Peter, please it’s CGI
As seems to be a practice in my writing, I am tying two different topics together.
The first is a 45 rpm record that we had when I was a kid. Peter, Please It’s Pancakes was played and played and overplayed to the point that even today I can sing the notably lame refrain:
Peter, please it’s pancakes
Hurry if you can
Peter, please it’s pancakes
The cakes are in the pan.
(By the way, Peter was an idiot who had to run up and down stairs about fifty times to get properly dressed before he could eat those pancakes. As a parent I would have packed in the effort and let the kid starve. He may have had a verse for each sock, in fact.)
And that’s the end of Part 1.
Part 2 begins with this: many years ago I used to regularly go to movies down at the Uptown Theatre. There was something I really looked forward to: several groups that would put together a reel of animation shorts and tour it around annually, including the Festival of Animation, the International Tournee’ of Animation and Spike & Mike’s Twisted a couple times (before I decided those were just a little too twisted for my taste.) As time went on more and more segments were from the newly burgeoning computer animation field. I was literally awestruck — I still distinctly remember seeing several of Pixar’s early efforts, Luxo Junior, Knick-Knack and Big Red. Awestruck. They were so COOL!As I had a VHS player by then, I’d buy tapes of these shows, accumulating quite a few over the years. This practice continued when tapes dedicated to computer animation became available. In fact, probably half of my remaining tapes are these old compilations. One of them is Imaginaria.

A different cover but this is the same tape.

March 5th, 2011 at 1:57 am
I had this record. I remember that Peter would come “Bumpety Clumpety” down the stairs! And “We’ll eat them by and by”