THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 25
Added 2024-07-19 00:23:46 +0000 UTCI woke up this morning with the theme song for the 70s Public Television children’s show “Vegetable Soup” stuck in my head. Upon watching it on Youtube this morning, it was prefaced with this Bureau of Mass Communications production company trailer that was this beautiful Kraftwerkian 70s technological brutalist piece of functional weirdness. The Vegetable Soup theme then opens up into weird, funky, psychedelic insanity. The song is like a Sly & the Family Stone march about it taking a lot of different kinds of vegetables to make vegetable soup. The contrast is stark but makes sense for the 70s in terms of blurring worlds. Also it shows how much of an impact the psychedelic movement had on everything. Apparently the show was on Public TV & NBC concurrently, but it was on only occasionally on Oakland on PBS. I was too young to understand things like TV schedules or track when my favorite shows were on so I was probably 4 or so, although it reran until 1984 probably. The intro & other animated segments on the show were created by Jim Simon's Wantu Studios, he also did a couple shorts for Sesame Street. His animation style is so weird, it used to scare me but I had to watch it. The drawings were stylized up to the point of being abstract gestures, vibrations. Then they were voiced by Bette Midler, using a variety of exaggerated New York caricatures that just added to the weirdness & then really helps her marrying one of the Kipper Kids make sense. That central meeting of this funky techno brutalism with psychedelic 70s weirdness aimed at kids is the takeaway for me. It’s an acknowledgement of the places we come from but then they are banded together, they have to work together.
