Before Bugs…
Before Mickey…
There was Felix.
One of the first, modern, media characters. There were even hit songs written about him.
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That theme song is Big Star’s ‘In The Street’
The actual track played in the show is a cover by Cheap Trick (maybe this one?)
I’ll be 63 soon and I remember all the words to this theme song from my childhood. I concur - it is nearly perfect. As well, the whole narrative of Felix the Cat is a treasure-trove of subversion and social commentary.
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Thanks, Sunshine!
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I have similar feelings about the intro to The Drew Carey Show
Both of them
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I take it back - I once laughed so much my sides ached, after I was in that accident and hurt my ribs.
I actually had some of the original early 1900s Oz books from my grandmother’s childhood. There was also one that clearly was anti-suffragist with a revolution by women that fizzled out in a few days, because of course it did. But all was forgiven and women went back to “being women” and all was right again with Oz.
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I definitely remember the female uprising book (The Land of Oz) and how the women promised to “be good” and get married like good girls should or some ridiculous thing.
Interestingly, that same book has a startlingly progressive (for the time) bit at the end about gender. Tip, the boy hero of the book, is revealed to be the lost princess of Oz, disguised as a boy to hide her. Glinda does a magic sex-change spell to transform Tip into Ozma, and she assures her friends that she feels like she’s back to being her true self, but that she doesn’t want to be treated any differently, even though she’s a girl now, and they’re all totally fine with it. This made a big impression on me at age 8.
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And dangerous, too. If a laughing kid’s sides started aching, not from laughing, but from something life threatening, then, well, you get the picture.
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Watched an episode of Felix. It was the one that introduced The Master Cylinder, “The King of the Moon.”
A pretty decent kiddy cartoon, really. A couple of clever touches, like The Professor running past a Montgolfier Brothers balloon. We learn that The Master Cylinder was a student of The Professor who kept blowing himself up in chemistry class, but his brain wasn’t so easy to destroy. So he’s a cyborg! Also interesting is that The Professor really grudgingly rescues Felix along with his nephew.
This is why the cross-dressing Tip is one of the major characters in the Skin Horse webcomic, along with a talking dog, a Patchwork (zombie) girl, a spherical wind-up robot, and various other Oz allusions. (I don’t think we’ve ever seen a living scarecrow, though.) By Shaenon Garrity - who also created Narbonic - along with Jeff Wells.
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