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An age gone past
Jun. 26th, 2009 06:53 pmI've been delving into the DVDs converted from my parents' video archives again after a while away from them - the process in getting them up to Youtube is unimaginably roundabout, having to rip them from the DVD in one program, convert them to a usable format in another, then use iMovie to split them into uploadable segments (who said Macs were easy?), so I can only do a few at a time before I get utterly fed up for a while.
What's sticking out to me most is the sheer amount of things that I grew up with that nobody would ever be allowed to get away with today. One of the relics on a cartoons tape was an episode of the Blue Racer, which in a sort of Road Runnerish fashion showed the repeated attempts of a supersonic blue snake to catch a lost Japanese beetle, complete with accent, slit-eyes and wonky teeth.
Pinny's House is something that gets mixed reactions whenever I show it to anyone - some people are absolutely horrified by it and some see no problem with it at all. I had just remembered it as a charmingly stylized story, in that way that Oliver Postgate used to manage so effortlessly, and while it doesn't contain any absurdly exaggerated racial stereotyping like the above cartoon did, I couldn't help noticing now that Victor is the smallest and also... blackface-est wooden sailor in the world.
And Mr Boom had the distinction of being the only programme that I remember from that era that I found a bit weird even at the time. This one was home-grown in Scotland, and was a pre-school storytelling series, hosted by a one-man band with a lampshade on his head who lived on the Moon. And the smiley blue ping-pong ball in the television screen with the voice that's exactly halfway between a Dalek and one of the turrets from Portal.
What's sticking out to me most is the sheer amount of things that I grew up with that nobody would ever be allowed to get away with today. One of the relics on a cartoons tape was an episode of the Blue Racer, which in a sort of Road Runnerish fashion showed the repeated attempts of a supersonic blue snake to catch a lost Japanese beetle, complete with accent, slit-eyes and wonky teeth.
Pinny's House is something that gets mixed reactions whenever I show it to anyone - some people are absolutely horrified by it and some see no problem with it at all. I had just remembered it as a charmingly stylized story, in that way that Oliver Postgate used to manage so effortlessly, and while it doesn't contain any absurdly exaggerated racial stereotyping like the above cartoon did, I couldn't help noticing now that Victor is the smallest and also... blackface-est wooden sailor in the world.
And Mr Boom had the distinction of being the only programme that I remember from that era that I found a bit weird even at the time. This one was home-grown in Scotland, and was a pre-school storytelling series, hosted by a one-man band with a lampshade on his head who lived on the Moon. And the smiley blue ping-pong ball in the television screen with the voice that's exactly halfway between a Dalek and one of the turrets from Portal.
