In the latter part of the middle of the last century, when I was a child...I'm old...saturday morning was almost too good to bear. I'd be up at the crack of dawn, the TV set on, still showing the test pattern with the picture of the Indian in his headress ,(we didn't have 24 hour programming back then, or infomercials...We didn't even have racial sensitivity and we called Native Americans 'Indians') waiting for the cartoons to start.
I loved saturday morning cartoons. I loved everything about them. I even loved the sponsors who were kind enough to provide the colorful bounty, most of them cartoon characters themselves. Thank you Cap'n Crunch! God bless you, Trix Rabbit! And yes...YES...YES! Yes, I DO want my milk to turn 'choclatey' in the bowl, Cocoa Puffs Cuckoo! Thank you for asking!
Almost all the commercials were for breakfast cereal, and they all wanted only two things in this world...1) To give me the energy I needed to be a kid, and 2) To give me toys. Just GIVE them to me! Either right there inside the box, or in trade for a couple of measly box tops. Worthless box tops! We were just gonna throw them away anyhow!
It was a paradise. All my cartoon friends and I got along, and we all lived in a harmonious, mutually beneficial society.
Except for Quisp and Quake:
These guys could NOT get along! It was always a fierce competition with them, each trying to convince us that their cereal was superior. Sometimes going so far as to invade one another's commercials!
As far as my sister and I were concerned, this was the conflict of the ages. There was no way to reconcile this chasm between these two vastly different pitchmen, the spaceman with a 'quazy' attitude and the down-to-earth rugged Quake. Even their boxes proclaimed their diametric opposition, with Quisp (my choice) a spacy liberal blue, and Quake (my sister's vote), with his red box and John Birch-like construction helmet. We argued about the relative merits of our man with passion and fervor, each declaring the other's cereal gross and inedible. My poor mother was forced to buy both, to keep the peace, lest cereal civil war break out at our table.
Of course both of these products were not only manufactured by the same company, Quaker Oats, but were made of identical ingredients, corn meal and staggering amounts of high fructose corn syrup. The only difference were the packages and the shapes.
These battles went on at our house until the day my mom read an article that quoted Ralph Nader as saying that all of these cereals were like "giving a kid a vitamin pill and a shot of whiskey." She stopped buying that kind of stuff altogether, and my sister and I patched things up, as we now had a common enemy: Corn Flakes. Although I'm still pretty 'blue', and she's a little on the 'red' side.
Oh yeah...There's a big commotion going on right now between Seth MacFarlane and Sarah Palin. It's a big controversy centered around the sensitive subject of developmental disabilities. The two combatants both are very influential figures in popular culture, with Seth being irreverant and brash while Sarah is....I don't know...Reverant and brash.
Anyway, both have large followings, one for his cartoon shows on Fox Network, which is owned by News Corp, the other for her frequent appearances on, and her high profile contract with Fox News Network, which is owned by News Corp.
A lot of sources I respect and rely on for information (Bill Maher, Huffington Post, Truth Dig) have all come out gleefully chortling at Seth 'sticking it to' Sarah, and her phony outrage, and her frequent use of her Down's Syndrome child as a political football. And I don't disagree with the sentiment. And of course Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin are discussing it on Fox News and and the controversy escalates and escalates until it explodes, covering Rupert Murdoch (and Sarah and Seth) in a pile of money and influence.
Ralph Nader already tried to explain this to us a couple of times, don't make me call my mom.
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