Dododreams

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.

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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.

This morning as I was monkeying around on the computer I can hear my daughters’ comments as they watch this film:”This is my favorite one!” “I love this one!” *singing* “It’s Styro, Styro the dog….” “I know I keep saying this one’s my favorite but this one is really my favorite!” It struck me as so odd to realize this video may well be their version of Peter, Please It’s Pancakes. Maybe in forty years they’ll be talking on the phone to each other and mention with nostalgia in their voices the little train that could or the dancing pencils. Very odd and somehow poignant.

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A different cover but this is the same tape. Still pics from some of the segments:

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 9:23 am and is filed under Link, Personal, Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.