Phineas T. Bluster, Wonder Bread, and The Mind Machine

[starroute]

I was remembering some stuff from my childhood earlier and freaking out over it. Now I've got to get it off my chest so I can feel sane again...

I've kept thinking the last few days about how much this election makes me feel the same way I did in 1984 -- and in 1972 -- and I wondered how far back those feelings went. This it hit me:

In 1952, when I was not-quite-six, the Howdy Doody Show held a mock election between Howdy Doody and the continuing villain, Phineas T. Bluster. The problem was that in order to vote, you had to send in a label from Wonder Bread -- and my mother would have died before she'd let a loaf of Wonder Bread into her house. I felt helpless, disenfranchised. I was terrified that Howdy Doody would lose, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Eventually, the tension got so bad that I just stopped watching the show. I heard later from friends that Howdy Doody had won, but I still didn't go back to watching. I couldn't bear the possibility of feeling that same way again.

Also, although Howdy Doody might have won, Adlai Stevenson hadn't, and I was very aware of that fact.

There was another tv show I stopped watching at the same time. The Superman show had an episode where criminals had gotten ahold of a mind control machine that had originally been invented for benevolent purposes and were using it instead to make potential witnesses against them forget what they knew. However, because of this misuse, the people it was directed against all went mad and then died. When they proposed to turn it on Superman, I ran out of the room, wouldn't come back, and never watched that show again either.

For the next couple of years, I couldn't fall asleep unless I had one hand clasped firmly over my forehead. It wasn't that I actually believed in mind control machines, you understand, any more than I actually believed there were dinosaurs under my bed or a big bad wolf in the toilet who would jump out when you flushed it. I just felt more comfortable taking precautions.

For fifty years, I've recalled that Superman episode as having been broadcast sometime early in 1953. But I just checked online, and the actual date was November 7, 1952 -- just three days after the election. ("Three congressional witnesses are killed by a hypno-therapy machine run by Lou Cranek, 'Kingpin of Crime.' ")


It's always been a mystery to me why I should have freaked out so hard over a couple of tv shows, but I've figured I was just a strange little kid who was having trouble adjusting to starting school and projected my fears onto the larger world.

What's getting to me now is a realization that it wasn't just me -- that those two shows, and my fears about them, were a true prediction of the world we have lived in since. One election after another really has been won by Phineas T. Bluster, and we really have been disenfranchised and helpless to do anything about it. And though we may not see any mind machines around us, the kingpins of crime really have been able to make every bit of evidence against them conveniently vanish from the public memory.

I suppose that should be a relief of a sort -- except that now I'm wondering about how many of the other nightmares of the 1950's about a crazy-repressive future US are going to come true as well. I'd really rather not live in a Phil Dick world if I can help it.

[eleny]

1. I can't let this sink like a rock

Just 'cause people out there don't know about Phineas. I do. I was born in '46 and remember him too well. I hated him!

But for me, it was the movie Tarantula. For at least 10 years after, I tucked my bed covers under my feet. Because small tarantulas were going to creep up the foot of my bed and bite me. Well, now they really are standing over the house.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. I remember Phineas T. Bluster as well!

I loved Howdy Doody, Super Circus, and Pinky Lee.

[OneBlueSky]

2. one of my earliest memories is meeting Superman, . . .

aka George Reeves, at the Vermont State Fair sometime in the mid-50s . . . my grandmother took me, and I remember him coming out on the stage (I was right up front) in his Superman outfit and thinking how scrawny he looked . . . no evidence of those big muscles at all . . . very disallusioning for one so young . . . but I still have (somewhere) my autographed photo . . .