A post on the super-nifty blog Neato Coolville got to one of my weak spots: The Banana Splits. And it reminded me of some other rare collectible Banana Splits stuff I had seen.
Here’s Neato Coolville’s Window Clings of Fleegle and Bingo:
And here’s something really wild that I’ve never seen before. The Banana Splits done up as the band KISS. I have no idea who made it or where it came from. This was on an ebay auction that another (at-the-moment-defunct) blog found.
No celebration of cheesy Irishness is complete without Lucky the Leprechaun:
The first Lucky Charms commercial
This is the very first commercial for Lucky Charms. This was done by Bill Melendez — before he started his own studio to produce the Peanuts specials, he did a lot of work on animated commercials. This commercial is from about 1964.
Kites are fun!
I love this one because it reminds me of Kites Are Fun, by the Free Design:
Because the POWER of Luie Luie’s liner notes is just too overwhelming to the average unsuspecting Junkyard Clubhouse frequenter … we have DISTILLED its power into digestable, bite-sized quotes of WISDOM that will change DAILY. And change you daily.
Yes, every day at midnight the Luie-matic 5000 will pick a random sentence from off the back cover of the “Creator of TOUCHY” album and serve it up in a little box on the left-hand sidebar on JYC. Included with the quote is the paragraph and sentence number where the quote appears, if you’d like to see it in context. Not that you’d need to, because just about every sentence is, in and of itself, unfiltered magical brilliance.
We hope that by displaying a random quote daily, you’ll be seduced slowly by these affirmative truisms that remind you that the Power of Touch and the Power of Music is indeed powerful power. If you think you can handle it check out the entire transcription. You’ll be glad you did. Otherwise, check our sidebar for this little daily gift.
Ze King! Ze Premier! Then all the ministers!
Army! Navy! Department Sanitaire! …
This Harveytoon cartoon isn’t really outstanding in any particular way, but it’s one I remembered as a kid I’ve wanted to see again for probably the last 20 years. I’ve searched for it several times before, and while it’s mentioned in several places in the web, I’ve only come across an actual video of it very recently! It’s beloved by many, but probably totally unknown to most. Here’s the description from IMDB’s entry for it, see if it shakes loose any memories:
A French shopkeeper’s life is disrupted by a daily parade. The parade consists of “ze king, ze premier, all ze lords and ministers, army, navy, department sanitaire.” When the “department sanitaire” hits a pothole, all the garbage gets dumped onto the street in front of his store.
One of my more prized possessions is this LP. Meet Luie Luie. Luie Luie recorded this album in 1971 — he composed, arranged and played all the music on this album. Luie Luie, you see, is a dynamo.
He hoped to spur a new dance craze, called the Touchy. As Luie Luie explains in one of several opening monologues, Touchy songs all start with a “wiiiiiild trumpet introduction,” signalling that it is time to start dancing the Touchy. To dance the Touchy, you dance however you want, as long as you are touching your partner. Any body part will do: nose-to-nose, elbow-to-elbow, toe-to-bellybutton, “or what have you.”
I was hepped to Luie Luie thanks to Hanford and his copy of Songs in the Key of Z, which has the first song from this album, “El Touchy”:
Click play to hear El Touchy, and be forever changed
Once I heard it, I knew I had to track down this album. It wasn’t easy, but it was well worth it — surprisingly, not just for the songs, but for the astounding text on the back of the album. Just when I thought the writing had reached the apex of absurdity, bang! — it got weirder. And weirder. The internet’s many Chuck Norris biographers could learn a thing or two from the back of this album. When I die, I want my eulogy to simply be someone reading the back of this album, replacing “Luie Luie” with “Humuhumu.”
Luie Luie is never one to disappoint his audience, and to celebrate his inimitable spirit, I offer for you here, today, in its entirety, the actual liner notes from this album, formatted as close to the original as I could muster. Enjoy.
The Amen Break is the Wilhelm Scream of modern music: these six little seconds of drum solo have been sampled — in both whole form and in Frankenstein-esque reconstructions — so often that it has practically become an instrument in itself. In 2004, Nate Harrison created an 18-minute documentary about the history of the use of this ubiquitous drum break. It’s a bit long, but at least listen to the first couple of minutes, so you can hear the break, say “oh yeah! I know that!,” and learn where it originally came from. The whole piece is interesting, though; toward the end, the focus turns to the implications of sampling and copyright laws on creative expression and capitalism. I first found it on BoingBoing a year ago, but was reminded of it today when Cynical-C posted it.
Scissor Sisters’ “She’s My Man” video, directed by Nagi Noda
This amazing video for Scissor Sisters’ “She’s My Man” was done all in one take — the camera didn’t move, and the speed of the film was not altered. The movement and effects in the video are made possible by black-clad kuroko stagehands. The video was directed by Nagi Noda, who was also responsible for that disturbing exercising poodles video.
There’s a slightly higher-quality version at the Scissor Sisters website, but it’s mired in Flash, so I can’t link directly to it. Bah.
