I think the joke here is about the letter ‘c’ in the German language, not the C programming language. But it could be about both since trying to learn either one will make you cry.

It’s taken me a long, long time, but I finally got my hands on a good, excellent actually, copy of Rhythm In The Ranks, a George Pal Puppetoon I remember from early childhood, mostly for how scary the villains of the story are.

When George Pal, a Hungarian, came to the States to escape the Nazi takeover of most of western europe, he brought with him a very unique method of stop motion animation. Rather than using clay figures, or ones with armature skeletons you could reposition between each exposure of a frame of film, Pal used a “replacement” method wherein many individually carved wooden figures were used to represent motion. A scene with a figure walking across the frame might use several dozen carved figures, each in different stages of walking, replaced one after the other as each frame of film is shot.

It gave the figures in the cartoon shorts an amazing degree of apparent flexibility, and yet they looked solid. You could tell they were wooden figures, and yet they not only walked and talked, they breathed, their faces stretched as the painted on mouths and eyes moved. Their legs and feet extended out as they walked. It made wooden figures seem as if the very wood they were carved from had come to life, and it made the Puppetoons fun to watch.

Pal made many of these while Europe was burning under the Nazi onslaught, and some of this cartoons spoke directly to that, employing a creepy stand-in for actual Nazi soldiers in the cartoons: The Screwball Army.

The Screwball Army was literally just that…an army of cannonballs with legs and arms that had screws stuck in them with nuts on top that spun while they marched across the screen, destroying everything in their path. Seems weird, but it was an effective stand-in for the real thing in a cartoon mostly aimed at children, but enjoyable by adults too. Added to the effect was they usually marched across the screen to the tune Powerhouse which anyone who ever watched the old Warner Brothers cartoons would recognise. They really creeped out six year old me.

The Screwball Army’s most well known appearance is in the Puppetoon Tulips Shall Grow, but Rhythm In The Ranks is the one I remembered most from way back when, and the hardest to find a copy of.

When I finally got to see Rhythm In The Ranks again after so many years had passed, I saw I’d correctly remembered much of it, including the hilarious singing telegram declaration of war, and the Screwballs marching across the hills. But dig it…I remembered everything reversed left from right. It’s a trick my memory plays on me over and over again to this day. I have no trouble reading, it’s not any sort of dyslexia. I have no trouble telling left from right. It’s just in my memory, and more pronounced the further back the memory is. There’s probably a name for it somewhere. This image of the Screwballs I got from a website article on Rhythm In The Ranks (go read it…there’s another shot in there of the hilarious singing telegram) is a good example. 

I remembered this scene perfectly all these years in every detail, but as a mirror image of what it actually is.

…being that it’s the last of April. Drizzly, chilly, miserable. Must be springtime in Maryland. A perfect day for staying inside and catching up on my filing. I have this really bad habit of just dumping mail that isn’t urgent into a box and leaving it there, sometimes for months. It can really pile up because I keep resisting the calls to just “go paperless”.

I practically already have. I have a list of bills I just routinely pay online and that is when I check over the transactions and make sure everything is okay. I have credit monitoring that alerts me instantly if someone tries to open an account in my name. My banks and cards tell me about every transaction made in real time. So the paper bills tend to get put off for filing later. Occasionally I get nagged to just switch to “paperless” billing (we used to call it email back in the day…) but I am old and like my paper bills for some reason I can’t even now explain. Maybe it’s that filing things makes me feel like I’m adulting.

The Social Security and medical statements I look at immediately, and also the retirement account statements. But then they also go into the box for filing later. So do all the other odds and ends including the junk, because I can’t always just toss the junk mail away. Some of it needs shredding.

Which is why my shredder gets a lot of work when I get around to sorting and filing everything in the box. This is when I notice how persistent some junk mailers are. No my house is not for sale, I don’t care how many times you ask. No I am not switching energy providers. No I am not buying a car warranty. No I do not want your Medicare supplemental coverage. No I am not going to your retirement planning seminar and I don’t care how free the food is. It’s impressive how many of these same exact mailers come, one after the other, over and over and over. What…did you think I missed the first one?