Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/master-cylinder-things-i-was.html
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I can’t bring myself to watch a Hong Kong Phooey clip. In my heart I know it’s going to be absurdly racist and I’d rather keep those old vague memories happy.
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This gave me a twinge of panic. Not because Master Cylinder was the first evil cartoon villain for me, but it was the first evil automotive villain.
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The Master Cylinder was quite sinister for a young child, but the Felix writers must have been howling with laughter when they came up with him.
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I always found Babar the elephant to be particularly creepy and vaguely sinister. Everything depicted in those books had a sort of nightmarish quality to them. It confused me that I was supposed to like it.
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Great. Now I want a Master Cylinder figure with an lcd for the eyes.
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@jlw, when I saw “Master Cylinder” in the title I knew this was gonna one of your posts… but that was because I thought it’d be about the master cylinder in one of your vehicles!
Ironically, Hong Kong Phooey allegedly had a “a car that just won’t stop” 
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I can completely see how creepy a big evil cylinder would be to a little kid, yikes!
The scariest thing to me was one of the bad guys on the Spider-Man segment of The Electric Company – a guy named Dr. Fright whose face was so ugly he covered it with a hat and would show it to people to freeze them in terror. I was so scared of seeing his face I made my parents cover the TV with a blanket.
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Somehow, I never watched Felix when I was a kid… but the number of times I’ve paid for master cylinder as an adult? The stuff of nightmares.
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Holy crow! I tried to get my family to name our dog “Master Cylinder” in the early 80s, to no avail (they named her “Buffy” instead). I haven’t thought about this character in years!
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As a SMALL child:
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The picture of a flourishing, Hawaiian coral reef (in our encyclopedia). I could look at it (still, with some dread of its eerie buzz), but I always failed when daring myself to simply touch the picture.
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Dark, winding staircases and damp, granite-walled basements.
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Having dreams involving 1930s cartoon characters and settings.
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The occasional appearance of my baby-sister’s ‘Suzy Q’ doll (walking and staring) in my dreams. (Once, I got a dream 3 and 4 mashup.)
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A child in my extended family had nightmares about Swiper the Fox. In the dream they were saying, “Swiper no swiping!” over and over, but swiper would not stop swiping!
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Same here. The name was especially clever.
(The deus ex machina solution at 5:08 [expected of cartoons back then] was worthy of George Lucas!)
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Huh, never saw a Felix cartoon. At least not one in color.
I thought it was a frisky dingo reference
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For me, it was the Muni Mula men from the Ruff 'n Ready cartoons.
I recall a black and white Felix cartoon… would have been about 1965.
Felix was having trouble setting up a beach chair, and the way it was animated and choreographed, that beach chair came across as positively sinister to my young mind.
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0:13 Ripley handling the Alien
0:22 The Death Star
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I’m just going to leave this here:
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