WATCH! The Candy Land commercial that haunted me for years! (Updated for 2024!)

This is what Milton Bradley's Candy Land looked like in 1978.

The game board as it looked in '78.

It's funny how an utterly ephemeral piece of music will become firmly lodged in one's brain for decades. Take, for instance, the instrumental music in an early '80s ad for the Milton Bradley board game Candy Land. There was a particular 30-second spot for this product that I must have seen dozens of times while watching Popeye and Andy Panda cartoons as a kid. Obviously, Milton Bradley bought up a lot of advertising time on children's TV shows, and I was smack dab in the middle of the target demographic.

The commercial itself is typical of the era. In a sunshine-yellow suburban kitchen somewhere, a young brother (played by a pre-Christmas Story Peter Billingsley) and sister play the game with their mom, while a gentle-voiced male announcer explains how it all works.

But underneath the narration is a jaunty, repetitive little melody with a whistle-like sound. To this day, I remember that insidious little ditty by heart. I will likely never forget it. As for the narrator's spiel, I didn't commit every word of it to memory, but there are certain passages that stick out: "You'll discover the Gingerbread Plum Tree, a Rainbow Pass, and Gumdrop Mountain! But be careful of the Cherry Pit Falls, and don't get stuck in Molasses Swamp!" The way he weirdly emphasizes "Rainbow Pass," as if it's a major selling point, is rather memorable.

Incidentally, one thing I learned in the course of researching this article is that there is no "definitive" version of the classic game. The internet can't even decide whether it's called Candy Land or Candyland. Under either spelling, the game goes back to 1949. The gameboard itself and the box it comes in have been redesigned and revamped many times since then. What was once merely "Molasses Swamp," for instance, is now a sentient creature unappealingly named "Gloppy." Other characters, like "main antagonist" Lord Licorice, have been added to Candy Land since the days of my youth. (In my day, bad luck was the only antagonist in Candy Land.)

Through trial and error, I learned that the version of the game seen in the famous ad dates back to 1978. Most sources say the commercial first appeared in the early 1980s, possibly 1983.

The indelible Candy Land jingle played a minor yet arguably-significant role in my life. I can remember humming it over and over to annoy my older sister during a long car trip. She must have identified the song, too, because she said, "Mom, tell Joey to stop singing the Candy Land song!"

A few years later, when I joined the school band, a few of my fellow musicians-in-training and I would try to learn as many pop songs, TV and movie themes, and advertising jingles as possible on our respective instruments. Then as now, I played the euphonium—a little-understood and much-neglected instrument to which I was dutifully assigned after failing to make the grade on the cornet. 

Being relegated to the low brass section was moderately more fun if I could play a reasonable facsimile of '"Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin or "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." I remember it was a major victory (in my own mind) when I learned the familiar seven-note "Miss Gulch" theme from The Wizard of Oz. But there was this one kid, Marc Wojtowicz, who played the saxophone and had a dizzying range of tunes at his command. And one of them was—you guessed it—the Candy Land jingle. That may not impress you, but it impressed the hell out of me.

Anyway, here's the commercial. If the song takes up permanent residence in your subconscious, remember that I tried to warn you.

UPDATE FOR 2024: Reader Dan Mahoney informs me that the jingle used in the Candy Land commercial is actually a piece of stock music called "Whistling Robot" by British composer and organist Harold Smart (1921-1980). In more recent years, Harold's music has turned up on SpongeBob SquarePants and its various spinoffs. Thanks for setting the record straight, Dan!

Podcast Tuesday: "Chachi Balboa"

Scott Baio and Henry Winkler on Happy Days.

The writers of Happy Days were not usually too keen on exploring particular themes—this isn't that kind of show—but they ended up exploring some anyway during the show's eleventh and final season. Specifically, a lot of these episodes are about the characters growing up and feeling the need to prove themselves as full-fledged adults. They're no longer children, and they want the world to know it! 

In "Because It's There," Fonzie (Henry Winkler) needed to prove he was "a man" by riding his motorcycle up Suicide Hill. In "Welcome Home," Richie (Ron Howard) proved he was an adult by ignoring his parents' wishes and moving to California to become a screenwriter. In "Glove Story," the episode we're reviewing this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast, Chachi (Scott Baio) tries to prove himself to Fonzie by becoming a boxer. 

It seems that, in Season 11, the characters on Happy Days are all trying to put childhood behind them and establish themselves as adults who deserve some R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Weirdly, they all go about it in ways that seem foolish or dangerous to me. Richie could end up broke and homeless, while Fonzie and Chachi could end up hospitalized or even dead! Oh well. I guess that's what it takes to prove yourself in this universe.

You can find out what we thought of "Glove Story" by listening to our latest podcast. Conveniently, it's available right here.

Happy Vernal Equinox from Vernal Q. Equinox!

Vernal Q. Equinox in his natural habitat.

When I was in junior high and high school, I created a variety of crudely-rendered characters who "starred" in comics that I would pass around every day in class. Some of the characters, like Iffy the Troll and Margin Man, had dozens of little pencil-drawn adventures. Others, however, only appeared once or twice before being abandoned. Even then, I was sensitive to reader feedback. Only the characters that got the best reaction became regulars. One quickly abandoned character was redneck mechanic Vernal Q. Equinox. I must have heard the term "vernal equinox" somewhere and thought it sounded like a funny name.

I'm sure I was influenced by Jim Varney's then-ubiquitous "Hey, Vern!" commercials, plus the Gomer and Goober Pyle characters from The Andy Griffith Show. The illustration above is my attempt to recreate what Vernal would have looked like. None of his original adventures -- and there couldn't have been more than two or three -- survive to this day in any form. The photographic background is pretty authentic. I used to clip out B&W pictures of things I didn't feel like drawing.

Why do I mention any of this? Well, today is the vernal equinox, and it made me think back to those old comics I used to do. I'm the only person in the world who remembers Vernal Q. Equinox, so this blog post is my way of immortalizing him before he vanishes from even my memory. And what is this blog good for if it can't be a repository of my useless trivia from the past? Enjoy this moment, Vernal.

Incidentally, if anyone feels that Vernal might be a marketable character, I'd be willing to sell him very cheaply. Like I'd take a pack of gum for him.

The complete and utter horror of... FOO TI FUM!

That crudely-rendered monster is Foo Ti Fum. The city he's terrorizing is Portland, Oregon.

My cousin's favorite gum

When I was growing up in Michigan, my uncle and his family lived right down the street from us, so my cousins were regular visitors to our home, especially during the summers. My uncle's youngest son, Derrick, was practically a brother to me in those days. He was one of those kids who, like the tykes in Family Circus, was always mispronouncing words in a way which grownups found cute. Derrick had a genuine love for Fruit Stripe gum back then, which I could never understand because, even at that age, I knew that Fruit Stripe was a total ripoff. A few seconds of flavor, then nothing.

Well, anyway, Derrick could never manage to say "Fruit Stripe gum" correctly, and it always came out sounding like "Foo Ti Fum." And that particular turn of phrase lodged itself into my mind and stayed there, long after I moved away from Michigan and my relatives. When I learned of a Marvel Comics character called Fin Fang Foom, I began to think of "Foo Ti Fum" as a similar character, a huge, snarling monster with the exact color scheme of the Fruit Stripe gum packaging.

This thought became so deeply rooted in my mind that, in moments of extreme boredom, I would actually Google "Foo Ti Fum" hoping to see pictures of this totally nonexistent character. Of course, nothing came up. Well, I finally decided to fix that. Here is a genuine article about Foo Ti Fum with a picture to go with it. If I ever Google the beast's name again, this will appear. That's good enough for me.

Pointless nostalgia time: 'Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World' (1979)

I didn't hallucinate it. This movie really existed.

The way you can remember the difference between latitude and longitude is that latitude lines are like the rungs on a ladder, while longitude lines look like long telephone poles. Got it? That's a little detail I stored away from a 1979 educational film called Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World, a lighthearted, 17-minute primer on basic geography hosted by a member of the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters. Though I never attended one of their games in person, the 'trotters were nevertheless a vital part of my couch potato youth, what with their two (count 'em!) Hanna Barbera series and innumerable appearances on talk shows and specials, not to mention their utterly ridiculous and unmotivated crossovers with Gilligan's Island and Scooby-Doo. Who can hear "Sweet Georgia Brown" without feeling the urge to spin a basketball on one's index finger? Yeah, the clown princes of the court were everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s, including, it seems the classroom.

I was lucky enough to be around for the last few years of educational films being actual reels of film being threaded through a projector. The transition to VHS and those omnipresent rolling TV carts did not occur until my middle school years. No, if a teacher wanted to kill some time with a movie, he or she actually had to have some rudimentary AV skills. My parents were both teachers, and I can still remember going with my dad to the Flint Public Library when he wanted to check out an educational film. (This was before video stores.) The movies -- 16mm, I guess -- came in these big, flat, grayish-brown boxes, about the size of a small pizza, and they were held shut with straps. I don't know why, but I thought that was neat. You had to go to a special room on the second floor of the library to get them. I thought that was neat, too.

But, anyway, back to the movie at hand. Somewhere around the third or fourth grade, a teacher must have shown our class Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World as part of a unit on how to read maps or something. It was the kind of weird, fun, little movie that just might take up residence in a person's subconscious forever. It certainly did in mine. Interestingly (to me), Presents the World was made by the same group of amiable zanies who did the fondly-remembered Close Encounters parody film Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind in 1980, just a year later: director Rick Harper, writer Bob Rogers, and actors Stan Greiwe and Sandy Stotzer. I imagine they had fun with this assignment. Also in the cast is Mike Jittlov, director, writer, and star of the (unseen by me) cult classic The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988).

Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World, sadly, is not to be found in its entirety on the Internet. A company called Pyramid Media markets a DVD of it, but it'll cost ya: thirty bucks for personal use, ninety bucks for instructional use. If you're planning on buying me a copy for my birthday next month, please choose the $30 option. Happily, there are some clips available online, like this one featuring Stan Greiwe as a detective-turned-superhero and Mike Jittlov as a sinister, black-hatted villain. Enjoy:



What's really weird is the complicated, nesting-doll structure of Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World. It starts out as a film-within-a-film, and before long it becomes a film-within-a-film-within-a-film. You see, the introduction involves a hapless grade school teacher (also Greiwe) showing this movie to his unruly students. Then Meadowlark takes over and shows even more films, like the one above. It's like Inception for eight year olds.

Of course there's a biopic of France's infamous Le Pétomane! Why wouldn't there be?

And he looks so suave, too: British thespian Leonard Rossiter played many types of roles in his career. Including this one!

This was the book!

The Book of Lists (1977) was the first dirty book I ever read, and was it a doozy!  I found this best-selling reference volume and its equally-smutty 1980 sequel in the library of the junior high school I attended in the late 1980s, and I can remember spending many lunch periods poring over its delightfully sleazy contents. 

For the uninitiated, The Book of Lists is exactly what its title claims it to be: a collection of supposedly-factual trivia organized into fun little lists with titles like "People Who Died on the Toilet" and "Twenty Great Events That Happened in the Bathtub." I think the book was supposed to give people some fodder for conversations at dull cocktail parties, but because it was compiled by a family of well-known authors -- historian David Wallechinsky, his father Irving Wallace, and his sister Amy Wallace -- and took up about the same shelf space as a dictionary or thesaurus, it had an air of respectability and wound up in libraries across the country. 

Apparently, a few librarians balked at the racier entries, which included a list of sexual positions and their various advantages and disadvantages. (How I remember that one! I still recall that Ovid advocated having lovers lie on their sides facing one another.) Later in life, I learned that some of what I had "learned" from The Book of Lists was pure bunk. John Dillinger, for instance, did not have an abnormally large penis which was detached from his body after his death and placed in a museum. I think the old yarn about Catherine the Great getting it on with horses was in one of those Book of Lists, too. I couldn't believe I had stumbled onto such a valuable artifact at school. What a world, what a world! 

Not too long after this, I found a paperback of Semi-Tough (1972) by Dan Jenkins in the basement of our suburban home, and suddenly The Book of Lists didn't seem like such hot stuff anymore. But for a while there, this silly little nothing of a book became the center of my entire erotic life.

The Artiste

Don't get the impression, however, that The Book of Lists was all about sex. There was plenty of violence and gross-out stuff in it, too, which I appreciated. In the latter category was the story of Joseph "Le Pétomane" Pujol (1857-1945), the French music-hall performer who delighted Parisian audiences with his skilled and versatile displays of flatulence. It was only a year or so later that I finally saw Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974), in which the director himself plays a character named "William J. Le Pétomane." When I heard that, I was weirdly embarrassed. It was like Mel Brooks knew about my secret shame, taking The Book of Lists into a secluded corner of the junior high library to drool over its most salacious details. 

Anyway, I have some distance on these events now, and my interest in Le Pétomane and The Book of Lists is now rooted in fond nostalgia. The video below is a light-hearted but substantive BBC production about Joseph Pujol's life, starring Leonard Rossiter (of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon) as the title character. Fascinatingly, it was directed by Ian MacNaughton, who is well known for his work with Monty Python in the 1960s and 1970s. It was MacNaugton at the helm of the Pythons' BBC television series and their first feature, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971). Python fans may notice that the score for Le Pétomane comes from De Wolfe, the same British production music company whose melodies graced Monty Python's Flying Circus and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Larry Hagman: Farewell to my Friday night babysitter

Now that's sophistication: A musical J.R. Ewing whiskey decanter

J.R. makes MAD's cover

If you're an American born during a certain stretch of the 20th Century, there's a good chance that Larry Hagman was part of your life. He certainly was part of mine. 

Oh, sure, I Dream of Jeannie was one of those syndication staples I'd watch whenever I was home sick (or "sick") from school, but I preferred The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters, Gilligan's Island, and Mr. Ed. Even in the "normal guy with magic wife" category, Jeannie was second to Bewitched. As true TV junkies know, the real Hagman action occurred on Friday nights. My parents used to go out to eat pretty much every Friday night and leave me and my sister at home with a babysitter until we were old enough to look after ourselves for a few hours. 

Either way, in the early-to-mid 1980s, our television set -- like those of many Americans -- was tuned to CBS at that time every week. That was when the Tiffany Network aired its one-two punch of The Dukes of Hazard and Dallas, those totally-accurate-I'm-sure depictions of Southern life. Dukes was definitely pitched at a child's level. I may not have understood what "marijuana" or "moonshine" were when I was a kid, but I knew it was bad if Roscoe or Boss Hogg would plant either one of those items in the General Lee. And, besides, good old Waylon Jennings was always there to explain everything that was happening, had happened, and was about to happen in each episode. 

Dallas, on the other hand, was all but entirely beyond my ken. What did I know about power struggles in the cutthroat oil industry, let alone infidelity or alcoholism? Not too damned much, that's what. But I tuned in every week anyway. Maybe it was Jerrold Immel's majestic theme song or all those shots of shiny, mirror-like skyscrapers in the opening credits which drew me in. 

But what kept me watching, more than any other factor, was Larry Hagman's performance as that grinning, glad-handing rascal, J.R. Ewing. Hagman's character was obviously having a ball being as greedy and selfish as he possibly could be, and that's something even a kid could understand. Come to think of it, I probably liked Boss Hogg every bit as well as, if not more than, those pesky Duke boys.

The precioussssss.....

One further J.R. Ewing memory: every Christmas Eve, my father would take me around to various delis and bakeries in the Flint area to pick up supplies for our traditional holiday meal. He'd always stop by the comic book store and let me pick out a few oldies from the racks. 

Being a budding "comedy nerd," I immediately headed for the back issues of MAD from the 1970s and 1980s so I could fawn over the artwork of Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, Angelo Torres, Sam Viviano and more. On one of those trips, I picked up MAD #223 (June '81) with a Viviano caricature of Hagman on the cover and a five-page, Drucker-illustrated Dallas parody called "Dull-Us" inside. I still have that issue today. 

On another one of those Christmas Eves, my dad and I stopped at a deli which was selling a particular trinket whose very existence boggled my still-developing mind: a J.R. Ewing whiskey decanter which played the Dallas theme song from its base. A quick Google search reveals that this particular decanter, the only officially-sanctioned Dallas product of its type, remains a popular Ebay item. If you haven't decided what to get me for Christmas 2012 and you have an extra $120 laying around, you could do worse.

The Shaggs: The only true "teenage" music I've ever heard

The Shaggs: (from l to r) Betty, Helen, and Dot Wiggin

One of the great ironies/injustices of popular culture is that the music specifically marketed to teenagers is getting progressively more polished and "perfect" with each advance in technology, while the teenagers themselves remain -- as always -- bumpy, lurching, and awkward. There's an odd disconnect between the relentlessly smoothed-out, robotic, studio-crafted pop being released by a group like One Direction and the messy, utterly human vulnerability of that group's fans. Teenage music bears no resemblance whatsoever to teenage life. A yawning chasm exists between the two.

Mick: Handsomely un-handsome

This gap is nothing new, exactly. Past teen idols, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley,  must have seemed superhuman to their fans, too. But Frank and Elvis both exuded a raw, quite human sexuality that largely eludes today's teen pop stars, who are "sexy" only in quotation marks and present a only a sanitized abstraction of carnal appeal to their fans, without any of that messy fluid exchange ruining it.

It's interesting that, during the 1960s, the British Invasion allowed a new type of entertainer to capture the teenage imagination. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were not conventionally handsome in the Sinatra/Presley tradition. They had big noses, big lips, bad teeth, and cheekbones that jutted in at odd angles. I was just watching a documentary about the Stones last night called Crossfire Hurricane, and it was fascinating to see the Stones in their 1960s prime via newsreel footage. They looked sort of gawky and malformed, with carelessly floppy hair and sallow complexions, and yet they were driving their female fans into a state of erotic frenzy. At last, the weirdos had won! 

But it didn't last. The 1970s brought a new generation of generically handsome, neutered teenage idols (David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, Donny Osmond) who set the precedent for those to come. And now, I guess, we have Justin Bieber, the platonic ideal of the safe, boring, utterly harmless pop star, a kind of life-sized Ken doll for the girls of Young America to play with for a few years. Kind of a pity.

All of this brings me back to the topic of the Shaggs.

I couldn't possibly tell you the entire saga of this astonishing all-female 1960s singing group composed of sisters from a working class New Hampshire family. You'll have to rely on this quirky but affectionate New Yorker article by Susan Orlean for the details. Here's an overview: in 1968, a Fremont, NH mill worker named Austin Wiggin decided to fulfill the deathbed prophecy of his mother, who proclaimed that Austin's then-teenage daughters would be famous. Austin pulled the girls out of school and forced them to become a rock band, even though the girls had no musical inclination whatsoever and definitely did not want to become performers.

Only one of the daughters, Dot, had any enthusiasm whatsoever for her dad's dream, so she was elected to be lead singer and songwriter of the resulting group, dubbed The Shaggs in honor of the Wiggin sisters' shaggy hairdos (and supposedly, the shagginess of the family dog). Despite their total lack of aptitude and success, The Shaggs soldiered on for 7 years, playing local gigs for audiences who either tolerated them politely or heckled them outright. The band finally ended in 1975 when Austin died, and the Wiggin girls -- no longer kids by then -- went on to lead very ordinary, non-musical lives.
 

The Shaggs' lone, infamous LP

Before the group's sad, drawn-out death, however, The Shaggs recorded and (barely) released one extraordinary album: 1969's Philosophy of the World. Though only a handful of copies were originally pressed, the utterly strange LP went on to become a cult favorite with avant garde rock musicians (including Frank Zappa and NRBQ) and influential critics who discovered it years after it was recorded. The album has been reprinted several times over the years and has also been released on CD and MP3.

For completists, there's even a collection of Shaggs rarities, live recordings, and outtakes called The Shaggs Own Thing, plus a hip indie-label tribute album called Better Than the Beatles. Even better, the strange, vaguely sad story of the Shaggs was the basis for a charming off-Broadway show, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, which I have seen and enjoyed. The musical tours quite a bit, and I was fortunate to catch it at Chicago's Lookinglass Theater a few years back.

But what about the original music itself? What's it like to listen to The Shaggs? Many listeners find it torturous, verging on unlistenable. For three demure New Hampshire girls, The Shaggs make a powerful racket, clanging away at their out-of-tune instruments with abandon. In particular, drummer Helen Wiggin seems to be in a world all her own. Throughout the album, there are lots of what music teachers would call "wrong notes," and the three ladies cannot seem to agree on a collective tempo, key, or time signature. Susan Orlean was right when she described their melodies as "squashed and bent." The album sounds like it was left out in the sun on a hot day and melted.

If Philosophy of the World weren't from 1969, you'd guess it to be some kind of primitive punk music, but the rawness of the music is at odds with the sweet simplicity of the lyrics. The Shaggs sing about looking for a lost cat ("My Pal Foot Foot"), the importance of obeying one's parents ("Who Are Parents?"), praising Jesus ("We Have a Savior"), and how nice it is to have a radio ("My Companion"). Austin Wiggin seems like he was a dictatorial parent who did everything in his power to keep the world away from his girls and vice-versa, so maybe the transistor radio was one of Dot Wiggin's few links to the outside world. Another recurring theme on the album is the foolishness of straying too far from one's home. "Little Sports Car" ends with Dot and her sisters singing, "I learned my lesson never to roam, never to roam, never to roam."

The late, great Crow's Nest in Crest Hill, IL

The main appeal of Philosophy of the World, to me, is that it provides a rare glimpse into the brain of a genuine teenager, without the interference of grown-up producers or executives. It's like an adolescent's diary brought to musical life, and for once the lurching, awkward bumpiness of the music matches the emotions of the singer. Nowhere is this more true than on the album's title cut, which is the first Shaggs song I ever heard.

"Philosophy of the World" was included on a 2000 compilation of so-called "outsider music" I purchased at a great, now-defunct record store called the Crow's Nest near my home in Joliet, IL. As I drove home from the Crow's Nest, I popped the disc into my car's CD player, and that song came blaring out of the speakers. I was entranced. I was hooked. I knew I had to get every last bit of Shaggs music out there. Fortunately or unfortunately, there's not much. Once you own Philosophy of the World and The Shaggs Own Thing (both of which have been combined onto a single CD simply called The Shaggs), there's not much to get, other than the tribute album. Although many people would struggle to get through even a single Shaggs song, I've listened to their entire catalog many times -- and none more so than this track:



P.S. - The rarities compilation is well worth checking out, too. It contains some later studio recordings by the group, some of which demonstrate that the Wiggins had been indeed practicing their instruments at least a little. One song in particular I love is "You're Something Special to Me," which contains a lyric that summarizes my own mindset: "Please don't speak unkind words to me. That would make me unhappy." Very simple, of course, but very true as well. If "Philosophy" was too much for you, maybe this will be more your speed.