef Classic," and concluded with the reason to see the episode in question. Succinct. Entertaining. Enlightening. Even for someone who has never watched Top Chef.

So it is that Monkey See rambles through the forest of pop culture, blazing a trail so that members of its expedition can keep up to date, even on aspects of entertainment to which they're not personally devoted. They provided a link to a Harry Potter quiz that's one of the best current promos I've seen. (I scored 31 out of 35 and would have scored 32, had my screen display made me more aware of precisely which of the films I was supposed to respond to.)

And, as host, Linda presides over other insightful commentators on today's entertainment. For example, Glen Weldon's comic-book commentaries are something I always find intriguing. A recent post, for example, was "Let There Be Bike Shorts: A Profile in Comics-Geek Courage." It's about DC Editor Matt Idelson and Supergirl, it was posted July 1, and it already has 37 comments. Rightly so.

So the link to "Monkey See" on my home page is no accident. It's there to remind me not to miss checking its most recent postings, because I don't want to be out of the pop-culture loop. Do you?

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