Nostalgia

I was talking with a friend this past weekend, and the subject of children's television came up.

"It all sucks," he lamented.  "There's nothing around any more that's the quality of what we had when we were growing up."

I certainly see what he was talking about.  In my opinion, the adventures of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are up there in the top ten funniest comedy writing ever (not to mention brilliant animation, incredible voice-overs, and impeccable comic timing).

Classic episodes like "Duck Amuck" and "The Rabbit of Seville" and "Bully for Bugs" still make me howl with laughter even though I've seen them dozens of times.

Another winner was Bullwinkle, which combined completely offbeat, goofy humor with sharp political satire.

The problem is, this kind of nostalgia only works if you've got a really selective memory.  There were some truly horrid children's shows when I was growing up.  One that sticks in my memory, because it not only was terrible but was, to put it bluntly, really fucking weird, was H. R. Pufnstuf.

If you've never seen this show, it's the adventures of an odious little twerp named Jimmy who has a magic talking flute, and somehow ends up in a land where the mayor is a green dinosaur with a Tennessee accent, and most of the characters are wearing full-body costumes supposed to be people, animals, or... pieces of furniture.  Oh, yeah, and the villain -- I shit you not -- is named "Witchiepoo," and is played by an actress named Billie Hayes who evidently was told by the director to pretend someone had made the Wicked Witch of the West drink six cups of espresso.  It also had a really creepy fake laugh-track, so you knew when something funny had happened, because heaven knows there was no other way to tell.  To get a sense of the overall effect, imagine what would have happened if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for Barney and Friends while tripping on acid.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this little excerpt:

The whole thing was dreamed up by Sid and Marty Krofft (the latter, sadly, died just a couple of weeks ago), who also came up with The Banana Splits, which was similar not only in its frenetic, seizure-inducing pacing, but in its psychedelic content:

So I'm not quite buying the "things were so much better back then" argument.  We naturally tend to look at our own past in a sentimental fashion, so a lot of our memories are colored by that.  (Although I do wonder how much of my own sense that the world is a weird and chaotic place was generated by watching shows like H. R. Pufnstuf when I was eight years old.)

On a more serious note, isn't this the same thing that drives the whole MAGA phenomenon?  "Make America Great Again," by returning to... when, exactly?  When was America so great that we'd jump in a time machine and head back there?  The prosperous Fifties -- when minorities could be legally denied their rights as citizens, and queer people couldn't be out without risking their lives?  The Roaring Twenties -- with its viciously-enforced class stratification and reckless economic policy that led directly to the Great Depression?

Even earlier?  No matter where you look, it was all a mixed bag -- as it is now.  There has never been a time that was unalloyed good, and there have been plenty of times in the past when it has been significantly worse than it is now.  Consider, for example, what it was like for your typical feudal peasant.  When we think of medieval times, we tend to picture lords and ladies in fancy dress dancing the galliard, but fail to consider that this represented maybe two percent of the population -- and the other ninety-eight percent spent their lives in backbreaking labor and lived in squalor.

So if I was offered a one-way trip in a time machine, I'd stay put, thank you very much.  If I were forced to choose, my criteria would be practical ones -- some time after the invention of indoor plumbing and general anesthesia.  Call me a stick in the mud, but I'm just fine right here.

And now, I need to take advantage of another wonderful modern invention, which is recorded music. Because if I don't do something to get that stupid fucking "Oranges Poranges" song out of my head, I'm going to lose my marbles.

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Nostalgia

I was talking with a friend this past weekend, and the subject of children's television came up.

"It all sucks," he lamented.  "There's nothing around any more that's the quality of what we had when we were growing up."

I certainly see what he was talking about.  In my opinion, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are up there in the top ten funniest comedy writing ever (not to mention brilliant animation, incredible voice-overs, and impeccable comic timing).

Classic episodes like "Duck Amuck" and "The Rabbit of Seville" and "Bully for Bugs" still make me howl with laughter even though I've seen them dozens of times.

Another winner was Bullwinkle, which combined completely offbeat, goofy humor with sharp political satire. 

The problem is, this kind of nostalgia only works if you've got a really selective memory.  There were some truly horrid children's shows when I was growing up.  One that sticks in my memory, because it not only was terrible but was, to put it bluntly, really fucking weird, was H. R. Pufnstuf.

If you've never seen this show, it's the adventures of an odious little twerp named Jimmy who has a magic talking flute, and somehow ends up in a land where the mayor is a green dinosaur with a Tennessee accent, and most of the characters are wearing full-body costumes supposed to be people, animals, or... pieces of furniture.  Oh, yeah, and the villain -- I shit you not -- is named "Witchiepoo."  It also had a really creepy fake laugh-track, so you knew when something funny had happened, because heaven knows there was no other way to tell.  To get a sense of the overall effect, imagine what would have happened if J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a script for Barney and Friends while tripping on acid.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this little excerpt:

The whole thing was dreamed up by Sid and Marty Kroft, who also came up with The Banana Splits, which was similar not only in its frenetic, seizure-inducing pacing, but in its psychedelic content:

So I'm not quite buying the "things were so much better back then" argument.  We naturally tend to look at our own past in a sentimental fashion, so a lot of our memories are colored by that.  (Although I do wonder how much of my own sense that the world is a weird and chaotic place was generated by watching shows like H. R. Pufnstuf when I was eight years old.)

On a more serious note, isn't this the same thing that drives the whole MAGA phenomenon?  "Make America Great Again," by returning to... when?  When was America so great that we'd jump in a time machine and head back there?  The prosperous Fifties -- when minorities could be legally denied their rights as citizens?  The Roaring Twenties -- with its class stratification and reckless economic policy that led directly to the Great Depression?

Even earlier?  No matter where you look, it was all a mixed bag -- as it is now.  There has never been a time that was unalloyed good, and there have been plenty of times in the past when it has been significantly worse than it is now.  Consider, for example, what it was like for your typical feudal peasant.  When we think of medieval times, we tend to picture lords and ladies in fancy dress dancing the galliard, but fail to consider that this represented maybe five percent of the population -- and the other ninety-five percent spent their lives in backbreaking labor and lived in squalor.

So if I was offered a one-way trip in a time machine, I'd stay put, thank you very much.  If I were forced to choose, my criteria would be practical ones -- some time after the invention of indoor plumbing and general anesthesia.  Call me a stick in the mud, but I'm just fine right here.

And now, I need to take advantage of another wonderful modern invention, which is recorded music. Because if I don't do something to get that stupid damn "Oranges Poranges" song out of my head, I'm going to lose my marbles.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Hugh Ross Williamson's Historical Enigmas.  Williamson takes some of the most baffling unsolved mysteries from British history -- the Princes in the Tower, the identity of Perkin Warbeck, the Man in the Iron Mask, the murder of Amy Robsart -- and applies the tools of logic and scholarship to an analysis of the primary documents, without descending into empty speculation.  The result is an engaging read about some of the most perplexing events that England ever saw.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Creating the past

Okay, this post may be a bit off-the-wall.   I'm perfectly willing to believe that what I'm going to say here might be entirely bogus.  That said, bear with me for a moment, and if you still think that by the end, feel free to let me have it right between the eyes.

A friend of mine told me an interesting anecdote a while back.  Her teenage son had lost his car keys, and she knew that his keys were on a worn blue carabiner.   She suddenly had this mental picture of them, sitting on a blanket or a bedsheet, and was convinced she'd seen them earlier that day.

"I think they're either in your bedroom or on the sofa or something," she told him.  "I know I saw them, on some kind of blanket or cloth or something, just recently."

So the two of them tore the house apart, looking on every such cloth surface they could find.  Oddly, the more they looked (without finding them) the more certain she became; she had a clear visual image of the keys on a tangled-up blanket.  Finally they gave up, but it was driving her crazy, because she knew she'd seen them earlier that day.

Well, when the son went out to his car (using a spare key), he found the key ring -- still hanging from the ignition, where he'd left it the night before.

My friend was baffled.   The visual image was so clear, so real, that she couldn't imagine that it wasn't true.   I asked her if she might have seen them a day or two ago on a bed or something, and simply misremembered when she'd seen them.

"No," she said. "I talked to my son about that afterward.   He said he almost never leaves his car keys anywhere but on the kitchen counter.   He was confused, himself, when I told him I'd seen them on a blanket, because he couldn't imagine how they'd have gotten there, but he said I sounded so sure.  And not only did I have a crystal-clear visual image of them, I was certain that it was that day that I'd seen them."

So, off and running my mind goes, and I say to her: "That makes me wonder how much of what we remember of our past actually happened."

And her eyes got really big, and she said, "I know.  I've been wondering the same thing.  Are our memories of our past real, or are they just stories we've told to ourselves long enough that they have become what we actually remember?"

The human memory is a remarkably plastic thing; well-controlled experiments have been performed which have conclusively demonstrated that memories can be implanted.  This was the subject of a final lab project from one of my AP Biology student groups some years ago.  The experiment was ostensibly to test people's memory of a variety of objects on a table, but the actual question had to do with implanted memories.  Subjects were given three minutes to study a set of twenty objects; then, during the test, one of the experimenters (who had before been hiding, out of sight) came out and took one object off the table, and then walked back out of the room with it.   A read-aloud questionnaire given afterwards asked (along with a number of irrelevant distractor questions), "What object did the girl in the blue shirt take off the table?"  Well, the girl had been wearing a red shirt, but not only did not one single subject mention that when the question was read, when they got to the last question -- "What color shirt was the girl wearing who came in and took an object?" -- almost every test subject answered "blue."  Further, when the subjects were told that the girl had been wearing a red shirt, several of them simply didn't believe it -- to the extent that one test subject demanded that the partner come back into the room, and when she appeared wearing a red shirt, he accused the pair of a ruse wherein the hidden partner had changed her blue shirt to red while she was out of the room the second time!

Of course, this has major implications for "leading the witness" in criminal trials -- given the right prompting, people can be induced to "remember" something that didn't actually happen.  While this is an interesting topic, what concerns me is more personal.  I wonder how many of my own life's memories are of events that didn't happen?  How much is implanted memory, formed of what my parents or friends told me happened, and which I then incorporated into my brain as if I actually remembered it myself?  What parts are memories of events which occurred but were remembered inaccurately, and then repeated so often that the inaccurate memory seems real?  What memories are an out-and-out fabrication on the part of my rather capricious brain?   I consider myself to be a fairly truthful person; but how can you not lie when an untruth has become part of your remembered past?

Worse yet, with no corroborative evidence, how could we ever tell factual memories from fictional ones?  As my friend's experience shows (however insignificant the actual event was), we can talk ourselves into believing, fervently, something which is entirely false.  When you remember your past, is your memory really a composite of truth, half-truth, and cleverly (if inadvertently) crafted fiction?