Nostalgia

I'm converting our last VHS tapes to DVD. The great majority are home videos, but I'm also converting a few of Melissa and my favourite shows - the stuff we had in the car for long rides. :)

I'm now working on The Grinch Grinches the Grinch from a very old tape with a dozen things on it, that my grandma gave us. The plot is - the Cat and the Hat makes the Grinch mad by blocking the road for his picnic. The Grinch responds by making inventions that screw up people's senses - creating dark and weird music and changing people's voices, etc. The Cat and the Hat reminds the Grinch of his mother, and the Grinch feels bad and makes things normal again. But he still steals Christmas later on... :)

The show reminds me of something I've thought about a few times - that cartoons used to have difficult words etc in them. Kids learned new words, or just got used to the idea that they wouldn't understand every word they came across. I thought it made things more interesting, and I don't remember anyone getting confused or upset about it. For example, in this episode, they use these words; acoustic, psychopathic, deplore, uncouth, acoustical, implausible, and more.

I also found a lot of things back then to be unintentionally frightening. For example, they just showed an advertisement for this electronic Simon Says game. It shows graffiti-people coming off a way in a dark alley to challenge a little boy to Simon Says. They play furiously, while the voice over says, "and if you lose, you get the razzz..." 'the razz' causes the loser to turn into a graffiti person and get trapped back on the wall with a scared look on his face. Let me tell you this - I had no desire to buy this game - the chance that it might actually imprison me in a wall as a chalk drawing was more than a little frightening. The same went for all the foods that they would advertise by showing the kids transforming when they ate them... :S I didn't want to be 'crunchitized' or turned into one of those silvery Capri Sun characters.

On the same DVD, I have the pilot episode for the planned (never made) Little Golden Book Land series, and trio of 5 minute cartoons from the 1950's - The Clockmaker's Dog, the First Flying Fish, and Happy Valley.