Sunday, September 10, 2006

Mañana

As you know if you hang around this page, I try to pick out interesting video clips to link to, usually one per day. This takes less time than you'd think but last night, as I went searching for something to post tomorrow, it took an unusually long time. I felt that on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I ought to put up something that said something important about that day.

There are thousands of video clips on the Internet about the September 11 tragedies. Many of them are long, intense lectures by people who believe they've proven (but haven't) that the "official" version of what occurred that day is a sham. The twin towers could not possibly have collapsed the way we were told they'd collapsed...and of course, no plane hit the Pentagon. Of all that, they are sure. I am a big believer in the expectation that the government will shamelessly lie to us — any regime of the government and especially the current one — but in this case, I have seen no evidence that makes me suspicious that what most people think happened that day is not pretty much what happened that day.

So I won't be linking to any of those videos and besides, they're all real long and extremely boring.

There are also thousands of "tribute" videos people have made...some clumsily titled as "tributes to 9/11" by folks who don't mean to celebrate what occurred on that day. Most consist of stills and video clips edited against a properly somber record...often "Only Time" by Enya. (The first one I recall seeing online a little less than five years ago was this one. It's still quite moving and whoever assembled it did a helluva job.)

I watched a few of them last night and found myself getting alternately sad and angry. The sad part needs no explanation but perhaps the angry part does. The more I am reminded of the pain of that day, the more I resent the folks who've tried to manipulate its memory. No event in my lifetime (I'm 54) brought Americans together the way our shared suffering brought us together that day. It is appalling not only that this unity has been lost but that the emotions of 9/11 have been reconfigured to demonize one another. The worst kind of partisans have claimed 9/11 as a club to use against the other side. The same thing has happened with the Iraq War: If you don't see things my way and vote for my side, you must be objectively pro-terrorist, plus you hate America and pray for our troops to be killed.

That dung has always bothered me, but it never quite bothered me as much as it did last night when I was watching footage of the burning towers, still shots of innocent human beings plunging to their deaths and the pained agony of onlookers and family members. I kept thinking, "How did we get from this to where we are now?" I finally had to stop watching 9/11 videos and cleanse my video palate with stuff like this.

So I haven't picked out a video for tomorrow. If you have any nominations, let me have them...though I can't guarantee I'll be able to watch them all. It really depresses me that, as I read about this Path to 9/11 movie on ABC, some people seem to be trying to note the five year anniversary of that awful disaster by seeing how much blame they can pin on their political opponents.

• Posted at 10:17 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Yesterday, we brought you the opening to the 1963 Casper cartoon show. Here's the ending, which is a bit sad until the last few bars of music. It's nowhere near as sad as the closing credits of the Linus the Lionhearted Show but it's still a bit depressing. Then again, the whole Casper franchise is about a dead child so maybe depressing is appropriate.

Something dawned on me as I watched this. The premise of the Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons was always that poor little Casper just wanted to have a friend...but he didn't fit in with the ghosts and witches of his world, and he scared away almost everyone he encountered in "our" world. Usually, at the end of each cartoon, he'd find someone who liked being around him...and then the next cartoon, he'd be right back to moping about, trying to find someone who wouldn't spot him, do a bad Tex Avery "take" and run screaming into the background painting.

Okay, that was the premise when they made a couple of theatrical cartoons per year. When he got into the comic books, he started making friends left and right: Wendy, Spooky, Nightmare, etc. Someone at Harvey Comics — and I have to presume this was a conscious thought — decided that the idea of Casper scaring away all potential friends would get monotonous. It would also make for a pretty depressing comic book...so they pulled that idea way back. Casper in the comics sometimes scared people but mostly, the stories were about a kid who was different from all the rest. Since we all feel different from everyone else when we're kids, there was a nice bit of reader identification going on there. My friends who had older siblings (I was an only child) all identified madly with the way Casper was picked on by The Ghostly Trio...and of course, adding in all those friends as a supporting cast created plot possibilities, to say nothing of spin-off comics.

All in all, it was a nice bit of retooling an animated property for the comic book page. And it sure was successful for a couple of decades there.

Before we roll the clip, I should mention: I said when I posted the opening that Norma McMillan was the voice of Davey on the kids' show, Davey and Goliath. Anthony Tollin reminds me that she was a voice of Davey and that Dick Beals — who's mentioned more often on this site than Donald Rumsfeld — was the original voice. Dick Beals would also make a much better Secretary of Defense than Donald Rumsfeld but that's beside the point.

• Posted at 2:07 AM · LINK