There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #3 – Goolie Get-Together by Toadies (1995)

It's 1995, folks, and I've got big problems. I love Saturday morning cartoons and I especially love Saturday morning cartoon theme songs. I have some of the songs in various places in my record collection. I have the original album by The Archies from my youth, and I also have a pair of 7" singles by The Banana Splits that I ordered from Kellogg's cereal boxes when I was five years old. In the mid-'80s, the wisely named TVT Records put out a series of albums called Television's Greatest Hits, that were completely comprised of nothing but TV theme song after TV theme song. I had a few volumes of Television's Greatest Hits, and included on there were a great many scattered songs from Saturday morning cartoons, but still it wasn't what I really wanted. There was just something missing...

It turns out that the "something missing" was a compilation album entirely made up of new renditions of some favorite themes and occasional "in-show" songs from cartoons of my youth, all performed by current bands who may or may not have ever heard the songs they were being asked to perform. (More on that notion later in the piece. A-ha!... Yay, foreshadowing!)

And late in 1995, that very album arrived in the form of a CD and long-form video called Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits. Cartoon Network, naturally, was involved in the promotion of it all, which included an airing – on a Saturday morning, nonetheless – of an 90-minute-long show (with commercials; the album itself it 65 minutes in total) featuring videos for the songs on the CD. Producer-composer Ralph Sall supervised the project, and brought in a lot of big names from the alternative and punk music worlds to take part. Somehow, most of the pairings of musicians to cartoon theme work out surprisingly well. At their worst, they are merely passable with nothing truly egregious to my ears (Collective Soul sounding like they are staring straight ahead having to do the theme to The Bugaloos; face to face basically walking through the Popeye theme); at their best, the matches seemed to have been made in some form of pop culture heaven.

The Ramones riffing perfectly through Spider-Man., with Joey closing the song by singing the last syllable of the hero's name as "Ma-yan". (No, not Mayan...) Helmet thrashing forcefully through Gigantor. The Reverend Horton Heat picking his demented way through that complicated and heart-pounding Jonny Quest jazz score before switching gears halfway through to get all yokel goofy by singing Stop That Pigeon! And do you mean to tell me that honey-throated Matthew Sweet didn't sing the original theme song to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? You could fool me. I'd ask if we could go back and insert Sublime's dub remix of the Hong Kong Phooey theme onto the original cartoons, but it would mean wiping out Scatman Crothers' swell voice, and I couldn't bear a world with any less Scatman Crothers than we already have.

Deep in the Saturday Morning album, I discovered its true revelation. At the time, I and the rock radio world were in love with an eerie, hard-hitting song called Possum Kingdom from a band in Fort Worth, Texas called Toadies. (Not the Toadies...) Truthfully, when I first heard Possum Kingdom, the vocals reminded me so much of Robin Zander's way with a song that for about a month, I thought Cheap Trick was making a comeback. (The dynamic between rhythm section and guitar was very different than Trick's, so it couldn't have been. But still...) When I found out for real who the band was, I rushed out to buy their album Rubberneck, and if I haven't listened to the album around a thousand times, I must be pretty close. It is in regular rotation (if I really have a regular rotation anymore) on my music devices and computer, and I also follow the band's new stuff to this day.

But somehow, even with how much I enjoy Toadies' music – and with singing along to the repeated "Do you wanna die?" part of Possum Kingdom, a song that has served as the template for a hundred rumors – the band's cover of Goolie Get-Together just might be my favorite song by the group.

But first, for the uninitiated. the Groovie Goolies...

The success of transplanting the squeaky-clean students of Riverdale High from the comic pages to television meant that Filmation's The Archie Show (1968-69) would bounce around for another decade in one form or another. The show would stretch into The Archie Comedy Hour for 1969-70, and add Sabrina the Teenage Witch to its cast, giving her a showcase in her own segments within the hour. The following year, Sabrina got a title spin-off while the rest of the Archies carried on in their own series in other forms. But Sabrina shared the 1970-71 season with a gang of gag-spewing monsters called The Groovie Goolies. Once that show was a hit with the kiddies, in the following season, the Goolies split to get their own show for a single season, while Sabrina (like Archie before her) carried her own series for several years.

I said the Goolies had their own show for a single season, with only 16 half-hour episodes produced, but they were all over the Saturday morning schedule throughout most of the '70s in some form. It is always amazing how few episodes there are of some series that have carried on for decades sometimes. The Jetsons was a single-season show in 1962-63 with only 24 episodes produced, but that one season was shown for years on end. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Hanna-Barbera finally produced another season of new stories, even with its continued success with a succeeding generation. Likewise, Jonny Quest ran its mere 26 episodes starting on September 18, 1964, exactly one week after I was born. If you are thinking, "Hey, Rik was a Saturday morning baby. No wonder he loves cartoons so much!", then you would be wrong. Jonny Quest premiered on a Friday night, facing a prime time audience with a focus on reaching adults, just as The Flintstones and The Jetsons did before it. That the kids lapped it up was pure gravy. By 1967, with the Saturday morning cartoon market finally in full bloom (it started small in the early '60s and built up stronger each year), Jonny Quest finally reached its long run before an audience mostly made up of kiddies, including myself.

Back to the Goolies, I probably watched every incarnation of every Archie series as a kid, and while the show is a little harder to watch today, I really loved the Groovie Goolies back then. Part of the appeal, of course, was my natural inclination towards monsters of all types. The Goolies were less of a family like the Munsters and Addamses, and more like a monster club operating out of a castle (Horrible Hall) on a desolate clifftop. That sounds ominous, and the trappings are meant to invoke a certain amount of spookiness, but the Goolies were just pure silliness. Even the name "Goolie" has been altered from that of "ghoul" – which means "An evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies." [Oxford, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ghoul.] Hardly the fare of Saturday morning TV where there were likely censorship boards who looked out for these sort of things, and I suspect the softening of "ghoul" to "gool" renders the original definition a more babyish appearance and sound.

The main characters were Frankie, an obvious nod to the famous monster of Frankenstein; Drac, the scariest of the bunch (even some of his closeups kind of get to me today), but who serves as the primary and mostly congenial host of both Horrible Hall and the TV show; and Weirdo Wolfie, a slang-spewing hippie-werewolf hybrid who who wears shorts and sandals and rides a skateboard. There a couple dozen other supporting characters who pretty much run the gamut of monster archetypes, outside of a zombie, which would fall into the ghoul category for kiddie television and pretty much off limits. (Also, the zombie renaissance was just in its earliest stage as Night of the Living Dead only came out roughly two years earlier.)

The Groovie Goolies show was also very current in its style, as it mostly operated like a kid version of the immensely popular Laugh-In, then still enjoying its original run on TV. There was little in the way of connective tissue from one scene to the next, with little to no plot at all. Largely, the show was one blackout gag after another, broken up by a couple of musical performances in each episode. There were even specific sequences devoted to Laugh-In-style gags – Weird Window Time – but then the rest of the show would be one joke after the other. Other segments would theme schoolhouse lessons and bedtime stories, but they really were just more scenes for a series of quick gags. Like viewing old episodes of Laugh-In today, the hit-to-miss ratio of the Goolies show is pretty heavy on the miss side, but then again, the Goolies get an excuse for being designed to appeal solely to 7-year-olds. I dearly loved the stupid jokes as a kid, and I can easily soak them in now in the same way that I look back at my old Topps monster trading cards and still have fun reading the lame monster jokes. Or even listening to old Lenny Bruce "Mama, Mama" jokes...

Then there was the Goolies' music...

As I said, each episode of the Groovie Goolies contained two songs. The first song would be "sung" by an all-star monster band that contained Frankie, Drac and Wolfie. Frankie played the drums and xylophones using bones for drumsticks, Drac played a pipe organ a la The Phantom of the Opera, and Wolfie strummed a lyre-designed guitar. However, most of the poses and animation were used from song to song, so is little to no attempt toward having either their lip movements or musical actions match whatever song was being played. In fact, there is so much reused footage that occurs from show to show that you can probably shuffle the episodes, select four or five, and it is likely you will have seen all of the actual animation used for the entire series.

There were several other bands that played within Horrible Hall, which is why I said it feels more like a club where all the monsters hang out than anything. One of the other bands would usually be seen "playing" the second song in each episode, though sometimes the vocals for those second songs would sound exactly the vocals for the main monster band (though not in all cases, such as with the mummies, who had distinct vocals at times). As to those other bands, they were: The Mummies and the Puppies (featuring, quite literally, three mummy musicians and four dogs who also play along; the name is an obvious rock reference and shouldn't need elaboration); The Rolling Headstones, which are three gravestones that somehow play musical instruments; a three-skeleton group called the Bare Boned Band (too bad The Grateful Dead was taken); and finally, the Spirits of '76, a patriotic trio of colonial ghosts.

Now, the theme song to The Groovie Goolies was very well-known to me, as it would be eventually to my two little brothers as well, as they grew up with year after year of some version of the show. Here's how the original tune went in this clip from the show...

But there were several other tunes from The Groovie Goolies that stuck in my head as I came out of childhood and grew to be, well, nothing but a larger child. The chief earworm in the group was the howling call of "... and Weird-o Wolf-ie!!" which sprang from a song about the main monsters on the show called Frightening Frank, Dangerous Drac and Weirdo Wolfie aka The Monster Trio. (Sadly or not, I am still prone to saying that phrase at any given moment should something trigger it in my memories.) Another strong contender for my favorite as a kid was the song Chic-a-Boom. I remember the puppet theatre that my father built which had enough room for all three of us to stand inside it. As a result, we would often turn the construct around and use it as a full stage on which to pretend to play rock band. I recall very clearly we Johnson Boys singing along with "Chic-a-Boom! Chic-a-Boom! Don'tcha just love it?" many times on that stage or just when we played in general. And I always really liked songs like Monsters on Parade and The First Annual Semi-Formal Combination Celebration Meet the Monster Population Party... look, if you are going to have a place full of every type of monster, you had either be ready for either a parade or party... or both. And you can bet there will be songs that come out of it.

The truth of the matter is that I could pick any of the thirty-plus songs that were played on The Groovie Goolies show and place them on one of these mixtapes, and no one would blink about it, nor would I. The show was about monsters that (mostly) sang about monsters or monster-related activities. But the song that stuck with me the most over the course of the past 40 years was that damned catchy theme song. However, which version should I use. The actual show version of the theme song is less than a minute long, which just never felt long enough. The album version released in 1970 – which featured three guys in really bad monster makeup on both the front and back covers, but still had images from the TV characters too – has a much longer version of the TV theme (at 3½ minutes) and it is one of the rockier songs on the record, even if it is really only a country rock rave-up that turns into a sing-along. But it was the only version I had for a long time. And I didn't know I needed another one.

Enter... Toadies

When Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits came out, I went hardcore into pushing it on my friends. It became part of an all-night animation fest that I held at my apartment in 1995, in which the plan was to end up on Saturday morning having to watch the promotional special while we all ate breakfast cereal. This is after we spent about a dozen hours watching all manner of Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, and other cartoons through the night. (Most slept through a chunk of it, of course... we were all working people and many were college students in those days.) The reaction to the show itself in the morning was tepid at best, mostly because it was ruined by host Drew Barrymore and her friends doing the same thing we were doing, by breaking into the middle of the individual videos in the special with their own giggling and dopey commentary. Dammit, we were trying to do that, Drew! Get your own animation festival! Or at least one that doesn't intrude upon mine! I know the intent was to be post-post-post-everything and oh so cool by laughing at popular culture and nostalgia, but all it really did was piss off the people who legitimately wanted to hear the music (and possibly buy it). And for Drew Barrymore-hating me, it just made her look like that much more of a self-absorbed asshole.

Regardless of stupid interruptions, the Saturday Morning special did have some pretty groovy videos within it, Most often, the best videos were the ones where the songs were already the more successful translations from past to present. The Violent Femmes' video for Jet Screamer's classic Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) (from The Jetsons) was favored over most of the other, with the jumpsuit-wearing Femmes pretending to play in front of rear-projected Jetsons footage and looking like they having a great, goofy time while also looking just about as uncomfortable and out of place as they did when they made a cameo on an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch a few years later. Helmet does a fantastic video for Gigantor, and the appearance of the band (in muted color) playing in front of the black and white cartoon explosions from the cartoon make their video arguably the most dynamic of the bunch. Liz Phair looks like she is genuinely having a ball doing The Banana Splits theme, all while wearing a go-go dress. Juliana Hatfield was pretty much born to sing Josie and the Pussycats.  And as always, the Ramones have the superpower of being... well, the Ramones, and thus they are able to team up with a certain web-slinger to make sure that their video for Spider-Man becomes a hell of a good time.

And then we come to Toadies covering the Groovie Goolies. But first the video...

Toadies
Goolie Get-Together
(Written by Linda Martin and Janis Gwin)

[Chorus 1]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

[Guitar solo]

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together!

[Chorus 1 repeat]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Everybody shout!!!

The words to Goolie Get-Together are devastatingly simple, but after all we are only being invited to join a bunch of monsters at a party. You don't want to make the invitation too complicated or nobody will show up to the gig. The single verse is repeated twice in the song, and there are two variants on the chorus; the first one is only repeated at the tail end of the song, and we get version 2 of that chorus thrice overall. Also note that while the song is titled Goolie Get-Together, the words "Goolies get-together," with the name of the group pluralized, is actually sung in the song (and appear on the official lyric sheet that way too).

It is the performance by the band Toadies that is the remarkable thing here. While, of course, the recording of the song took place in a studio (Planet Dallas), the sound of the song has a true live feel to it. I have heard full, actual live albums that sound less "live" than this track. Adding to this feel is the video, which is one of the few (if not the only one) in the special that incorporates stage footage of the band actually performing the song they are covering in the special. The footage is edited into the video, naturally, so you don't see an unaltered performance; instead, in the MTV style, it is chopped up and lightly tossed with footage of the Goolies mucking about and causing all sorts of chaos. The Toadies stomp about on stage and work the song hard, while the screen seems to ripple and flash as if being threatened by a lightning storm.

And in the song, lead singer Todd Lewis imparts almost as much passion into singing about a cartoon monster party as he does to singing about coming from the water, swearing he won't backslide and become the hypocrite he seems to fear becoming, or convincing a girl to self-immolate to join him in the afterlife. Dare I say he brings the song actual gravitas? He makes it sound like his band really is performing at Horrible Hall and have committed to coaxing a crowd inside to join in all the ghoulish, silly fun. You can almost feel the sweat and hum of the club, and as Lewis grips his guitar and dives into another chorus, you think, "Yeah, I wanna join the Goolies at their get-together..." The song hypnotizes me nearly every time into believing that I am at that clubhouse, ready to become one of the crowd. It's the best rendition on the album, built out of what might be one of the lightest, simplest songs covered on it.

Even Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) has more lyrical depth to it than Goolie Get-Together, and half the song is just "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah" sung relentlessly. Getting back to what I said at the beginning about the bands participating in this album not necessarily being fans of the songs they are covering, I had the pleasure of being allowed to hang with the Violent Femmes in the green room of their show during one of their appearances in Anchorage, Alaska. Singer-guitarist Gordon Gano asked me if there were any particular songs or rarities that I would like to request that evening, and I said, "Maybe it's a longshot, but Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah?" Gordon gave a sly smile, shook his head, and said, "Man, the last time we played that song was when we recorded it for that album." 

He told me later that he really didn't know the song or the show growing up, and that they selected the song from a list of potential songs for the album. I asked him to play T. Rex's Children of the Revolution instead (which the Femmes had released as a single off their third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, in 1986). They did, and I was happy; it was really a killer show. But the crowds would really go nuts if they ever did play Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah.

If only they understood the power of the animated side...

Other Countdown to Halloween Thrills in Cinema 4 Land...

If you stopped by here because of the Countdown to Halloween website, thanks for visiting. I have posted new material every single day in October thus far, and plans are to keep that going for the rest of the month. But I have other sites taking part in the Countdown this year, so I want to take the opportunity to let you know about what is going on at one of them today.

On my animation website, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a post about a 1930 cartoon from Van Beuren Studios called The Haunted Ship, starring a long-forgotten team called Waffles the Cat and Don the Dog. The pair would only star in a few shorts before being humanized into a more well known team called Tom and Jerry, who would make a couple dozen shorts before retiring for good. Years later, MGM would take up those character names for a totally unrelated cat and mouse team of their own, and make cartoon history.

The Haunted Ship is an odd little cartoon, both an undersea adventure involving sharks, eels, rays, turtles, and octopuses, but also a full on Halloween cartoon, in which they tangle with skeletons and monsters as well. And its also a bit of a musical. Somehow, it ends up being far more enjoyable and watchable than you might think.

You can read all about The Haunted Ship by clicking here.

And keep checking back here on The Cinema 4 Pylon for more Countdown to Halloween fun!

RTJ

There's More Countdown to Halloween Fun in Pylon-Land to Be Had!

Looking for some more Countdown to Halloween fun today (whatever day that happens to be that you are visiting this page)?

On my animation website, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a new post about a longtime Halloween favorite, Walt Disney's classic Mickey, Donald and Goofy vs. spooks romp, Lonesome Ghosts (1937). Goofy quite literally says, "I ain't afraid-a no ghosts!" in this film, and with our three heroes trying to remove a quartet of pesky creeps from a haunted house, you can bet that if this film isn't a direct inspiration for Ghostbusters, it at least had some residual influence on its creation.

You can read all about Lonesome Ghosts by clicking here.

But that's not all! My writing partner and pal, Aaron Lowe and I have a Stephen King blog called We Who Watch Behind the Rows. Our ritual is to take a written work by King, read it, and then discuss it back and forth. Once the book is done, we then tackle any film adaptations (and even their sequels) made from that written work.

Our concentration for October is on King's first published novel (not his first written, mind you), 1974's Carrie, which many of you may know even better from the 1976 film directed by Brian De Palma. We will tackle the De Palma film in the coming weeks, but for now, we have published our discussion of the novel on our website. For me, it was the first time in roughly thirty years that I have read the book, and for Aaron, who has actually read far more of King's works than I have, it was his first crack at this book.

To read our discussion of Carrie [The Novel], click here.

And keep checking back here at The Cinema 4 Pylon every day throughout October. You never know what you might find here!

RTJ

More Countdown to Halloween Fun on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc...

A bit of an open day on The Cinema 4 Pylon as local job searching played a heavy hand in today's activities, but fret not, dear friends. I have a fresh Countdown to Halloween post on my animation site, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, today based on the 1942 Terrytoons cartoon, Frankenstein's Cat. The short has the titular monster running amok on a village full of once happy mice and birds, until Mighty Mouse shows up to (what else?) save the day! 

Loaded with plenty of early '40s monster movie spirit, Frankenstein's Cat is a fun addition to any Halloween-oriented cartoon playlist. Check out the article (and watch the cartoon) by clicking here.

The Monster's on the Loose!!!: Non-Chaney, Pt. 1: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad... Something?

"Werewolf, werewolf, come and get me!"

Those were the words I chanted in complete darkness one evening as my school chum Mark Kiehl and I were each tucked tight in our sleeping bags on the floor of the downstairs family room area in my parents' house in Eagle River, Alaska. Mark was staying for a sleepover with myself and my brothers, and after a day of rambunctious play in the woods surrounding our home and most likely watching something goofy on television that evening, we were too wound up for bedtime but were, of course, under the then-usual parental orders to keep it down. But the late evening was filled with whispered jokes and rampant giggling, and because we were kids, and because I was, as I am now, ME, the darkness always brought about talk of monsters.

And thus, while we continued our course of giggling and joking, a discussion about werewolves ensued. I had to show my pal that I was not afraid of werewolves in the least, when the truth was, living in the woods in Alaska in a winter where sunlight was only seen for a few rare hours a day, I was completely petrified of them. And so, to prove my worth, I created the chant, "Werewolf, werewolf, come and get me!" Following my earnest repeating of my brave incantation, in which Mark joined me, there was a pause... a long silent pause... and then...

Following that pause, there were different paws. The kind that came bearing tiny, sharp kitten claws needling into my youthful chest. There was a small thunk on my body and then instant pain. I had completely forgotten the newest addition to our family, a kitten that was now occupying our house, a cute little tortoiseshell that we had named, inventively, Tort. AND I SCREAMED! And then Mark screamed. Not yells, not manly noises of desperate fear like "Arrgghh!" or "Awwww!" but a pair of full girly style screams, high-pitched and ear-shattering. 

Tort the kitten, of course, went flying. Then, there was the sound of hurried footsteps from upstairs where my parents slept, and then those same footsteps down the stairs, and then there was a light coming on in the hallway adjacent to the open family room where the two of us were camping out for the evening. There were some grunted words of disapproval from my father -- possibly betraying that the speaker was close to being on his own trip to Sleepy-town -- a stern warning that my dad had no intent of actually following through with but boy did he mean it, and then the clicking of the light switch to the off position followed by the sound of footsteps out of the basement area and up the stairs, across the upstairs hallway, and back to the master bedroom. Fully reprimanded, we didn't care. We had been giggling the entire time. We continued giggling and saying stupid, meaningless, childish jokes to each other – illuminated like a medieval text by more monster stuff, most likely – until we finally drifted off to sleep for the night.

Of all the classic horror monsters, the one with whom I have perhaps the deepest personal history – aside from Bigfoot, whom I consider more of a by-product of the modern age despite having old roots himself in native cultures – is the werewolf. Before the creatures created by various mad scientists, the vampires and their attendant bats, assorted aliens of all shapes and sizes, and Godzilla and his kaiju lot, and especially King Kong took over my life, I had rather a close relationship with werewolves. Or at least I imagined that I did.

Growing up in Eagle River, Alaska in the mid-1970s, we lived in a neighborhood largely unencumbered by such fancy, modern niceties as street lighting or even paved roads in much of our area (in our neighborhood, at least; don't even get me started on when they oiled the gravel roads to keep the dust down and we had to ride our bikes through it). Our neighborhood was more woods than housing development, with the thick spruce and birch forest of the Chugach Mountains threatening to grow in around us on all sides. There were often a couple or three acres between homes, and sometimes much larger swaths between homes, though we had good friends as neighbors to our right and also across the street. But since we played in these woods all day long, sometimes at night, and especially in the long Alaskan winters, werewolves turned safety concerns on their ear. The thought of creatures borne of claw and fang or one turned to such a fate by a potentially rabid bite from another such creature was constantly in my mind, if not the minds of my friends. 

Apart from the moose that came through quite often and the bears that we saw maybe once a year or so, one imagined all manner of things out in those woods. By "one," I mean me, specifically. I can't speak for all of my friends, but I know several of them were as swept up in this madness as I was, but I am speaking here of my personal fears and demons. The problem for me was not only werewolves; Bigfoot or Sasquatch or Yeti or whatever you wanted to call him (except for Skunk-Ape, which I still maintain is a stupid name), I was already beset on all sides by giant, furry humanoids, spawned in my mind, like most horrors, by the appearance of such creatures in any number of cheap horror films, but especially from episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man. But let's save the Bigfoot variety for another future installment of The Monster's on the Loose, because there are definitely a couple or three about Bigfoot on their way. Besides, out of all of the monsters (not counting dinosaurs, which I don't consider to be monsters because they were real living creatures), werewolves really got to me full force first.

But the way that werewolves took over my life for this period that now seems so brief in retrospect wasn't what you would think. The source was a far more innocent spring than a outwardly fiendish horror flick.

The Three Little Pigs (1933, Walt Disney)

Technically, it was regular ol' ordinary cartoon wolves that first got me to the werewolf stage. One particular wolf, in fact: The Big Bad Wolf. I would maintain that he was far from ordinary, of course. He talked, he wore a top hat, and he also wore patched-up pants with green suspenders. Regular wolves did not dress like that. No, this is not just any Big Bad Wolf from the fairy tale books. This was Walt Disney's version of The Big Bad Wolf. At numerous points in my childhood, I had occasion to see the Walt Disney cartoon from 1933 of The Three Little Pigs, the Oscar-winning short that had the world singing along to Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? The song, of course, is sung in laughing derision at the wolf in the story by the titular pigs, or at least two of them, who learn a hard lesson and have to be saved by Practical Pig, the smartest and only industrious one of the trio.

And somewhere between watching that cartoon and reading the book version, I created my own answer to "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" I was. Despite all the logic that I could muster, I was the one who was afraid. If the image of a sneering, snarling God had not gotten into my psyche first, haunting my dreams in my early childhood by continuously grinding me to a pulp within the cruel gears of the machineries he used to control the universe, then Disney's Big Bad Wolf would truly represent Ground Zero of my Fears and Neuroses. I created my own monster from a mere cartoon character who, yes, was supposed to be big and scary, but only in an early 1930s, Great Depression sort of way. In fact, the cartoon and song were so popular at the time of their release they were seen as a tonic towards boosting the spirits of the millions of Americans (and others) caught in the wake of economic disaster. The Depression itself became "the Big Bad Wolf".

But I was living forty years later, and I had somehow brought the Big Bad Wolf to full life in my own mind. This Big Bad Wolf didn't have a care for mere little piggies; he was instead a ravenous monster set upon my own destruction and devouring. On our property in Eagle River, we had a house that was built pretty much into the side of a carved-out hill, where the top floor, which wasn't completed until a couple years after the basement was finished, sat a few feet above where our front yard was on the other side, and the original basement had its own separate entrance on the original side facing out from the hill. We had a long, gravel driveway in the front of the basement entrance side of the house, and our entire property was composed of woods whose mostly birch trees, in the winter, displayed threadbare branches that seemed rather haunting in the moonlight to me. Meanwhile, the other primary tree in the forests there, the spruce, could hide any mystery fully behind it due to because they never lost their needles due to a changing of season. Spruce were curtains of portent waiting for a thousand phantoms to make their grand entrance onto the stage of my demise. And behind those spruce were also creatures like the Big Bad Wolf.

To get up to our house from our lower driveway, you had to climb a long, wooden set of stairs. (The upper driveway, whose horrors were unceasing for me, will become a major player and villain in the second part of this article, so just you wait and see.) The lower driveway that ran from the then (and still, having just visited the place freshly) almost entirely unpopulated and hilly street behind us, sat far below the basement level of our house, enough so that there was a fairly high area beneath the porch for storage or many other purposes, though we mainly used it as a handy pirate or monster cave in various fantasy adventures.

We played all over our property, in every possible corner of the woods surrounding us and in the small fireweed field in the back lower part, and even off the sandy cliff behind our house, where we used to see how far down the hill we could jump before we reached the street. (That hill seems so tiny now.) When we weren't playing all over our own property, we were extending our adventures to our neighbors' property, the Wachsmuths, who were our friends and neighbors in Anchorage and moved to Eagle River and had a house built next door to us at the same time. And in the name of American imperialism, when we weren't playing on our property and the Wachsmuths, we were running through acres and acres of the mostly wooded, sparsely populated areas surrounding us, claiming those lands for ourselves.

It is amazing we never killed ourselves or anyone else in those days. We were fairly reckless about climbing high into spruce trees and bounding down the steepest of hills. And of sledding down impossible angles, and even down a good portion of the mountain behind us at some points. We ran into moose rather often, and learned the ins and outs of dealing with those creatures safely; black bears, we saw quite rarely, but they happened onto our street only a couple of times. But somewhere in the midst of all this actual danger – even though we never had a run-in with real wolves, just foxes – I developed a fear that the Big Bad Wolf was right behind me anytime that I went up those steps that extended from the lower driveway.

I don't know how the notion got into my head of being scared of the Big Bad Wolf on a personal level. I had seen the character on The Wonderful World of Disney, of course, and we had a Little Golden Book that told the Disney version of The Three Little Pigs. Naturally, my brothers and I were entranced by the artwork, so all three of us read that book many, many times in our youth. But I don't remember being scared of of the BBW when I was really, really small. It took a gymnasium showing at Eagle River Elementary one night to do the trick. In a town where there were no local movie theatres, mind you, having a local school host a movie night was a big deal. Especially for me, who was already figuring out at an early age that I had a more than normal connection to and perception of the movies. This particular night, the school showed a feature called Namu, the Killer Whale, a fictional film with a semi-nature documentary feel to it, the subject matter of which stuck in my mind (quite obviously, if you know of my love for ocean life as well). On the program with Namu were a few selected short films, including a couple of cartoons. Among them was Disney's The Three Little Pigs.

Seeing TTLP on an actual screen (I would not say "big screen" in the usual terms, because it was a standard pull-down screen that any school multi-purpose room had, though certainly far bigger than our comparatively tiny television set at home), and hearing the constant churning click of the film projector, was a revelation to me in what must have been either second or third grade for me. (Just before fourth grade, we moved to another school, Homestead, where one night I remember seeing a different set of Disney films, like The Shaggy Dog, which also has a semi-werewolf theme to a certain comic extent.) The sensory overload of attending these movie nights with the series of films and shorts, and the smell of fresh buttered popcorn, were nirvana to my young mind, and since I perceive my movie fandom as being composed of a series of "Aha!" moments, these nights were some of the earliest of those. The sensation of seeing films like Namu has never been out of my mind (nor has the next feature we saw in that gymnasium: The Man Called Flintstone, along with a Canadian cartoon called The Great Toy Robbery), but something weird clicked for me with The Three Little Pigs. The Big Bad Wolf truly came to life.

Seeing the creature on the screen, drooling and licking his chops with a leering grin and a fast but loping walk throughout the cartoon registered in my brain, and the brief sideways glances the wolf would make at the camera whenever he strode onto the screen were aimed directly at me, more and more each time he did it. It was also his penchant for using disguises, for employing phony voices and accents, the sneaky way he hid behind trees and cornrows, and did anything he could to get at the pigs, including displaying his awe-inspiring power of blowing down buildings (except those entirely made of brick and stone), that made him a formidable opponent in my young mind. (He is even shown as a "carpetbagger" for a few seconds, a reference that I did not understand as a child.) All of these aspects combined to make this BBW a monster to be feared. No matter that he is handled by cartoon's end with a major dose of appropriately dispensed comic justice that leaves him naked (by wolf terms, left only in his fur, dragging his burnt rear on the ground) only meant we could be back for revenge and dinner later.

And somehow, I became convinced he had followed me home, and was lurking about the woods surrounding our abode. I also connected him only to moments when I was alone, even in the daytime, or if I was the last in line in the darkness. I had no fear of him (or even thought of him) except for in those particular moments. Before we built the top half of our house, we most often parked in the lower driveway that came off the nearly empty and wood-filled street behind our house. Those long wooden steps at a relatively steep angle were not exactly built for speeding up them with smaller, stubbier legs (I would have no problem now in the leg department), and if it were the middle of the day and I were playing with my friends and brothers, I had no worries at all about moving up and down them. But left on my own, even in the daytime? Turning my back on the woods and the small fireweed patch where the wolf could be lying in wait to climb the stairs? Heaven forbid...

I had two options. The first was becoming very practiced in carefully going up the stairs backwards so I could watch behind me, though there was always a lot of stumbling and scraping of elbows, hands, and shins on the rough wood of the sides of the steps. And a lot of splinters. The other problem with this method was that it was not very efficient. The second option was to actually go with the run up the stairs, and when I got to those moments, I had a procedure. Exceedingly fearful each time, I took a first step onto the stairs, almost like testing the water, while I would look carefully around in every direction. And then -- I would bolt! Bolt as fast as my scrawny legs could carry me up each step. This meant, of course, that I could never go fast enough. I invariably felt like my feet were stuck in quicksand and so I would often stumble when trying to speed up even more, because I could feel the hot, panting breath of the Big Bad Wolf on my neck and hair, as he slathered his wet tongue up and around his razor sharp canines in preparation of making me his next meal.

Damn it, I am scaring myself all over again...

There was a third option that I employed very rarely, and it made no logical sense to me whatsoever, but I would sometimes choose to simply ride my bicycle all the way around to the end of the block – by myself, through longer stretches of woods on either side – and then around to the more populated street that led to our other driveway, which I would then ride to safety to the top of our basement and walk down to your porch from there. So, I would spend more time getting to our house with exposure to the monsters of the forest to avoid going twenty feet up some steps because an imaginary cartoon wolf might sneak up behind me.

As long as we lived in that house, I never got over that fear of The Big Bad Wolf, but it totally went away once we moved elsewhere in town following my parents' divorce (I was thirteen). But before we moved, I shifted my attentions beyond a mere everyday-style cartoon wolf and began obsessing about an even greater threat to my being: the lycanthrope.

There are two particular werewolf moments – one literary in its source, and one cinematic (and it is not the one you might be thinking) – that influenced my werewolf obsession to the largest degree, but first, I want to get into a little bit of background in my lycanthrope experience. There were smaller influences, but they were no less notable for their repeated intrusion onto my boyish psyche.

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf? (October 24, 1970)

Many kids of that time, since we were in an age just before the video/VCR revolution, got their first exposure to classic monster archetypes through shows like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? We were no different. We watch Shaggy and Scooby on TV every Saturday morning of our childhoods without fail, and to say that we were in some ways raised by the Mystery Machine team is not to exaggerate. There was an out, however, with Scooby-Doo. There was an eternal escape hatch, that allowed kids to release their fears by episode's end: the revelation that the monster was nothing more than a man in a costume.

"And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!" was a refrain we knew full well, and while I definitely voiced my displeasure from time to time that the monsters were never real (even today; the notion goes against my rules for horror films), I secretly liked finding out that a mask could be pulled off, and what seemed so frighteningly real a few minutes before was nothing more than the scariest monster in all creation: man himself. In some ways, I guess you could say it was part of why I grew to accept fantasy creatures as friends more readily than I did human beings from that point forward.

In the second and last of the original seasons of Scooby-Doo, Where are You?, in October of 1970, there was an episode called Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf?. I am fairly certain I probably saw it when it premiered, as I was already fully baptized in the ritual of Saturday mornings – rising with the dawn to crackle the TV to life; Sundays, too – but naturally, I can't be sure I saw the actual premiere. Regardless, I loved Scooby-Doo so much as a kid, even with the monsters turning out to be fake, because fake or not, the show still had monsters and ghosts and all manner of ghouls roaming around at night tormenting a funny teenager and his talking dog, both of them 'fraidy cats who still seemed to capture the monster by the end of the episode. (Sorry, but Shaggy didn't register with me as a stoner when I was a kid, because I didn't know what that was. Nor was he actually meant to be, no matter how it is seen now in the Age of Irony.)

The werewolf in Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf? is actually more of a wolfman (yes, I know it is a guy in a mask) type than werewolf. Across the board, most people (myself included) tend to use the term "werewolf" for shape-shifters with lupine characteristics, but there is sometimes a further breakdown into smaller subdivisions: werewolves vs. wolfmen. The first acts and looks more like a wolf, a man who has turned into a wolf but maintains most of the physical nature of the wolf, including shedding all human costuming and chiefly running about on all fours. The second is more like the Lawrence Talbot character played by Lon Chaney, Jr, in 1941's The Wolf Man, where he may get all furry in the face and body, but still mostly moves about as a man would in a bipedal fashion, and wears human clothing.

So, the Scooby-Doo lycanthrope has a full suit of clothes, though his feet are not shod and are open to reveal large canine feet with claws and fur, and he only runs about on two legs and opens doors and throws things at the other characters (such as barrels) using his hands. Of course, it is quite obvious he would considering he actually is just a man underneath a disguise, but the look is rather apparently based on the popular Chaney mold. Why the wolfman/werewolf is green is a question for whomever built the costume for the villain underneath the mask, because that is something I have wondered since I was a kid. still, the look works and it is far more effective than the werewolf in the other similar episode in the original two seasons (A Gaggle of Galloping Ghosts, where they meet Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman, who is not really scary at all).

I had, as a kid, a modicum of fear built around some of the monsters on the Scooby-Doo show. The mummy episode with his chanting of "Coin! Coin...!" was a favorite in our house, and especially with our mother, who delighted in repeating it, in the same way that I loved saying, "Igua! Igua!" from Jonny Quest. The design of the ghost figures was always pretty frightening to me, and along with other villains like the Spooky Space Kook, the glowing sea diver, the Funland robot, the Creeper, Mr. Hyde, and the Ghost Clown, they remain some of the more evocative images from my youth.

Jonny Quest: Werewolf of the Timberland (January 7, 1965)

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, Jonny Quest, was a wonderland of thrills for me since I first discovered it as a child, and I was so very frightened of many of its episodes. Robotic spy devices that were built in the shape of a spider, giant crabs, sea monsters, snow monsters, pterodactyls, creepy gargoyles, komodo dragons, and that really horrendous invisible monster that is revealed to have one big eye!! Argh!!!

Quite the opposite of Scooby-Doo's outcomes (and predating that other Hanna-Barbera production by about a half-decade), Doug Wildey's exquisitely designed Jonny Quest usually let most of its horrors and terrors be exactly what you thought they were. It was not a show for skeptics like Scooby-Doo was. (There is a bit of an irony to the fact that in real life I try to approach almost everything, from the news to rumor to urban legend to religion, with a skeptical eye, but when presented with entertainment, I am pissed off if you ruin my supernatural fun with logic.) A few episodes of Jonny Quest played about with initial impressions and pulled the rug out slightly from you (as this episode under brief discussion here does), but for the most part, Jonny and his non-traditional family were supposed to actually be encountering the various beasties within these stories.

Believe it or not, the original series of Jonny Quest was only produced for a single season in 1964-1965, and then it ran for eons after that. Much like Scooby-Doo, it always seemed like Jonny Quest was on, year to year, on Saturday mornings, but there were only a scant 26 episodes from that first season. (Later episodes and TV movies were produced after the characters were updated for the '80s and '90s, but they had nowhere near the impact of the original show.)

In Episode #17, Werewolf of the Timberland, Team Quest goes to Ottawa to investigate a major fossil find (a rare form of petrified wood), but there are some criminals running an illegal gold-mining operation in the forest nearby who want to run people off from the area. To frighten outsiders away, one rather large fellow – with an outrageous French-Canadian accent, as they all have in this episode – has taken to dressing boldly as a wolf-creature called the Loup-Garou. His costume is made of wolf skins, and has a headpiece through which his own face sticks out through the jaws. In the opening scene, associates of the criminals are attacked by what they believe to be a werewolf, and so they confront the one they think responsible, but he claims to have been in all night. Is there a real werewolf at large in the woods?

Soon enough, Jonny and Hadji head out on their own and bungle upon the true plan. They find out the miners are smuggling the gold in hollowed out logs from a sawmill, and then mix them those logs in with the non-altered ones that are sent down the river. The boys get caught by the crooks but are rescued by White Feather, a stiff-talking Native American who is accompanied by an abnormally large wolf, whom he calls Gray One. From there it is a battle against the phony Loup-Garou and exposing his gang, while their dog Bandit gets the worst of a run-in with a skunk.

The episode has good atmosphere at the beginning, with a marvelous title card, and an opening scene that sets up the werewolf action perfectly, even if the victims only get away with some scratches. (Keep in mind, people would meet their doom on Jonny Quest, so it wasn't all goody two-shoes behavior.) Most of the episode gets so caught up in their dog Bandit's hijinks and the surprisingly complicated plot involving the criminal gang that the horror atmosphere from the beginning dissipates pretty quickly. That said, the final showdown between the Loup-Garou and the Gray One on the cliff above the river is pretty well conceived visually (see right).

I do wish the angle they had taken was in making us believe that it was perhaps White Feather who turned into Gray One, and then have it revealed they were just friends all along, as opposed to having them side by side the entire time. Instead, the title ends up being a lie, as the werewolf is nothing more than the hoaxer in disguise, which puts us solidly into Scooby-Doo territory, though we do find out in the first five minutes what that hoax is, so there is no big reveal. That reveal is merely a casual slide into the knowledge that there will be no big monster payoff in this particular episode of Jonny Quest for once, just a tease. 

Still, it didn't matter to me then. Jonny Quest had its hooks in me, which carried enough built-in fear and excitement from week to week that even the weaker episodes such as this would have me on the edge of the couch. It was clear that first wolves, and now werewolves, were haunting the woods around me and building up their presence in my fear index. But it would take a trip to the library and then an accidental viewing of a certain film one afternoon to turn my last winter in that neighborhood into one of the most frightening periods of my life.

To be continued in Part 2... COMING SOON!