Soupy Sales

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What Soupy Sales was trying to do, at root, was to explain our excruciating, bewildering childhoods to us, in real time.

This was an era when the original Mad Men ruled the collective unconscious, when a gleaming pastel future, and, by extension, a lavishly sterile present, were held up as ideals and goals. Children were the very hope of America, and were therefore routinely lied to. Television was sanitized for our protection. Networks could not bring themselves to show married men and women sleeping in the same bed. Minorities, their cultures, music, and disenfranchisement, were conspicuous by their absence, sidelined, stereotyped, silenced and in ways both sophisticated and brutal, shunned.

At the time, programs for children were unnervingly cheerful, unrelievedly sentimental, saccharine and coddling in tone and substance. They were the expression and the vehicle for the Disney-animated postwar America of the mind, in which wishful thinking, however understandably, came in large part to paper over and replace critical thinking.

On the surface, the Soupy Sales Show looked a great deal like other kids' programs. The host acted, talked, and dressed like a burlesque of an overgrown child. But Soupy, along with a crew of animal puppets whose thorny personalities were often much more human than the norm of human television acting at the time, was to have a diametrically different role. He was preparing an unknowing new generation for a radically broken future.

This was to be the legacy of the kids Soupy addressed: an unwinnable war which would betray the principles on which they had been raised, an explosive roar of music that sounded like nothing our parents had ever heard or would ever be able to stand, a pervasive distrust of authority and the language of blanket obedience. Soupy would prepare them for what was coming, and also for what would follow: a rust belt world.

Sandwiched between the silent movie-era gags and vaudeville vintage corn, the real humor, much of it unplanned, some of it unfit for television, was offhand, biting, irreverent, the best of it taking lethal jabs at the workings and deviance of television itself. And then there was the music. The son of a merchant who sold sheets to the Ku Klux Klan, Soupy Sales was an unapologetic champion of African-American music, and at a time when much of it was banned from the airwaves as dangerous and valueless "jungle" trash.

And now in this, the rust belt present, a second peculiar milestone came this month, the 50th anniversary of the debut of another television series which, as well as any other institution, explained late mid-century American children to themselves.



http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1123442.html