cartoon nostalgia

Okay, dammit. I wrote a whole new entry this morning before I had to get ready for work and when I went to submit it, the stupid thing got all chomped up in the server. CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP and like that all of my eloquence was gone forever. So here’s the new, less eloquent version of it:

This weekend we got an urge to see Puff, The Magic Dragon. We used to have it taped on a VHS tape with a bunch of other cartoons. But then at some point in the past several years the tape got separated from the spool and then we couldn’t watch it anymore. Until now.

Ginny took the casing apart and reattached the tape to the spool and voila! we were able to watch Puff!

In one sense, watching it and singing along to all the songs for the first time in years was this wonderful, pure nostalgic childhood joy. But then we also had to watch it as adults, playing Spot the Drug Reference and tearing other aspects of the poor cartoon to shreds. Such as the following:

– Why does Puff have a vest drawn on only the front half of his body? And when he goes to put something in or take something from his pocket, he just kind of pulls out a flap of skin and sticks the object in there. Isn’t that weird?

– If Very Long John really can make a bunch of different kinds of pie, do you think he made them a POT PIE before they left for Honalee?

– When Puff was pulling all that stuff out of his “pockets,” we were like hemp! Rolling papers! Wax? What’s the wax for?

– Also, in the shots of the former Honalee, the pretty one, there’s this suspicious-looking brown pile with eyes dancing around in the midground. Maybe it’s mud, but how jolly can mud really be? We think it’s a big steaming pile of unicorn poop.

While watching it, we kept making marijuana jokes and at one point Sammi was like “damn, I need some Cheetos.”

There are other cartoons on this tape, most notably The Chipmunk Adventure. That is some hardcore childhood nostalgia right there. We used to watch that movie all the time. ALL the freaking time. Every weekend when my friend Holly and I would have sleepovers, we’d watch it and act out the plot. I always got to be Brittany Chipette because I was the coolest, and also because I was blonde and Holly had dark hair so she had to be Jeanette.

The BEST part of the whole movie is the showstopping musical number “Girls of Rock & Roll.” You know, when they’re in the Greek ruins and Dave has just figured out they’re all there and the boys and girls have just stopped their balloons in the same place and they have a sing-off? And then at the end when they’re leaving they stand on the sides of the hot-air balloon basket and hang onto the ropes and keep singing? That was the best.

Seriously, I’m so glad that tape is fixed.