Get Zigged!
I’m singling this out because I found it particularly amusing listening to it on the subway yesterday.
Children’s literature, howsoever you prefer to define it, begins somewhere. And for some people that would be on the comic’s page of their parents’ newspapers. Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that nobody in the history of the world has ever actually laughed at a Ziggy cartoon, right? Even Marmaduke gets more chuckles. But I have laughed, and laughed quite hard, at Daily Show segment producer Elliot Kalan’s take on what a Ziggy movie would entail. Essentially it boils down to Wallace Shawn with or without pants ("Did he wear pants in My Dinner With Andre? Who knows?") and a wise-cracking parrot. I’m not doing it justice, though. Elliot talks so quickly you just have to hear it yourself. Thanks to Dan at The Flop House (a podcast where three fellows make fun of bad movies) for the link.
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About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.
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Hey, thanks for the highlight. You should’ve been there for the recording session, when Elliott talked, with little to no prompting for ten minutes straight, about said Ziggy movie, and it was almost all gold (though I pared it down to a more manageable 7 minutes). If folks like this, I hope they stick around and listen to one of the full length shows (warning: copious swearing).
This does sound great, but I must object to your thesis regarding an absence of authentic Ziggy laughs.
Through the haze of 27 or so years, I seem to recall getting in trouble for laughing at a Ziggy cartoon book at church during the Christmas Eve service.