It all started last month when I was talking with my social media consultant about planning our next Greatest Seminar Speaker competition. We were going through a few possible categories—I’m actually forgetting most of these, but I’m sure my consultant has them written down somewhere—; in any case I do remember that we only had 6 or 7 out of the necessary 8 categories, and in the back of my mind I was trying to think of one or two more.
Then today I was working on an article on equivalent sample size for Bayesian prior distributions—it’s funny, there are a bunch of articles on the topic, all of which include people who I know personally: Peter Mueller, Rob Trangucci, Xiao-Li Meng, and Sebastian Weber. This is not one article, it’s 4 different articles, each of which includes a friend, and none of which I’d heard about until my colleagues and I started looking into the topic. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there; the relevance of this particular digression is that one of the other references in the paper is to the statistician I. J. Good (his “device of imaginary results”), and that got me thinking of famous people who are known by their initials: A. J. Foyt, J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. Nesbit, T. S. Eliot (alternatively, he could go into the always-crowded “bigots” category), etc. I was trying to come up with a good set of 8 of these people, and the name “H. R. Pufnstuf” jumped into my head.
Just to be clear, we can’t use H. R. Pufnstuf in the Greatest Seminar Speaker competition as he’s not a real person. H. R. Pufnstuf, as anyone who happens to be exactly my age and grew up in the United States and watched too much TV—ummmm, I guess that would be just about everyone my age who grew up in the U.S.—was a Saturday morning cartoon—actually, it was not a cartoon; according to Wikipedia, it was a “live-action, life-sized-puppet program.” Like any other kid, I much preferred cartoons to live-action anything, but given the options on TV, we watched whatever was on in those long weekend hours.
Anyway, thinking about that show brought to mind that infectious earworm of its theme song: “H. R. Pufnstuf, can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough.” What can that possibly mean, I always thought? Can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough?? I still have no idea.
It’s been often noted that The Jetsons have had an outsized influence on popular memory given that it was only on the air for one season (later forgettable reboots notwithstanding). H. R. Pufnstuf, also airing for only one season, had a much smaller cultural foonote. But I remember it! Maybe not so well as its hat-themed sister show, Lidsville, or The Houndcats, which I absolutely loved for its elaborate plots (I’d never seen an actual episode of Mission Impossible and had no idea that this was what The Houndcats was ripping off), but that theme song . . . I’m still humming it in my head, at least when my brain’s not being occupied by the even more memorable Banana Splits theme song, which has the extra benefit of being associated with that unforgettable water slide image.
I looked up Pufnstuf on the internet . . . The internet has lots of issues, but one thing it’s good at is providing detail on classic and not-so-classic TV shows. I really have no need at all for my yellowed copy of “Total Television: A Comprehensive Guide to Programming from 1948 to the Present.”
Anyway, this internet search led me to the album, Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits, which appeared in 1996 and features various somewhat-gritty boomer and x-er rockers such as Liz Phair, Butthole Surfers, Violent Femmes, etc., covering cartoon classics—and also the theme from H. R. Pufnstuf, even though it’s not actually a cartoon. Truth in labeling, people! None of the tracks are by R.E.M., which is too bad cos their covers are great, but of course I respect them more for not being on this kind of crappy concept album that I love so much.
I recently learned that all the music you could ever want to hear is available for free on the internet, so I went over to Youtube and found the album! I kinda wanted to hear it, but maybe I just wanted to “own it” (as the oldies would say about recorded music); to actually listen to all 19 songs sounds like a bit much. Fortunately, I can listen to music in the background while I work or whatever.
Now it’s time for bed, but tomorrow, or when I next have a chance, I’ll listen to all 19 songs in order and report it all to you. I’ve also heard that music criticism is dead, so you can be glad to hear that I’m being paid $0 for this particular post.
OK, tomorrow has come. I just listened to the first song: the Banana Splits theme performed by Liz Phair. It was terrible. “Tra la la” over and over and over and over again. With guitar feedback in the background. I want those three minutes back. Now I’m on the second one: Sponge performing Speed Racer. We have a Speed Racer principle here at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science—but I don’t like this song either. I’m starting to think that theme songs for kids’ TV shows don’t have enough going on to support three-minute songs.
The third track is Mary Lou Lord performing Sugar Sugar. It’s pretty boring too but at least it sounds good. I don’t really feel listening to the end of this one, but at least it’s not actively unpleasant.
Now it’s been 2:19 out of 3:54 (almost 4 minutes—what were they thinking??) and I’m jumping to the next track, Matthew Sweet singing the Scooby Doo theme. Hey! This one isn’t half bad. OK, maybe it’s half bad, but that’s still better than anything that’s come along so far. . . . OK, 1:28 gone and it’s repeating itself. Couldn’t they just have made each of these tracks a minute long? No way the themes were so long on the actual TV shows. I get that these long-form covers would be fun as anything in a live performance by a band, but, on record . . . forget it! On the plus side, hey! Matthew Sweet’s band is jammin! Why not, I guess. Next up, Juliana Hatfield and Tanya Donelly perform Josie and The Pussycats. Not bad, it’s got a beat. But no way am I gonna listen to every song on this album. I’m jumping a few tracks to the Ramones performing Spider Man. Sounds like every other Ramones song I’ve ever heard. . . . Time to quickly go through a few more, and now we’re a Dig performing the Fat Albert Theme. With the whole Cosby thing, Fat Albert now has this dangerous vibe which makes the song kinda fascinating in retrospect. Boring and unmusical, but fascinating. And now I’ll skip a few more to get to the Murmurs’ take on H. R. Pufnstuf. In classic TV-theme style, it tells the story of the show. Not bad—actually this is my favorite song on the album! Still kinda boring to hear 3:20 worth, but I’ll take it. My quick summary: they should redo this collection, doing each song in 1 minute instead of 3 or 4. Or maybe the solution is at the other end of the equation: the listener should get drunk or stoned before putting this record on.
OK, my job here is done.
P.S. On that webpage for Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits is a link to the record’s producer, Ralph Sall. Following that link leads to a page on his album, “The Art of McCartney,” described as follows by Wikipedia: “The 42-song set, which covers McCartney’s solo work and work with the Beatles and Wings, features a wide range of artists such as Barry Gibb, Brian Wilson, Jeff Lynne, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Alice Cooper, Smokey Robinson, and Kiss.” Barry Gibb covering “When I’m Sixty-Four”—how fun is that? And another quick search reveals there’s a copy at the local library! So I can check it out, save it on the ipod, and listen to it on my bike while dodging the cars. That’s much better than listening to the songs on youtube. But I won’t review it for you, as I don’t think anything interesting is left to be said regarding classic Paul McCartney songs.
P.P.S. If you want to read an unlimited number of music reviews, all by the same guy, check this out. Dude hits the rock-criticism jackpot by writing interestingly with opinions that are occasionally unexpected enough that you’ll want to keep reading, and of course the air of 100% super-certainty that we’ve come to expect from the genre. It’s never, “I like this album” or “I hate this album”; it’s always “This album rules” or “This album sucks.” Like all rock critics, he doesn’t have tastes, he has absolute knowledge.
I think we should retcon the Devo “Speed Racer” song to be the official theme song of that franchise; I can’t hear the name of that show without having that song stuck in my head for the next hour or so. :D
That occurred to me, too. And they could’ve used Bob Marley’s cover of the Banana Splits theme (a.k.a. Buffalo Soldier).
You missed out on the Buttholes’ cover of Underdog?
Which is great – but can it ever be as good as the original with Wally Cox?
> ” What can that possibly mean, I always thought? Can’t do a little cause he can’t do enough?? I still have no idea.
? Not ever having watched the show it assuming that’s not necessary to speculate…
Seems kind of straight forward to me. He has to do a lot because he never feels satisfied that he’s done enough? Hence he can’t do a little.
Here’s one for you. Try humming the Smothers Brothers theme song to people, say maybe 60 and older (specially if they’re libruls) , and asking them to “name that tune.” I have yet to find anyone who doesn’t recognize the tune, but it seems that also no one can pull out the name from the recesses of their brain. Funny how brains work. Why can we remember the tune but not the show that it was for? Weird.
Also, not a cartoon, but the Dobey Gillis theme song is pretty damn good, Imo. Incredibly jazzy (and there’s an underutilized word if ever there was).
Just look at how much we’ve changed. Back in the day, “incels” were just lovable goofy guys, and not the end of the world due to librul authoritarianism.
Joshua:
Sure, lots of TV shows had great theme songs. The “Welcome Back, Kotter” theme was an actual hit that got lots of radio play.
I think the mistake of the compilation discussed in the above post was (a) including a lot of crappy ones in the mix, (b) including some unmusical performances (I guess this was some rockers trying to show how gritty they are), and, most of all, (c) stretching them all out to 3 or 4 minutes. That said, I think it could be turned into a good Smiths album if they were allowed to rewrite all the words and the music.
Joshua, yes, your interpretation of “can’t do a little ’cause he can’t do enough” is the same as mine, and indeed that was my interpretation when I was a little kid. I remember figuring it out and thinking it was very clever. And of course I felt clever for feeling it out. Which means we shouldn’t call Andrew a dummy for not having figured it out even as an adult: after all, we can expect people to be ordinarily smart but we shouldn’t mock them for failing to be extraordinarily clever.
Phil –
Now that I think about it more… I guess he never feels satisfied no matter how much he does. So there’s no difference to him between doing a lot and doing a little. So then why wouldn’t he just choose doing a little? Or maybe he’d likely just give up?
Just goes to show, you can never be totally sure with H. R. Pufnstuf.
Childhood heroes are often more complicated (and flaws) than we suspected. It’s kind of a bummer that H.R. Puffinstuff is a mean drunk. Nobody’s perfect, however much we might wish it.
It calls itself “Saturday Morning Cartoons’ Greatest Hits” and doesn’t include The Ramones’ “Spider-Man” ?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5P8lrgBtcU
Vaguely related: ~10 yrs ago, when my kids would have been the right age for Saturday morning cartoons, I was sad to find that these don’t really exist anymore. In many ways the world is more boring, though perhaps access to so much of the past makes up for it.
Raghu:
Yes, it does include the Ramones performing Spider Man. Indeed, I mention that track in my post above. So I don’t quite get what you’re saying.
Sorry — I somehow skipped your last paragraph *and* mis-skimmed the track listing. This really isn’t a good start to the day…
David Owen (the average-intelligence-man’s John McPhee) wrote a pretty interesting essay called The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, about the first ad guy to figure out that you could get a huge fraction of children to sit in front of the TV for hours if you put on cartoons, and then you could advertise the kinds of things they would hector their parents to buy: cereal and toys and so on.
The essay is available along with a lot of others in the book “The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, And Other Adventures in American Enterprise”. I read the book about 30 years ago and loved it, I guess I should read it again.
Owens’ golf book and blog are wery good as well: http://www.myusualgame.com/biography-2/
Unfortunately he has more than one golf book. I did read The Usual Game and liked it pretty well, but it’s really unfortunate that Owen became so obsessed with golf to the exclusion of many other interests. He’s talented enough as a writer to make just about anything interesting — for exanple I loved his book The Walls Around Us, which is sort of a combination of the history of housebuilding since 1800 and a how-to book about home repair, with a substantial admixture of amusing anecdotes about his own home repair mishaps. It may even be true that if I read the rest of his golf books I would enjoy them too. But there’s no way I would enjoy them as much as I would enjoy whatever books he would have written if he hadn’t chosen to write about golf.
Phil:
I agree completely. David Owen is a wonderful generalist nonfiction writer, a national treasure. David Owen deciding to devote his life to golf . . . I wanted to say that would be as bad as if a well-known statistician were to devote his life to blogging, except that (a) I do lots of other things, not just blogging, and (b) the blog is about all sorts of topics. It would be as if I only blogged about golf. Owen’s a free person, he can write about whatever he wants, but, dammit, it’s frustrating. On the other hand, I already don’t have time to read everything I want to read, so maybe it’s fine that Owen has been long retired from non-golf-writing.
Three notes: First, the 2nd season of the Amazon series Goliath shows Mark Duplass in [spoiler alert? not really] sexual thrall to, among other things, the HR Pufnstuf theme (the original). I’m a fan of the show, but I readily admit tastes vary.
Second, when the Omni complex opened in Atlanta in 1976, it contained an indoor theme park, the World of Sid and Marty Krofft at which one could cavort with HR Pufnstuf live. It is, I think, not coincidental that after the theme park when defunct, it became CNN headquarters.
Finally, Bowling for Soup’s cover of the Gilligan’s Island theme isn’t bad, but maybe they’re elped by the fact that they recorded the actual theme song to a modern cartoon, Phineas and Ferb.
Witchie-Poo!
I remember the H.R. Pufnstuf show, although now I wonder what stuff he was puffing. And the Banana Splits theme song was in a class by itself. But that particular record, despite its promise, never seemed to work for me.
One quibble though. The Ramones cover of the Spider Man theme is brilliant. I think it’s an unfair complaint to say it sounds like every other Ramones song. I’d suggest that’s the entire point of The Ramones.
Aren’t the show name and character a take-off on “Puff the Magic Dragon”? Seems convenient to have a nice dragon with a name that’s “puffish” just a few years after the song had been popular. I said this because of the name similarities but then I read the plot and story line of the show as described in Wikipedia. Absolutely, the whole show is a take-off on the earlier song and poem.
I couldn’t remember the characters at all until I looked it up, but the flute and the character “Witcheepoo” are vaguely familiar.
“”If you want to read an unlimited number of music reviews, all by the same guy, check this out. Dude hits the rock-criticism jackpot by writing interestingly with opinions that are occasionally unexpected enough that you’ll want to keep reading, and of course the air of 100% super-certainty that we’ve come to expect from the genre. It’s never, “I like this album” or “I hate this album”; it’s always “This album rules” or “This album sucks.” Like all rock critics, he doesn’t have tastes, he has absolute knowledge.”
This guy is an Italian physicist, with really encyclopaedic knowledge on rock music, (and apparently on jazz, classical, literature, art, and more). Of course, he is quite controversial. I take it for what is does very well: suggest artists and albums to check out ( I am bit sad on his ratings of the Grateful Dead and his choices of Bach, I am foremost a Deahead and a Bachian)
Vale:
Yes, it’s very impressive. I just thought it was funny that he adapted the default mode of rock critics, in which all opinions are expressed as absolute truths.
that Liz Phair version was awesome. way better than anything REM could do. and i say that with the same certainty as Andrew said the opposite.
next review: schoolhouse rock covers
other initials peops: b.k.s. iyengar. e.e. cummings.
Bob:
The Liz Phair thing was fine for what it was and I don’t think REM could do any better with it, nor do I think I said they could’ve. I just think the idea was hopeless, to repeat “Tra La La” for three minutes. Maybe John Cage would’ve appreciated it.
A candidate for the “known by their initials” category: R.A. Fisher. Also, with more genetics and less statistics, J.B.S. Haldane.
Gregory:
Cool—they also fall into the Nazi Sympathizer and Communist Sympathizer categories in case we don’t have space for them in the Initials group.
FN David?
(Perhaps famous for what her initials stood for)