Learning from "Kill the Wabbit"

Are you not entertained?

My first exposure to classical music came at a very young age when I encountered such extraordinary works as “Kill the Wabbit” and the theme to “The Lone Ranger.”

Later on, I learned there was a bit more to those tunes, but I’m still deeply appreciative for the lessons in music, imagination, and wit that were subtly given by a Saturday morning faculty consisting of Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn, Mr. Peabody and Sherman along with many others.

Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons even tackled the Cold War. We encountered Pottsylvanian spy Boris Badenov and his partner Nastasha Fatale long before hearing of James Bond’s battles with the Kremlin.

As a teenaged reader of Mad magazine in its best days, it was great to see how cartoonist Mort Drucker spoofed films and television programs. One memorable example was when he transformed “West Side Story” into an “East Side Story” gang tale where JFK, Macmillan, and De Gaulle fought Khrushchev’s crew for turf near the United Nations.

If a magazine had an equivalent feature for today’s teenagers, how would that be received?

Probably with a dull stare.

Here are some examples of the common culture back then:

The Book of the Month Club was very popular. Because of that, many a home had Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War on its bookshelves and authors got a serious boost if their novel was made the Selection of the Month.

The ABC News Report began with an excerpt from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Leonard Bernstein had a music appreciation program for children, and television was packed with historical documentaries.

Although intellectuals scoffed that those days were a wasteland, we made do with novels by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, John O’Hara, and Katherine Anne Porter, plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, musicals by Rogers & Hammerstein, movies with Edward G. Robinson, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and baseball games with Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle.

Appetites and tastes are acquired early and so it is wise to check just what is being served to young children nowadays.

If you want to see how far we’ve fallen, check out the popular Peppa Pig series with its crude animation and low level of wit.

See what’s happened to Sesame Street.

I recently watched a preachy episode where the Cookie Monster was – no joke - longing for a vegetable sandwich.

He shared it, of course.

You wouldn’t have seen social engineering in the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, but you would have been far better entertained.