I am not a Woody Woodpecker fan but . . .
There was a Woody Woodpecker cartoon that seemed to run constantly while I was growing up and it had a quote that is very applicable to many common everyday situations. I have exactly ONE friend from childhood who also remembers it and it seems nobody else in the world has ever seen this episode.
We mention it to people and they always say “Oh, I was never into Woody Woodpecker.” But that’s just it- neither were we. But when you’re a little kid and you turn on the T.V. and there’s a choice of noncartoons vs. one of your nonpreferred cartoons, you watch the nonpreferred cartoon and zone out waiting for the better cartoon that comes after it.
These were the only situations in which my friend and I ever watched Woody Woodpecker, so it was only ever very rarely that we’d watch the show at all. And yet it seemed that any. time. we. watched. they were playing this one same episode! So we thought naturally that even non Woody fans should have come across it at some time or another.
Context for The Quote (and it was a bit of a refrain that repeated throughout the episode):
At the beginning of the episode, something terrible goes wrong- Woody is wronged in some way, scammed I think. Woody takes it upon himself to pursue the issue and things keep getting worse and worse and worse.
Each time Woody makes the situation worse, a narrator- a detective type, maybe based on Joe Friday- repeats the refrain:
I say that to myself whenever I find myself making a situation worse.