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Some of my daughter’s favorite songs are from the Buffy The Vampire Slayer musical episode, “Once More With Feeling.” She listens to them and sings them constantly, but she’s never seen a single episode of Buffy. She likely won’t for many years to come. I’m thinking 11-12 at the earliest before Buffy-level violence and sex and goofy facial prothesis are appropriate. True story, for those of your familiar with the songs: My wife just recently had to explain, “His penis got diseases from the Chumash Tribe!”
I wonder what she’ll think when she finally sees that episode. It’s damn near at the end of the series, so she’ll have 5ish+ seasons to get through before she gets to the familiar thing she remembers from her earlier childhood. I wonder if she’ll still care by then, or if my opinion on pop culture will still hold any sway.
COMMENTERS: Is there anything you loved as a kid, or your kids loved totally out of context that would have been crazy innapropes had you known the context?
I’m sure a ton of pop songs fall into this category. Jokes too. I would repeat pretty much any joke I heard on An Evening At The Improv or SNL when I was like 10 years old. Looking back, I’m sure 98% of them were about sex, drugs, airplane peanuts and the deal with them (What is it? What IS the deal?).
I love the Buffy songs! I actually heard them all before I saw the show too, but I had read some of the books, so I had a bit of context. Also I was about 12. Speaking from experience 12 is probably a good age for Buffy.
Airplane! was my favorite movie as a child. I especially loved the blowing up of the autopilot… O_o
Oh man, same here. I'm sure I only saw the TV sanitized version as a kid but even then I doubt I had any idea why I was laughing at the jokes.
Old enough to have seen it in a real theater. So funny I nearly passed out laughing. I think I may have wet myself reading the end credits.
Stewardess, I speak jive…
my brother and i would totally embarrass my mother by acting out Pepto Bismal commercials, also the diarrhea song. Anybody else heard of it? "When you're *da da da da da*…and you *da da da da da*…diarrhea *dun dun* diarrhea. I miss being a kid.
omg, my dad still sings that song! (poop jokes are A Thing in my family.)
When your talk'n to Kirk and you feel something jerk . . . .
I knew that song as a kid, but I think it was standardized and perfected by the Steve Martin movie Parenthood (that inspired the tv show that just ended).
Actually loved that movie. Didn't realise till later that it was set in the St. Louis suburbs I lived in at the time..
Now that my kids are entering teen-hood, I’ve made a list of movies they need to see so they’ll understand what the hell I’ve been talking about for the last decade. In no particular order:
Forrest Gump
The Road to Wellville
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure
Meatballs
Sister Act
Back to the Future
Kindergarten Cop
Halloween
Terminator
The Usual Suspects
The Blues Brothers
Sling Blade
Spinal Tap
The Sixth Sense
War Games
The Matrix
My Cousin Vinnie
Dogma
Friday the 13th
The Crying Game
Airplane
New additions welcome. Presence on Netflix a plus, but not required.
Except for 'The Crying Game', which I haven't seen, I like your list and cut of your jib!
Goonies
Mannequin
Blade Runner
Heavy Metal
Gremlins
Ice Pirates
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Heathers
UHF
Singles
Shrimp, and seafood is general, is kind of weird. I mean, I like it, but I dont like having to peel off the shells myself, and for some reason, thats treated like a goddamn experience by almost every place that serves them. Its nuts, imagine a chicken restaurant cooking the things with the featers and head still on and then telling the customers they'll have to pull off the feathers and decapitate it themselves. I dont want my food to still have eyes when it gets to my table
True story: I sent back prawns with heads still on at the Black Cat and Blue Club in San Francisco because if I have to pay out the nose for them I'm not doing the work of cleaning them.
I especially dislike when restaurants leave shells on and it's in a pasta dish. Like, am I supposed to bust this open wih sauce all over it?
My 3 year old watched Crusty Demons of Dirt Motocross Videos and would run around the house singing Offspring songs because we didn't really do nursery rhymes. At pre-school you'd look along the row of pastel shade jackets and nestled in the middle would be a leather jacket (biking grade) for a 4 year old. We once had to get the nursery teacher to apologise because they'd used the naughty stool for lying when our child was adamant they owned a motorbike and wouldn't agree with the teacher that they didn't. It was a PW50 Honda automatic…
Like your Offspring situation: my daughter's musical taste is eclectic and odd considering that we don't listen to the radio or care much for current pop music in our house. Her current obsessions are the Annie (2014) soundtrack, Wizard Wrock videos she watches on YouTube (bands that play music exclusively about Harry Potter), and the Buffy Musical. The only exposure she gets to pop music is when they play KidzBop songs at school (which seems to be a lot). The only other music she ever hears is what my wife and I play in the car, so she knows a lot of They Might Be Giants, Decemberists and recently she's taken to a few White Stripes songs. I just assume she thinks everyone knows the songs she knows, when in fact I bet none of her friends have ever even heard ANYTHING she likes.
I never got Kidzbop. Even as a kid, I never got Kidzbop. I mean, you wouldn't say to your parents, "Hey, you know those Perry Como and Bing Crosby songs you love! Well, guess what; I got you a CD with a bunch of seniors singing them! You'll like that better than the originals because these guys singing it are in your age group! :D"
How about, if you know I like a certain kind of music, you just get me that music? I really don't need to hear it interpreted by children; it doesn't really improve the songs. *grump*
Well, the idea is certainly not for adults to enjoy these songs. From what I can tell, they are basically "sanitized" versions of pop songs for kids. I am much more of the mindset that parents should choose what media is appropriate for their children and when. If you don't want your kid listening to music with references to sex and drugs, then don't let them listen to that music. It makes far less sense to me to let them hear MOST of a song about sex and/or drugs with SOME of the context removed or replaced. Whenever I hear this stuff at her school functions, I am always taken aback by the odd world choices. It's the same mentality that gave us "This is what happens when you FIND A STRANGER IN THE ALPS!" from the TV version of The Big Lebowski.
When I was the tender age of 7 or 8, my brother was in the marching band and they were doing selections from Phantom of the Opera. I had the cassette tape (yeah) from the broadway musical, but just songs and no story made me fill in the blanks. I was ripped when my brother got to see the full show in Philadelphia and I did not. Only as an adult do I now understand how rapey and gross that whole story is. Still, I fondly look back on my time roller skating figure 8's in my street with my Walkman singing "Music of the Night" at full volume.
High five! Sounds like we are both roughly the same ageish and also local to each other. I had the cassette of the cast recording too. I was in 10th or 11th grade though, and we were doing songs from the show in the school chorus before I got to see the show and understand the story. I can't bring myself to listen to it anymore, mostly due to burn out on it.
I had a lot of similar experiences growing up, where I had no idea how gross the common trope of "Man forces himself on woman and she's damn lucky for it!" in old TV and movies. I grew up on Nick At Night and most of those old 50's and 60's TV shows were pretty god damn sexist and rapey.
Holy god, we decided to watch all the James Bond movies in order, right from the beginning. Good lord you have no idea how bloody creepy and rapey old Sean Connery!Bond is. D: We got about three in, and were just, like, "Welp, that was awkward… On to 'Mythbusters'!"
My parents had me young, so we kind of all grew up together, in a way. So, of course, pretty much all of the music I grew up listening to and singing loudly were totes inappropes for a child, but fine for the twenty-somethings my parents were. Not that it really mattered, though, because I was reading books that were way too grown up for me at an early age, anyway.
Sort of related, I used to work closely with a dance company with lots of home-schooled children (girls, mostly). They weren't allowed to watch movies that were PG-13 (even when they were 16), but they danced to stuff like "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga (even when they were 6). -_-
We took our daughter to Kids Karaoke at a sports themed restaurant when she was about 4 and there were 6 year olds singing Ke$ha songs while their moms just clapped and cheered. "Brushed my teeth with a bottle of Jack," sounds horrifically creepy coming out of a 6 year old little girl's mouth.
When I was a kid in the mid-70's, we used to do things once or twice a week for gym class, such as take swimming lessons, or power skating lessons(figure skating for the girls), and we always walked to the pool or arena. Being totally into music already I always carried around my little battery operated AM radio to play while we all walked. One time in 3rd grade we were walking somewhere and the song "Afternoon Delight" came on, and my teacher asked me to turn it up. Since I had a major crush on her already, that became my favourite song for the next year or so, and I would sing it at the top of my lungs constantly. I would have been about 6 or 7 at the time, and had no idea what they meant by an "afternoon delight"
It's when you have like a cupcake around 2pm, right?
Barbie Girl was my one of my favorite songs growing up. Never understood why it made my mom uncomfortable until I listened to it as an adult!
I hope one day I have a daughter and we have as awesome a relationship as you do with yours.
That's very kind of you to say. Thank you.
Pretty sure she'll love Buffy. And honestly, in many respects Buffy the Vampire Slayer conveys basic coming-of-age life lessons better than Health classes usually do. I think if anything, what you'd need to worry about is that by then she may well not want to watch the episodes with you (I watched them as they aired and was around that age during the first season, and would've been mortified to watch them with my parents).
I wont be super offended if she's "interested" but not "interested with me in the room." That's super normal. As long as the good stuff is going into her head, I'll try not to get my feelings too hurt.
Adorable comic.
Thanks!
"OMWF" is possibly my favourite episode of any TV series anywhere — I am often trying to convince my kids (my daughter's best friend is a BtVS fan) or friends that they should watch the whole series up to that episode. I have often wondered how the music would stand on its own, seems like it'd be missing some context.
There's a ton of context missing. For instance, I don't even know if SHE knows "I'm under your spell" is sung by a girl to a girl. It's almost better this way, because she'll grow up knowing it as a pretty love song and when she finally sees it as being about two girls she won't miss a beat.
Admit it, Joel, this entire strip was just an excuse to reference the shrimp worlds. Not that that's in any way a bad thing.
hah! Actually I sat on this script for days and days with no way to finish it. The shrimp thing hit me when she was listening to the Buffy Musical.
My youngest son has autism and an insane memory for lyrics and anything he has seen written down. He has been known to burst out into Add It Up and Kiss Off by the Violent Femmes. One of my proudest moments, however, was when another kid in his class yelled "Help! Help!" and he yelled "I'm being oppressed."
That's fucking rad.
that is awesome!
Whatever you do, don't let him hear anything from Avenue Q. It's hard enough to not accidentally sing "The Internet is for porn" under my breath with customers within hearing as it is. 😉
My daughter loved Bohemian Rhapsody until she hit 9 or 10 and realized what was going on in the lyrics. Sher then boycotted it until high school or so.
I, like most of young America at the time, fell in love with that song because of Wayne\’s World. I was singing it to myself before the bell rang in humanities class in 7th grade and the teacher (she was an awful shrew) yelled at me. I remember replying, \”C\’Mon! It\’s classic Queen!\” to which she said, \”I know EXACTLY what it is!\” What a joyless shit of a person. Reminds me that in the 90\’s there was this massive collective mind wipe among adults who forgot (or never realized in the first place) that song lyrics could be metaphors or fictional stories, or just random strings of words in no particular order. Singing \”Momma, just killed a man…\” meant \”I think it\’s a good idea to kill people. I\’m advising you do to the same. This song advocates murder. Carry On,\” to people like her (and my mom, for that matter).
I remember the big blowup over teen suicide and songs "supposedly" promoting it in the '80s. Judas Priest got vilified, and for lyrics that were pretty innocuous in my memory. I kept wondering why no one mentioned BOC's Don't Fear The Reaper. Heck, that song pretty much said it straight out, and they had to look for vague metaphors?
My dad sat me down in front of The Doug Anthony All Stars on TV when I was ten. That probably doesn't mean much to non-Aussies, but amongst others they did a song called "Will you stimulate my penis with your hand" to a tune from The Mikado.
The scene in Spaceballs when Dark Helmet is criticizing the way the gunner is shooting and the gunner is called an asshole. It's funny because my last name is 'Astle' and if you pronounce it without the 't' it sounds like asshole.
MALWARE ALERT
Hey Joel, I visit every day but today when I did, Firefox popped up with an alert that says a malicious website was blocked. The alert comes up when I go to the main page, or when I go into this comic or the Faneurisms one.
Firefox is providing this info:
Url: kusik.dijasvjazki.com
IP: 91.209.77.91
May be an ad or something? Anyways, wanted to let you know. Thanks for a great comic! 🙂
ad people are looking into it. thanks!
No prob! 🙂
Is that Dumbing of Age your reading on your device in the final panel?
Yep! I thought it would be too tiny to notice at web resolution.
I remember singing the words to jimmy buffet’s Feeding Frenzy album on the way up to michigan a few times a year. My parents assured me later, once i understood the context of the lyrics, that they found it really creepy at the time listening to a 6 or 7 year old singing along to ‘Why don’t we get drunk and screw’ and ‘come monday’. However, i was having such a great time that they let me go at it.