Remember when you found out that Foghorn Leghorn was a parody of a human radio character that would have been familiar to the original audiences of the 1940s? That was just one of many pop culture references in Warner Bros. cartoons that eventually lost connection with its source material because those cartoons still hold up almost 100 years later.
The one comedy impression that was used more than any other, however, came from a classic novel. So many students read Of Mice and Men in high school and said, "Wait a minute, this is a cartoon character!" Even more so if you ever eventually watched the 1939 film version starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney Jr. Your cartoon experience made it hard to take the tragic story seriously. And even if you knew that, you might not be remembering the same cartoon character as the next person, because it was used so much, from 1940 up to the '60s.
Friday, July 31, 2026
The Parody That Ruined the Original
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4 comments:
Do American high school students no longer read that book?
I don't know. My kids did, but they left high school ten years ago.
I wrote George-and-Lenny-like characters into a radio drama series I did with kids in the Albion Whale School in the middle-1980s, a few hundred miles through the phone lines to KKUP, Cupertino. There were two series that overlapped: Chuck Frank, Private Op! and Cleveland, Ohio, 37th Century! The episodes were between five and fifteen minutes long. "Hey!" "George, I squoze the flashlight too hard." "Ya got hands like hams, Lenny. Ya don't know yer own strenth!"
Of course not. Wouldn't want to traumatize them with the realities of history, humanity, or the realities of life.
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