As one more good example of early induction into simulacra I am fairly sure I had no freakin' idea what a fez was even seeing the one on Morocco Mole's head, probably not helped by the way it didn't even sit on his head but balanced precariously on one of his head-points. Every time I have seen a fez on anyone or anymole since that time my consciousness has unravelled a series of memories from this fez on this individual. The shitful animation which means that the tassel is as motionless as the fez itself made it even harder to understand what made up its component parts.
I also never really 'got' the Secret Squirrel/James Bond connection (other newspaper reports said SS was based on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a program I don't recall watching) although obviously part of his appeal without understanding the satirical (? or playful) basis was the gadgets he had at his disposal. (Another newspaper article from 1965 suggests Secret Squirrel is a merely a 'spoof' of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. spoof Get Smart but I think this is going too far) ('Trends in Fall TV Emerging' Brattleboro Reformer 14 August 1965 p. 13).
Truthfully if Hanna-Barbera characters/cartoons of the 1960s have any appeal (and they don't have that much to me, though you'd have to recognise they've meant a lot to many over time) it is in firstly the character design, and secondly the silliness of names like 'Yellow Pinkie', which, Win Fanning is right, I never understood until I read it just this morning. But names like 'Goldfinger' become sort of ubiquitous and you don't think 'huh, old mate has a golden finger' (later: ok I was wrong even about that apparently, he just likes gold) you just sort of accept the portmanteau, don't you. If it was Yellowpinkie it might be a little more obvious.
Oops I just disappeared down a wikipedia rabbit hole there of derivation of Auric Goldfinger's name and the possibility that he was named after Ernö Goldfinger another Hungarian who Ian Fleming (btw, did Fleming have any redeeming qualities) probably didn't like. Geez Louise the story of E. Goldfinger suing Fleming over the villain Goldfinger is hilarious, inc. Fleming's suggestion that the character be renamed Goldprick... I didn't even realise that Goldfinger was a not uncommon or at least recognised (well, wikipedia says 'typically German-Jewish') name...
Interestingly (never start a sentence with 'interestingly', I will always tell everyone, ever, like my opinion matters) the original debut of Secret Squirrel was as part of a little Saturday morning package with Atom Ant (originally misunderstood by the press as 'Adam Ant' lol) and a show called The First Look, which sounds like a kind of proto-Sesame Street but without any, you know, good things.
‘Here, the scheme is to use song and dance to beguile youngsters into painless learning.
‘Producer Robert L. Bendick says the series will direct audience attention to 18 areas of knowledge, from prehistoric animals and the United Nations to mythology and jazz.’*
I looked for this on youtube but no dice.
What's really amazing about Secret Squirrel - oh, apart from the fact that he gets about in a car with 'SS' written on it and is consistently referred to as 'SS', only twenty years after the fall of the Third Reich - is that there were only 26 episodes made of the original show, and then 13 more of a revival series about thirty years later (which, incidentally, wikipedia says many think is funnier than the original, like that'd be hard). So let's be generous and lump it all in together: there are basically 39 episodes, assuming they're 7-8 minutes long, I can't be bothered doing the maths (OK, five hours) that's a fifty plus year legacy based on five hours of cartoons (I admit that is more than I thought it would be) where the obviousness of the scripts are matched by the primitive economy of the animation, and repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats up the wazoo. The voice actors are of course the real stars and Mel Blanc and Paul Frees must have really felt like they were doing a great job making tons of money for others (although also, in the mid-60s I am sure even though syndication/repeats were already a thing, no-one could have predicted the longevity of this shit). (I use the word 'shit' with affection/contempt, but the contempt is at least as much for those of us who accepted-absorbed this stuff as it is for those of them who made it). I think I need to know more about Paul Frees, just as I needed to know more about Andrew Sachs until his book took six months to arrive and I didn't need to know anymore by the time it got here.
I'm probably being too hard on everyone involved, I just feel a bit cheated, I was lazy and I could have been learning the violin but instead I was watching cartoons I didn't really enjoy and blaming the world for being boring when what I didn't yet realise was only boring people get bored.
*Clay Gowran ‘Mouse to Lead Parade of Fall Moppet Shows’, Chicago Tribune 11 July 1965 p. 10. Don't ask me why I'm using both footnotes and in-text references, it's just because I can.
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