Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
New Years Days gone by
I used to look forward to New Years Day for one reason and one reason only: one of the local stations would show Underdog for an hour. I think it must have been a special two-parter. I remember it was always the same episode, and it was something truly epic, like: Underdog loses his power. Or, Sweet Polly Purebred nearly gets iced. Something like that.
Lying in bed this morning (dragging ass), I tried to recollect the words to the theme song. I didn’t do too badly — I remembered most of them.
The little guy whose head is shaped like a rotten molar tooth, that’s one of the bad guys, Simon Bar Sinister. The wolf is (if I remember correctly) Riff Raff. I had to check the Wikipedia article to remember “Riff Raff,” and it turns out most of the episodes were multi-parters. I recall that Underdog was a notorious pill-popper, but what I didn’t know was that the network had a problem with that:
For many years starting with NBC’s last run in the mid-1970s, all references to Underdog swallowing his super energy pill were censored, most likely out of fear that kids would see real medication that looked like the Underdog pills (red with a white “U”) and swallow them. Two instances that did not actually show Underdog swallowing the pills remained in the show. In one, he drops pills into water supplies; in the other, his ring is damaged and he explains that it is where he keeps the pill – but the part where he actually swallows it was still deleted.
Aside from Underdog, New Years Day held nothing for me. As much as the Rose Parade bored me* (watching it on TV, that is — far be it from my folks to take us to a parade), college football was worse. So by about 10 AM, long after Underdog had saved it for Sweet Polly, my day was already going to hell.
D.
*But just wait another couple months and our city would throw its annual gala, the Camellia Festival, wherein we would prove that we could make floats like the big boys in the Rose Parade, only, say, 1/100 scale, and with camellias and not roses. Thing about camellias? After you pick them, they turn a lovely shade of brown.
