Paul Simon’s Love Me Like a Rock was playing on the store’s system.
She loves me! She loves me!
She gets down on her knees and hugs me!
I suddenly realize exactly which body part is being hugged! Like a rock indeed, Mr. Simon.
He’s singing about his mother, Annie.
This. She’s down on her knees because he “was a little boy”.
Size isn’t important.
Allegedly
It’s even worse when you consider the distinctly unsubtle names he gave some of the villains of the piece: O’Deadly Darkseid, Granny Goodness, Gilotina, Lashina, Mokkari, Stompa and Virman Vundabar.
That’s one nice thing about having gotten into comics in the late 1980s: the writers had (mostly) gotten past the stupid, obvious names by that time.
But speaking of Granny Goodness … there was a scene in an issue of one of the late '80s-early-'90s Justice League titles (when the Justice League was going through its “comic relief” phase), where the intergalactic salesman/huckster, “Manga Khan” met Granny for the first time, and was attempting to sell her some product.
Keep in mind that Granny Goodness was an immense, ugly, bad-tempered old lady.
Manga Khan started his sales pitch by laying on the flattery with a shovel. “Why, Granny Goodness! I have heard tales of your beauty, but I never imagined that …”
At which point Granny cut him off with, “CAN THE EYEWASH, MISTER!”
I was about 22 or 23 when I read that scene. The only other time I’d heard the word “eyewash” was in a few episodes of the 1970s kid’s TV show, “H. R. Puffenstuf”, way back when I was a little kid. The big villain in that show had this big eyeball thing that he’d use to spy on the heroes, and periodically his lackeys would come in to clean it, using “eyewash” to get the job done.
So that Justice League comic suddenly explained to me the subtle joke from a 2-decade-old kid’s TV show. “Eyewash” = “insincere flattery”.
Lidsville, actually. It was Hoodoo the magician who had the giant eyeball.
Can I ask how old you are? Because I figured out that meaning when I was a kid in the 1970s. At that point in time, Hawaii had only been a state for a little over 20 years, so the hula dance, and all things Hawaiian, were still something of a novelty, and were being shown often in pop culture, so the connection was obvious (plus, the Hula Hoop came out in the 1950s, shortly after Hawaii became a state, so it had been around for 20+ years by the time I was a kid).
Huh. I have absolutely no recollection of watching any show called “Lidsville”. I’ll have to look that up. Was it a big eyeball mounted on a pedestal, and the minions would come in singing, “Eyewash eyewash eyewash…”?
Forward to 4:40. They’re not singing about eyewash in this one, but they could have in other eps.
ETA: Helps if I actually put in the link… Lidsville
Now that I see that, I recognize it! (remember it would have been nearly 40 years ago that I saw this stuff). As far as the singing, the “Welcome welcome welcome” bit in your link sounds exactly like the “Eyewash eyewash eyewash” bit I remember.
I see Lidsville was also a Sid & Marty Croft production, so I guess it’s understandable that I would conflate it with H. R. Puffenstuf.
I find that any nostalgia I might have for Sid & Marty Croft productions wanes very quickly when I actually watch a clip.
Your mention of “I’m So Tired” reminded me of the song “I’m Tired” from Blazing Saddles, about which I recently had a revelation.
Madeline Kahn’s character, Lili von Shtupp, is an obvious parody of Marlene Dietrich and her film roles, and for years I’d taken “I’m Tired” as a fairly broad parody of the sort of song that Marlene Dietrich might sing. But when they played a clip from the song during a recent NPR interview with Mel Brooks, it occurred to me that “I’m Tired” is actually a very specific parody of a song called “The Laziest Gal in Town” that Marlene Dietrich performed in the film Stage Fright.
This understandably isn’t obvious to everyone as the parody is now far more widely known than the thing being parodied, but I first saw Stage Fright 10+ years ago and saw it again a year or two ago and I’m surprised that it didn’t occur to me on either occasion that this song must have been the inspiration for “I’m Tired”. I suppose it threw me off that Stage Fright wasn’t a Western and Dietrich’s character in it was a legitimate stage star. Dietrich had many other film roles – including several Westerns – where she played women with questionable reputations who sang in bars or nightclubs, and Lili von Shtupp is primarily based on these characters. The look of the “I’m Tired” number seems like a cross between the “Falling in Love Again” scene in Blue Angel and the “Boys in the Back Room” scene in Destry Rides Again, but the song itself is much closer to “Laziest Gal”.
Mister Rik writes:
> Can I ask how old you are? Because I figured out that meaning when I was a
> kid in the 1970s. At that point in time, Hawaii had only been a state for a little
> over 20 years, so the hula dance, and all things Hawaiian, were still something
> of a novelty, and were being shown often in pop culture, so the connection was
> obvious (plus, the Hula Hoop came out in the 1950s, shortly after Hawaii
> became a state, so it had been around for 20+ years by the time I was a kid).
Minor nitpick: Hawaii became a state in 1959, so in the 1970’s when you were a kid it had been a state for only somewhat more than 10 years. The modern version of the hula hoop was introduced in 1958, so it had been around for somewhat more than 10 years when you were a kid but less than 20 years. There was an immediate public reaction to the introduction of the hula hoop in 1958, with several songs about it being hits. The idea of twirling hoops around yourself had been known before then in several cultures around the world apparently. The hula became known to outsiders in 1820 or possibly earlier, but doubtlessly it got pushed in a big way around the time that Hawaii became a state.
S’what I get for posting while drinking. My brain (or something resembling my brain) thought Hawaii and Alaska joined the union in 1950.
It’s the Lewis Carroll effect. This website has the original poems Carroll was parodying. All, with the exception of “The Star”, are now obscure and mostly forgotten.
There’s another name for this phenomenon.
This is not quite accurate. Hawaii became a state in August 1959, while the Hula hoop per se came out the year before. But there were similar toy hoops before.
You know, for kids.
I’m crowding 40. And yes, the connection just landed on me the other day.
But according to other posters I’m mistaken about the origin.