The Shadow Box (Part 1)

Remember that first television appearing in your house in the early 50s?  That tiny screen in the middle of a big clunky cube? Didn’t it look like some sort of oracle in pre-prophecy slumber, an eye about to open and change everything forever? 

Television itself was a post-war baby boomer. It was a long time in gestation—a couple of decades, at least—but the 50s was when TV came to full life and consciousness, right along with us kids. We were the first generation to grow up with TV, and a wondrous thing it was. 

I disagree with people who decry the existence of television. Whatever its supposed subsequent sins (and that’s a whole other topic), its early years were a phenomenon. It was a fresh, brand-new medium. All kinds of cultural endeavors, both “pop” and highbrow and everything in between that had been around for years in the good old-fashioned mediums like radio, books, movies and live performance came swarming aboard, and we, right there in the front row while TV was still inventing itself, were the fantastically fortunate beneficiaries of this overload of talent concentrated into light rays and fired directly into our brains.

For instance: Because of this brand-new medium of television, I, a (mostly) wholesome freckle-faced New England pre-schooler, experienced the wonders of opium visions without ever touching a hookah or drinking absinthe. I’m talking, of course, about the animated cartoons of the 20s, 30s and 40s which beamed their way into 1950s living rooms and into our hungry little heads via those diminutive black-and-white screens. Now, I realize that we were not the first children on earth to watch these incredible works of art. But we were the first ones to be able to get a fairly steady diet of them, at will, in our own homes, as often as we wanted, simply by flicking on the TV. 

Ah! The confluence of artistry and technology that came together in the “click” of that switch! We were too young to be burdened with wondering what a TV actually was or how exactly it sucked living, speaking pictures out of the air, or why, or to know anything about the complexities that had gone into its invention. We’d never heard of Philo T. Farnsworth. Like everything else around us, it just was. And we were innocent, too, of any knowledge of the amazing history of the art of animation that had been going on since the turn of the century, ever since moving pictures had been born. We knew nothing about the insanely labor-intensive process that was frame-by-frame cartoon animation, and we couldn’t possibly have grasped the dimensions of the creative urge that drove the early pioneers of animation—like Max Fleischer—so that they produced some of the maddest, funniest, most wildly inventive and original works the world has ever seen.

I don’t know if any of those guys smoked opium. It seems unlikely, because the act of cartoon-making and the fierce competition between the studios and artists required such purpose, focus and sheer hard work, not the kind that gets accomplished by lying around with a pipe, but somehow they tapped into that part of the mind that’s usually only accessible through drugs, dreams or high fever. Those old cartoons were pure delirium, straight out of the subconscious, and at the same time full of sly satire and irreverence. A potent recipe indeed. We absorbed it the way hummingbirds absorb sugar.

“Trippy” is barely an adequate word for those old cartoons. It was a phantasmagoric world of impertinent talking animals and bewitched inanimate objects. Forks, spoons and knives got up and cavorted around the kitchen at night, marching, singing, dancing and somersaulting like possessed imps, musically accompanied by jazzy old music from the flapper era. Jolly skeletons played golf in a graveyard with a skull for a golf ball while smart-alecky cats plinked out snappy xylophone tunes with leg bones on rib cages. Sadistic little dogs persecuted big mean dogs, evil mice built elaborate Rube Goldberg cat-tormenting devices, cows and horses wore hats and overalls, walked on their hind legs and spoke and whistled, a walrus dressed in Cab Calloway tails and a bowtie sang “Minnie the Moocher” accompanied by an orchestra of sea creatures. Betty Boop, who, if she were flesh and blood, would be more horrifying than the Elephant Man with her enormous head and tiny mouth, exuded saucy, brazen, naughty sexiness, and her grandfather the mad genius inventor would go into a crazed dance when he got a great idea, his legs whirling around in a blur like propellers while a light bulb flashed over his head. 

No wonder that fifteen or twenty years later we’d hungrily drop acid, mescaline, and psilocybin as if we’d been suffering from a vitamin deficiency and now had the nutrient we lacked. And all those spoons, forks, and conniving animals running amok like wisecracking hyperactive lunatics were downright subversive with their wiseass disrespect for authority and all things sacred. Again, no wonder!

At the same time that we were absorbing this sassy surrealism, another tributary, just as strong, was flowing into the mix from an entirely different direction—inspirational tales of honor and valor featuring noble dogs and precocious, courageous-but-occasionally-mischievous children. 

When Lassie tipped her head, cocked her ears, whimpered and gazed into our eyes, we knew that whatever it was that was holding her back from actually speaking was not much at all. She was so close. Certainly she was thoroughly acquainted with the age-old battle between good and evil, and held dear the values of home and family in her doggy soul. And Rin-Tin-Tin (“Rinty!”), canine cavalry soldier, was defending the American frontier alongside guys with names like Rusty, Rip and Biff. 

What we 50s kids were getting here was the highly focused small-screen realization of a long, fine tradition—what I call the “Brave Dog” genre. We didn’t know about Albert Payson Terhune yet (Lad, a Dog, 1918), or Eric Knight (Lassie, Come Home, 1938) or so many other “dog” writers. We didn’t know about the 1922 Rin-Tin-Tin movie or the 1947 Lassie radio show. What we did know was that these creatures were the living, furry exemplars of the Boy Scout credo: They were kind, clean, courteous, brave, reverent and true. Plus their ethics were impeccable and they could just about bark in Morse code.

Sometimes the human kids in these stories were a step or two behind the dogs in terms of moral development, but with teachers like these—with their warm brown eyes, high I.Q.s  and boundless love—Rusty, Jeff, Porky and Timmy never failed to learn. And neither did we. We got weekly doses of this concentrated essence of animal goodness and wisdom from Rinty and Lassie, both shows starting in 1954 and going on for years. 

We learned from them about truth and social justice, selflessness, sacrifice and honor. And the most important lesson of them all: Humans were often greedy, sneaky, thieving, lying no-good double-dealing backstabbing varmints, but a dog’s heart was pure. What did this add up to in our young heads? Something like this: A dog was good, a dog was nature, therefore nature was good; humans were not always good, to each other or to nature, humans should respect nature, nature should not suffer at the hands of humans. Humans should listen to nature and learn from it—and nature will speak to us, if we know how to listen. 

Sassy, druggy cartoons? Wise nature, sagacious animal teachers? Little kids soaking it all up during their prime brain-growth years as it beamed in, laser-like, through the lens of the TV screen, internalizing it, storing it away? What could it all mean a few years down the road? Hmmm. Let me think for a moment. Can you spell C-A-R-L-O-S   C-A-S-T-A-N-E-D-A?