Who the Fuck knew that Howdy Doody was poltiical??? Or the root of media beginnongs being indocrination of small children?

I just had my mind blown in so many ways today, and it only took one clip of old video to do it.

I was watching news this morning, and there was a clip of Howdy Doody in one of the blocks.... which made me all nostalgic and feeling fuzzy, because I only vaguely remember Howdy Doody.  

He was a marionette.  This sort of wimpy red-headed freckled cowboy marionette with too much cheek and a plaid shirt and jeans and of course the boots...  sorta wimpy.  I know I had a Howdy Doody lamp on my night table for a long time, sitting beneath the shade, so I must've liked the show...  

As above...  my memories are sort of warm and fuzzy.  I could only vaguely remember Buffalo Bob, and Howdy, and used to get a kick out of the 'evil' Flubadub, which was supposed to be a conglomeration of seven animals, if I remembered correctly, and having a sound mistrust of Clarabelle the clown, who only honked and was lame.

So I thought I'd go down memory lane, and look into the birth of the tee-vee media, and see what I'd seen as a small child.  I remembered the signation, and the peanut gallery...  a tier of small children, who could be raucous and led to the saying 'no comments from the peanut gallery!'  

The rest was vague...   

The first clip I looked at had some nerd in NY named Daniel who had a ukelele, and Howdy sang about how important it was to look both ways before you cross the street...  teletubbies for the Fifties.  

But that was in 1949, and I'd just been born.

By 1952...  I was a tee-vee consumer of three or so years.    It's one of the first things I remember, if vaguely.  A year later, my parents were getting a divorce, and I was back to listening to radio, my grandfather was a fierce follower of listening to the McCarthy Hearings, and they upset me, because all I knew was....  the fucking senators were mean and putting good people under extreme duress.

Later, it was the Cold War, and our teachers taught us that when... not if... the Russians took over, our parents would be put into re-education camps, some of us would never see some of them again and we would all be indoctrinated.  Needless to say, the lady in question was a radical Rethug.

But we have to go back to 1952...  and the peanut gallery.   Now the structure of the show was simple.  The intro song, something with Howdy, then a lesson, then a silent classic film narrated by Buffalo Bob, and some sort of marionette conflict resolved by the end of the show and a sing-out.

In 1952...  there was a presidential election.  Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson.  And in the April 1st edition...  the peanut gallery got an immersion in presidential campaign politics that....  well today, if you would put that on the tube, it would send heads exploding left and right, because it was crass indocrination.    

I'm still speechless after viewing this.  Let alone how they used direct pressure to make mommy or daddy buy the sponsor's products.  It was a new media.  And boy, did they make the most of it.

This is how my generation learned if even sublimanily, about presidential politics, swing states, and voting.  Just skip over the silent film part of the clip and listen to the message being the massage.  

Looking back, it is fucking astounding.

The cap is about influence peddling to become vice president.

This really is amazing, and not wing-nuttery.  It's a look at how even at the beginning of media, there was an agenda.  I will  never think about it ever in the same way again.  Manipulating the votes to go to Howdy, and the hokey applause machine.  You can't GET more timely.

And please take the time to actually listen to the main parts of this.. skip the silent film... the rest is indoctrination.

I shudder to think what it is they do today, and the peanut gallery was only five or six, I think...  heavy.  And funny when ou get all the nut jobs nowadays claiming winky tinky and bob spongepants are gay...  what s come down in political discourse.