"Where can that towel be hi-yi-yi-yi-yiding?"

May 16, 2013 8:23 PM

Long out of print, "A Doonesbury Special." That is all.
posted by timsteil (36 comments total)

better than 30 Something
posted by philip-random at 8:40 PM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

Oh, thank you thank you! I saw 20 minutes of this when I was 10, and then my mother made me go to bed! Looking for it since. Yay!
posted by Riverine at 8:42 PM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm putting on the turtle neck sweater, the Peace Symbol necklace, opening a bottle of ripple and then I'm going to watch this...

thanks... great way to end the day.
posted by HuronBob at 8:45 PM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

And... the Howard Cosell bit at the 13:40 mark was great!
posted by HuronBob at 8:54 PM on May 16, 2013

The commune is passé.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:55 PM on May 16, 2013

" I went there..."

" to get out of a term paper."

HA!
posted by HuronBob at 8:56 PM on May 16, 2013

"Ella Fitzgerald is NOT a building contractor!"

There are about a million great lines in this. Maybe a million and one.
posted by HuronBob at 9:00 PM on May 16, 2013

What hippybear said. (about the musical.)

I remember renting this on VHS, back when video stores were a thrilling place to go.
posted by Melismata at 9:13 PM on May 16, 2013

It's fantastically ironic that I have not yet seen this special.

I downloaded it from YouTube for posterity a few months ago, when it was linked on Reddit, but I just never got around to watching it, and I eventually forgot I even had it.

If only I wasn't so busy programming...
posted by The Confessor at 9:18 PM on May 16, 2013

I have the day off tomorrow. The mayor of my town was just discovered to be smoking crack. The liquor stores will not be going on strike.

I will watch this with my coffee in the morning. This long weekend is turning out great.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:36 PM on May 16, 2013 [3 favorites]

I found the companion book in a used bookstore a few weeks back, searched on a whim and found the special. Absolutely fascinating. It is pretty much the "Charlie Brown Christmas" of Hunter S. Thompson's "riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave" piece.

John and Faith Hubley did the animation; John was Garry Trudeau's professor at Yale as well as a early Disney animator. He was one of those who left the Disney studio after the disastrous strike in the early 40s, and ended up at UPA for a while, producing Gerald McBoing-Boing and creating Mr. Magoo. After refusing to name names during the McCarthy witch hunts, he teamed up with his wife and made independent animation. John died as the Doonesbury special was being storyboarded; Faith continued on and dedicated the film to him.

It is bittersweet in so many ways.

(The storyboard segment featuring the wild camera zoom up the drumkit over to the guitar fretboard in the Jimmy Thudpucker piece is included in the book; it's amazing the kinds of artistic touches that were thrown into a cartoon primarily about talking heads.)
posted by Spatch at 9:48 PM on May 16, 2013 [7 favorites]

(The storyboard segment featuring the wild camera zoom up the drumkit over to the guitar fretboard in the Jimmy Thudpucker piece is included in the book; it's amazing the kinds of artistic touches that were thrown into a cartoon primarily about talking heads.)

Loved that sequence. It felt very like Ralph Bashki-like. Oh, animation in the 1970s was a glorious thing.

(And now I have the urge to go find as many Doonesbury books on Alibris, etsy and eBay as possible. Boy, do I regret donating my collection to the Friends of the Library sale.)
posted by sobell at 9:50 PM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

Boy, do I regret donating my collection ...
We moved a couple of years ago, and downsized our "stuff", heck, I even donated the bible I was given when I completed the dreaded Lutheran catechism 50 years ago... but, the Doonesbury books, the National Lampoon archive CD, and anything related to Janis Joplin were preserved. Priorities!
posted by HuronBob at 10:02 PM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

John and Faith Hubley did the animation; John was Garry Trudeau's professor at Yale as well as a early Disney animator.

...also due credit as parents of Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo) and her animator sister Emily.
posted by mykescipark at 10:18 PM on May 16, 2013 [2 favorites]

This is really cool - - "unless you're from Vermont, the commune is finito!" - but these voices are so different from the ones in my head.
posted by Miko at 11:05 PM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is really cool - - "unless you're from Vermont, the commune is finito!"

I had a bad flash of the potential Jessamyn banhammer over that. But I'm steady. I love Vermont.

Just a few notes

-- the guy in the red turtleneck looks like Ron Jeremy, and is up for some group sex

-- voices on the telephone are "wah wah wah" like the adults in Charlie Brown

-- the kids at the daycare almost seem like the Charlie Brown Xmas play when they are jumping around. Almost like you could dub Linus and Lucy music under it and it would work.

-- But I think the most poignant thing, I mean really got me, were the first and last scenes, with Zonker in the pond. That beautful tree full of turning leaves. For the life of me that tree looked like something out of Calvin and Hobbes, and I was ready for Calvin to come up wearing that snorkel both times.

-- at the end, Zonker abides.
posted by timsteil at 11:22 PM on May 16, 2013 [3 favorites]

I've long maintained that my foundational knowledge and interest in Vietnam, Watergate, and basically the 60's and early 70's in general, comes from reading my father's original Doonesbury Chronicles in Middle School. What started as "oh cool, comics!" quickly turned into this quest to understand the subject matter and figure out why it was funny. Seeing it animated like this is kind of jarring, since it's always lived in my head as this sort of self-contained textbook time capsule, if that makes sense. Still really cool and amazingly well animated, though. I can't wait to watch the whole thing. Great find, Tim!
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 11:27 PM on May 16, 2013 [14 favorites]

My dad had the same book! I, too, started reading it in junior high and to this day can recall names like Colson, Dean, Ehrlichman, Hunt, Magruder, Mitchell, Liddy, etc. whenever somebody mentions Watergate, even though I was born in '81. The odd thing is, I've always known my dad as a right winger who will attempt a half-spirited defense of Nixon as "corrupt, but not that bad" if you press him on it.
posted by TrialByMedia at 12:26 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

"unless you're from Vermont, the commune is finito!"

Zonker says "China" in the original script. There's a few cuts and alterations, but this one stands out as an interesting one for me. Can't help but wonder who made the change and why.
posted by Spatch at 12:27 AM on May 17, 2013

To me, Vermont is funnier. Might not be much more of a reason than that.
posted by TrialByMedia at 12:29 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

Gotta agree with you on that one.
posted by Spatch at 12:30 AM on May 17, 2013

Whoah!
Hey Dean Yeager you too?
Check out this comment I made last time Doonesbury came up on the blue.
I wonder how many others of our generation had this sort of experience. Crazy.
posted by Senor Cardgage at 1:10 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

My sister and I saw this when we were kids. Neither of us can tell you much of anything about it, but to this day we do "IIIII need a towwwwwwwel" to each other.
posted by Legomancer at 5:20 AM on May 17, 2013

-- at the end, Zonker abides.

Indeed.

Also, eponysterical doesn't quite capture my reaction to this post -- is eponymawesome a word?
posted by Zonker at 5:29 AM on May 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Add me to the list of precocious Doonesbury Kids. I believe my family's exact phrase was that when I asked my dad to explain it to me they '"knew what they had on their hands."
posted by MCMikeNamara at 5:38 AM on May 17, 2013

Further proof that Bill Watterson was right. Putting voices to these characters is uncomfortable.

Wikipedia

After this he was asked if it was "a bit scary to think of hearing Calvin's voice." He responded that it was "very scary," and that although he loved the visual possibilities of animation, the thought of casting voice actors to play his characters was uncomfortable.

posted by DigDoug at 5:44 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is probably the right thread to mention that if my daughter (born in 1980) had been a boy instead, I was going to name her Zonker Scott Eric Fitzgerald Jones. (My second choice was Basketball Jones.)

Anyway, this is awesome and I can't wait to watch it!
posted by MexicanYenta at 5:55 AM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

I wonder how many others of our generation had this sort of experience.

Me three. My parents had a few books. I started reading it in the paper when I started reading the paper, age 12 or so. But then it was all about Reagan. It wasn't really until I started babysitting for a yuppie couple at the age of about 15 that I really got my Doonesbury education. They had a complete set of the books, and starting from the beginning, I was introduced to all sorts of political and cultural history nuance that then sent me off reading and trying to understand all sorts of phenomena from that time.
posted by Miko at 6:07 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I haven't seen this before, and didn't even know it existed. (Trudeau has said that he finds the UK fanbase for Doonesbury perplexing, and has no real idea why we exist. Yet, here we are.)

Seconding the love above. But it also struck me just how distant those times seem now.Trudeau has always had a really good eye for how technology infiltrates everyday life - an aesthetic he shares, albeit in a very different way, with Clive James - and has always kept on the button with the gradual, then tsunamic, way it has changed us. To see this, a land where rabbit ears on TVs are as intrusive as it gets, is more deeply unsettling than any number of "Commodore 64 Thirty Years Old Today!" pieces.

I think it's because the Doonesbury world is so well defined, so continuous and so always there as a simpler alternative universe in our heads, that this sort of flashback is unexpectedly powerful This was a world poised on silicon-fuelled change, the very edge of transition, a normal way of life that now seems almost pre-industrial.

As the bomb said in Dark Star, I must think on this further.
posted by Devonian at 6:45 AM on May 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Heh, I remember wanting to watch this when I was around 9. All I remember is watching it for a few minutes, thinking it was kind of boring, and then having my liberal and hippie-hating father jump up and start screaming at the television, and slamming the "off" switch, and then ordering me to go to bed. And that was that.
posted by smoothvirus at 6:58 AM on May 17, 2013

Reflecting on it further, the funniest thing I remember about it now is how my father had to stoop over to scream at the television set, since it was the 1970s and our family television was like a 19" or thereabouts.
posted by smoothvirus at 7:05 AM on May 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

My parents hooked me with "Dare to Be Great, Ms Caucus." My paper never carried it on the comics page, but on the editorial page.
posted by tilde at 7:17 AM on May 17, 2013

I met Doonesbury when I moved into a sort of dormitory provided by the state to help survivors of ww2 . We we were all sorts of people, struggling at school and unified by the fact that our parents or grandparents had made a special effort during ww2. We were all dumb-asses.
In retrospect, I'd say we were all somehow marked by ww2, even if we were born later.
The cartoon helped us accept our pain was real. Doonesbury was our common ground, across politics

This is so long ago, I don't really know what to say, except I still feel Doonesbury is a space where true emotions and narratives come forward.
posted by mumimor at 1:56 PM on May 17, 2013

Metafilter: You should consider a newsletter.
posted by hot_monster at 2:14 PM on May 17, 2013

WHOA.

You had me at John and Faith Hubley. I've wated to see this for ages. If you've watched Sesame Street or the Electric Company you've soaked in their work. John Hubley is one of the masters of American animation - John and Faith's other work is steeped in jazz and compassion. Faith's own work is beautiful and flowing. Their children animated alongside them, and were featured voices and valued conrtibutors.

OK, you had me at Doonesbury. We had The Doonesbury Chronicles and some of the other collections in the house when I was a kid. It was like reading a parallel history of the 1970s up to the present (this would have been the mid-late 70s.) I didn't necessarily understand all of it at the time, but would return to the volumes as I gained new information and insight, and they always seemed to get funnier, more touching, and sometimes more frustrating.
posted by louche mustachio at 5:43 PM on May 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

is eponymawesome a word?

It is now.
posted by timsteil at 8:21 PM on May 17, 2013