Have you ever had a childhood memory so dim and sparse that you wondered if you had dreamed it? I’ve had a few. Sometimes I’ll encounter something that cracks such a memory open.
In college twenty years ago, building my collection of Paul McCartney vinyl I bought a 45 of the song Another Day. I didn’t think I knew the song. But when I played the record I was suddenly three years old, at breakfast in my mother’s kitchen. I sat at the table, a K-Mart special in dark simulated woodgrain laminate with a brown plastic edge and brown steel tubes for legs. My high-backed chair was covered in vinyl with a loud green floral pattern. The fridge stood in the corner, its long chrome door handle like a giant upside-down T. A white plastic table radio sat atop the fridge, tuned to a station that played this song every morning while it was a hit. Transported, I played the song over and over that college afternoon, enjoying the remembered connection.
While Another Day had slipped entirely from memory, a particular cartoon sea serpent had not. While I couldn’t remember much about the cartoon, I clearly remembered his lisp: Theethil the Thee-Thick Thea Therpent. So I was excited to find this clip of the show’s open on YouTube the other day:
My brother was over the other day and I showed this to him. “Of course I remember it,” he said. “You wouldn’t quit saying ‘Nyah-ah-ahh’ over and over again! You did it for years! I wanted to pummel you!” I felt my brain pop with the recalled memory. It was the villain character’s signature laugh! I adopted it as my own until I was 9 or 10! How could I forget? Here’s an entire Beany and Cecil cartoon with plenty of Dishonest John nyah-ah-ahhing:
Beany and Cecil were created by Bob Clampett, who animated the craziest Warner Brothers cartoons, including Porky in Wackyland. (Side trip: The blog of John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, deconstructs several of Clampett’s WB cartoons and reveals the man’s genius.) Clampett created Beany and Cecil as puppets, Cecil just a sock with eyes glued on. In 1949, these puppets became a huge hit on TV in Los Angeles. Albert Einstein is said to have been a fan. In 1959, Clampett animated these characters for theatrical cartoons in foreign markets. In 1962, ABC started running the cartoons in prime time and got Clampett to make more of them. The cartoons ran on ABC until 1967 and in syndication through the early 1970s.
I learned recently from the FuzzyMemories forum that the BJ and the Dirty Dragon Show on WFLD in Chicago showed Beany and Cecil cartoons, and that’s where I must have watched them. The Dirty Dragon finished his run on WFLD in July, 1973, which was about six months after we got cable and could have seen the show. Moreover, it was on at noon, meaning we could watch only during the summer. So after watching Beany and Cecil cartoons for maybe four weeks that summer, I then annoyed my brother for four years repeating Dishonest John’s laugh.
Righteous.