SOUNDTRACK: “Me Ol’ Bamboo” (1968).
This song comes from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the movie. It is a strange little set piece in the early section of the film. In terms of the movie it is utterly absurd: Caracticus Potts (Dick van Dyke) is looking to make some quick cash. He heads to a carny circus (that has just popped up) with his crazy haircutting invention. A brawny guy sits down and gets a terrible scalping. Potts runs away through various parts of the circus and ultimately ends up in the chorus-line-type set up with a dozen or so guys getting ready to sing this song.
When the song starts Potts is able to follow the routine fairly well, although he’s always a step or two behind. But by the second verse he is now in charge of the song, singing extra lyrics and then doing a bit of a solo routine which the other guys then follow. Now, I realize it’s a musical and as Clark asked the unasked question, “how do she know the song they sing when she is hearing it for the first time?” But even in the logic-defying world of musicals, shoehorning this set piece into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a stretch.
And yet, if you’ve been reading, you know we watched this weeks ago and I can’t get it out of my head. The song (weird as it is being about a bamboo pole) is really catchy. And the dance routine is, simply, amazing. I don’t know much about Dick van Dyke’s performing skills, but man he knocks it out of the park. And, more amazingly, there are some really long takes before they cut away. And ensemble of 12 or so doing a very complicated routine for more than a few measures is really impressive.
The more I watch it, the more impressed I am and the more I understand why they shoehorned it in. Check it out:
[READ: February 22, 2013] Ricky Ricotta Books 4-6
This is the second set of three Ricky Ricotta books. They don’t vary all that much from the first three–Ricky and his Might Robot get in trouble, and then they save the day. What I did like was that Pilkey adds some valiant assistants who add a new dimension to the rather simple story.
In Book 4 Ricky and his Robot are bored of playing hide and seek so they decide to go skateboarding The Robot uses the Ricotta’s minivan as a skateboard and of course, he crushes it. His parents hold them responsible for paying for it (which Ricky calculates will take 259 years). Meanwhile on Mars, Major Monkey hates living on a cold, dead planet and he wants to take over Earth. But he has been watching what’s been going on down there and he knows what happened to the three previous villains (I though that was a nice touch). He also knows that the Mighty Robot has stopped all of their plans. So he sends a decoy to distract the Robot.
The decoy says that Mars is in trouble so the Mighty Robot flies off to help. But when he gets there he is trapped by Major Monkey’s ambush and he is stuck on Mars! Then Major Monkey flies aback to Earth knowing no one can stop him.
So the man from S.A.S.A. comes and says they need to get that robot back! So Ricky is invited to fly to Mars to retrieve his friend. But when they get there, the S.A.S.A. spaceship is also trapped in the ambush. And Major Monkey is already on Earth! What will they do? Well, Ricky is a tiny mouse and he has a big idea.
In Book 5, it’s Ricky’s birthday. He’s super excited because they are going to the museum to look at dinosaurs! It’s going to be the best day ever. Except that his cousin Lucy (the pest) is coming along too. And she is indeed a pest–asking if she can have cake as soon as she gets there, even wondering why they are going to a boring museum. Indeed, the Ricotta family has to ask Ricky and his Mighty Robot to be nice to her because she doesn’t really have any friends.
But General Jackrabbit, who is miserable on Jupiter, has other plans. Unaware of Ricky’s intentions, he flies to the museum (in a spaceship shaped like a carrot) and steals the heads off of the dinosaurs and attempts to clone them. But he doesn’t have enough DNA so he uses some of his own and makes…Jurassic Jackrabbits–bunnies with dinosaur heads. The clones get huge (and they are given a dose of evil) and they immediately begin to fight with the Mighty Robot (in Flip-O-Rama). But Ricky (with help from Lucy) thinks of a plan. It involved dressing as a rabbit and messing with the zapper controls.
The rabbits are returned to normal size and are mad un-evil (and are now quite cute). And even on his own birthday he gives Lucy a present. All the stories end sweetly, but this one ended really sweetly.
Book 6 is the first book in which the plot kind of depends on knowing the previous book (it’s true that the end of each book shows all the previous villains but this book actually expects you to know a bit about what happened before). They head of to cousin Lucy’s house, which Ricky doesn’t want to do because, even though she helped them battle General Jackrabbit, she still wants to play princess all the time.
Meanwhile on Saturn, Sargeant Stinkbug, the messiest creature in the galaxy (at the end of every TV show that he watches, he throws the set out the window and gets a new one), has finally gotten sick of his filthy planet and he plans to capture the king of Earth. When he zooms in, he hears Lucy talking about being a princess and decides that’s good enough. Especially when she says she has a pile of rubies that need protecting He grabs Lucy (while Ricky and the robot are eating grilled cheese sandwiches) and flies off with her.
But he soon relies that the rubies are ones she drew on her crown–in crayon! (That joke made me and Tabitha laugh). When Ricky sees what happened, he and the robot fly after Sargeant Stinkbug But the Sargeant has a trick or two left–he has grow-big gumballs which he gives to his stinky warriors, and they grow to an incredible size. But of course a robot can’t eat a gumball and he is captured–so what can they do?). It’s up to Ricky and Lucy and her pet jackrabbits to help. Ricky takes some of the Grow gumballs and grows to a huge size and fights the stinkbugs –who blow stinky gas at him–in Flip-O-Rama. But then more and more stinkbugs come from the Sargeant’s spaceship (which is shaped like a garbage can). Then Lucy comes to the rescue! She eats some Grow Big gumballs and actually saves the day.
These later books don’t offer any real scientific facts about the planets (boo)–the Saturn one only says that the planet was overrun by smelly stinkbugs. But they are still great for laughs and offer nice messages about friendship. And they’re funny, too.
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